The Violin Maker

by John Marchese

  Every day I spent with Sam I understood a little better that on the path a luthier treads leaps are unheard of; each step is a small one.

  “There are not many gross variations on the design of a violin,” he continued, “but there are quite some number of minor variations that can be recognized by someone who really knows violins. Someone like Jacques Français, people who make their living dealing fiddles, can tell a Strad from any other fiddle and can tell you roughly what year it was made in. They can look at other violins and tell you what city it came from, maybe who the maker was and when it was made and be accurate to within a few years, more or less. For them it’s like a normal person’s ability to look into a crowd of faces and pick out someone they know, without looking at every face and saying, ‘Is that him, is that him?’”

  This basic body of the violin that Sam was holding looked like one of those balsa wood models architects make of buildings, where the roof has been taken off to give a view of the little rooms inside. The walls of the fiddle—the ribs—made of maple planed to a thickness of only one-sixteenth of an inch, were clamped onto those six interior wood blocks.

  “There’s a whole thing to bending the ribs,” Sam said. “You bend them on a hot iron. They’re made out of curly maple and they break easily, especially if the iron is not hot enough. If the iron is too hot you can burn them. So you have to have just the right temperature and just the right pressure. It’s a skill and knack, and if you do it enough it just happens.

  “We’re letting the ribs dry now and tomorrow we’ll glue them. Then we put linings inside the ribs.” The linings are made of thin veneer strips of wood that are glued to the inside of the ribs, running parallel on the top and bottom. The linings provide some extra support for the ribs, but primarily they are there to give more contact surface on which to eventually glue the finished top and back. After the ribs and linings were glued and dried, all of the excess wood of the blocks would be shaved away. About half of each block I saw now would be removed. Once that was done the great majority of structural support of the violin’s body would be finished, though the work was far from done.

  “The next real decision point,” Sam said, “is when you start cutting the outlines of the top and back.”

  Since that curvaceous shape of the top and back is the most prominent feature of a fiddle, I thought it must also be the most important component of the design. Sam quickly set me straight. The pattern of the violin has become so standardized, he informed me, that some violin makers simply use one pattern for their entire career. “There’s nothing really wrong with that,” Sam said. “That’s the way Strad was usually working—with the same basic mold and then making variations while he worked. It was the same thing with Guarneri.

  “Having a lot of models to work with slows down your efficiency. It gives you more things to think about. But I get tired of working on the same thing all the time. Each pattern is maybe a little bit different tonally, and a little bit different aesthetically. I feel it allows me to match what I’m doing to the individual player.”

  Collectors and dealers may talk about the curves and edges on the face of a fiddle, sometimes in flowery language. Violin aesthetes can spend a lot of energy describing the placement and tilt of the f-holes that are cut into the belly of the fiddle on either side of the bridge, which supports the strings. I had read some of these descriptions in exhibition and sales catalogs and started referring to it as “fiddle porn.” Sam liked that term when I told it to him, but he had not been totally immune to such effusiveness. In one article he wrote years ago about the Cessole, a Stradivari built in 1716, he noted that the fiddle had “sleek, animated lines. The corners and edge work are prominent but delicate, the ffs upright and lean…. There is a light and nimble character to the work.”

  But that was years ago, when he was trying to get his name out and build a reputation. Now, in the workshop, Sam left the showmanship aside and acted like an artisan, someone who was simply cutting wood to build a box. Over his years as a builder, he’d increasingly understood the important factor: the violin is a vibrating box. He’d come to the conclusion that the airspace inside that box was far more important to the actual sound of the instrument than delicate edge work or the carving of the distinctive scroll at the top of the neck, no matter how nimbly it was done.

  “There are things that are very important for the function of the sound and you want to get that just right and spend as much time as possible to get it to happen right,” Sam told me. “And then there are things having to do with the aesthetics, and some people like it one way and some another, but both are fine. Just cutting wood—that’s a walk in the park for me.”

  Through the upcoming weeks I would watch plenty of wood being cut, but cut in a way that bore no resemblance to the sawing I was doing on my deck upstate. Using many of those odd and ancient-looking tools lined up on his worktable, Sam started fashioning a fiddle. It was a process that he always liked to describe by adapting an old joke about the art of sculpture: how do you make Michelangelo’s David? Take a block of marble and carve away everything that doesn’t look like David. In his case, Sam told me, “I just take a piece of wood and carve away everything that doesn’t look like a violin.”

  One day I climbed the stairs to Sam’s studio and found him working intently on a piece of wood that looked an awful lot like a violin. It was the back for the Drucker fiddle, a beautiful piece of maple—an Exhibition Piece Indeed!—that he’d cut into the outline shape. He’d already done preliminary carving of the arching. Sam had the back clamped onto a cloth-covered work surface, and he was slicing into the wood very close to the edge with what looked like a kitchen knife. It turned out it was a kitchen knife, a small blade with a very sharp point, a kind of paring knife, which he’d modified for this task—purfling.

  On the front and back plates of a violin, out near the edges, there is a line that traces the outline about four millimeters inside the actual edge of the wood. From a distance, the purfling looks as if it has been drawn or painted on the fiddle, and on some cheap fiddles it is simply painted. In a quality instrument, though, the purfling is actually a sandwich of three incredibly thin strips of wood, inlaid into a tiny groove that has been carved around the curving borders of each of the two plates. Because he likes the way he can work with it, Sam often uses wood from a pear tree. Two pieces are dyed black and a strip of poplar in the middle is left light. The whole effect seems to be decorative, but the three bands of wood serve to stop cracks from running from the edge of the fiddle into the interior part of the plates.

  Before I’d arrived, Sam had scribed a guideline for the groove he was cutting with a little edge tool designed just for this job. Now, digging that sharp knife into the scribe lines, he pulled the blade carefully, tracing the mark. It took a surprising amount of force to make the cut. Sam’s fingers flexed hard on the knife handle, and there were times when he let out a grunt. The groove would only be three millimeters deep, so there wasn’t much room for error. Once he cut the two edge lines, he would dig out the wood with another special tool that looks like something a dentist might use. It is called a purfling picker.

  “This whole little assembly—the outline, the purfling groove, and then the channel—all that is what I call edge work,” he said, staring intently at his knifepoint. “It’s not the most important thing, probably, but it has implications. It’s really where the aesthetic finesse of making an instrument is visible. If I was judging a violin at a competition, the edge work is where I can see the technique come together. A lot of other things are more important but are not as readily visible.”

  Minutes went by and accumulated into hours. Sam carved and gouged. Lots of time passed where he was silent. At one point, when the concave curve of the purfling pieces met and the edges of that three-part wood sandwich had to be joined, Sam tried to explain how Stradivari did this job in a distinctive way, creating a sweeping and elegant little pointed corner that Sam jokingly calls the “bumblebee
stingerette.” There are reams of fiddle porn devoted to describing this feature. I stared and stared as Sam worked to re-create the stingerette in this fiddle, but I just couldn’t see what he was trying to show me.

  “Go home tonight and read that article I gave you,” he said rather sternly. “There’s a section on purfling.” Sam sounded exasperated. “It’s a minor point,” he continued. “You just have to be into it.” He tried again to show me what was distinctive about the mitered joint of two sections of those three impossibly small pieces of wood. Try as I might, I still couldn’t see what was special about the point.

  Finally Sam put down his tools and sat back in his chair. “The angle itself is not the big deal,” he said, with a distinct tone of disappointment in his voice. “But it’s almost impossible for me to talk about it with any sophistication until you can get hooked into the right way of looking at it. It’s not that this one thing is all that important in itself, but if you want to understand it, you have to understand that those kinds of things exist. There are hundreds of small tasks like this that come up in the course of making a fiddle. It’s not even like my clients know about these little things either. But they know that I’m a person who knows about it.”

  I stayed a little longer that day, long enough for Sam to perk up and exclaim, “Okay, we’re coming to the exciting conclusion! I’m going to go warm up the glue.” He uses traditional rabbit hide glue to stick the purfling into the channel. Rabbit hide glue is used almost exclusively by musical instrument makers because it is quite strong, but the bond can be easily broken when repairs are required.

  When the viscous glue started steaming in a little electric cooker, Sam took a syrnge, dipped it into the glue, and carefully pushed a sticky bead into the tiny channel he’d dug. The whole studio smelled a little gamey as I was leaving. Sam walked me to the door. “It’s good for you to see one part of this from beginning to end,” he said. “Because every part of making a violin is a big thing with a lot of details. A lot of those details you really don’t want to know.”

  I tried to be a good student and went home and read the purfling section in Sam’s article on violin making, which was adapted from a talk he’d given at the twenty-fourth annual convention of the Violin Society of America. He’d talked about how Stradivari veered a bit from his scribe line to create the bumblebee stingerette and how Guarneri seemed less fussy in his approach. Sam mentioned that there was now a mechanical tool—a little router machine—to create the purfling groove without the painstaking cutting and gouging. He would no sooner use a powered purfling machine than he would sell his son. “People think there is something esoteric and pure about using hand tools,” he said to his colleagues that day. “But they are more useful in some ways because they more naturally give you the result you want.”

  The result he wanted in this case seemed never far from Sam’s mind. Almost every time I visited his shop, he would at some point bring up Gene Drucker and his finicky nature. Sam sometimes seemed to be psyching himself up to the challenge, and other times preparing himself for disappointment. Often, he’d start talking about the Drucker fiddle and end up discussing his life’s work.

  “It might have been interesting to have worked on Gene’s Strad a little more,” Sam began one day. “If I had a chance to do that I’d know more about his fiddle and more about Gene. But each fiddle of mine he’s tried he’s liked.

  “I’m just hoping the force will be with me on this one. It’s not like it’s the first fiddle I’ve ever made; it’s not all that mysterious. And let’s assume that Gene is finicky, but he’s not crazy. And he’s finicky because his fiddle is a little capricious, and that’s unsettling for him. It is my hope that what I make for him will be on a good day as good as what he’s got and will always be less capricious. That result would have the potential of really helping him a lot. That’s kind of asking a lot of the project. A more modest upside is that my fiddle provides him something else to play when his Strad is bothering him, or he can spare his Strad the pain of traveling. That would be a totally acceptable outcome, but just not as satisfying as if he retired his Strad. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.”

  Sam was working on the violin top—or “belly”—that day. The spruce had been cut and carved in a close approximation of the final arching. The architecture of the upward sweep of a violin belly from the edges to the center is a vital component for sound production, and its design holds nearly endless possibilities. Once again, what had been decided upon three hundred years ago seems to work best. Consequently, Sam used templates to guide his arching. He had traced the archings of a number of great violins during his years working in René Morel’s restoration shop.

  “The templates are great,” he said, “because that way I’m not trying to make the arching the way I feel that day. I have a guide. Right now I’m on a late Guarneri kick and that’s what I’m using for Gene’s fiddle. Generally the Guarneri arching is a little flatter than Strad’s. My teacher Carl Becker used to say that it looked like someone has stretched out a sheet of rubber over something—it’s all taut and smooth and low and drawn out. On some Strads the arching seems more sculpted.”

  The hand tool Sam used this day was a scraper, a sharpened piece of steel that looked like the head of a spatula with no handle. The thin metal slicing off the wood made a short, raspy report. His motions were quick: three or four scrapes in succession and then a pause. “I’m making decisions the whole time I’m doing this,” Sam said. “Okay, do I want to go a little deeper in the channel?” (The channel is a sort of gutter, which swoops down just inside the purfling before rising again as the arching climbs to its maximum height in the center of the plate.) “The channel will affect the flexibility of the whole top, and that will affect how it feels to play and how it sounds.

  “At this point in the process there are several variables I can choose. The arching height is one. The depth of the channel and the edge work. Then the thicknesses of the top and back. The placement and the size of the f-holes. And the bass-bar.”

  I came to think of the Drucker violin as something like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, in that scene in the movie when he’s being cleaned up and put back together in preparation for meeting the Wizard. Pieces of the fiddle were scattered about the studio—the top on Sam’s desk, the back across the room near Wiltrud’s workplace, the rib structure stored in a slot near the stereo—all waiting to come together.

  Music played nearly constantly throughout the day in the shop, a soft background noise that was often interrupted by bleating car and truck horns from the streets below. I sensed there was some interpersonal dynamic at work, a benign battle over whose favorite music was played. One day, Sam stopped working for a moment to listen more closely to the soundtrack, which was oddly metered and filled with exotic-sounding string instruments. “Wiltrud always accuses me of listening to hillbilly music,” he said, “but what’s this? It’s hillbilly music that happens to be from Macedonia.” Wiltrud said something in German to Dietmar, and they both laughed. Sam looked at me with one of those put-upon stares that Jack Benny used so effectively.

  All workplaces have a culture of sorts, and this shop had an easygoing feel. I’ve worked in a few places where the boss prided himself or herself on letting people come and go as they pleased, and creating camaraderie and fun. But it was still a job. Here in Sam’s studio there seemed to be no sense that what was going on was even work. It was as if three people had somehow realized separately that there were all these tools in this one place and you could go there and make violins. Sometimes everyone would have lunch together. Other times they went off on their own. Sam was fairly often interrupted by phone calls. Mostly, talk among the colleagues in the workshop was brief and infrequent. Of course, that may have been because I was there, making Sam talk as he worked.

  “The other night I came here and worked by myself,” he told me one day. “I had to cut the scroll for a cello we’re building. We just needed to get it done.
It’s the kind of thing that’s best done late at night with good lights. So I stayed late and had the music going and everybody was gone and I just wacked it out. It was really very pleasurable. But most of what you’ve come here to see isn’t like that.”

  As the pieces of finished wood accumulated, I began to get the sense that now there was much more on Sam’s mind than cutting and carving, that he was moving into a realm of decision making that would affect the quality of the Drucker fiddle in important and irreversible ways. Sure, a lot of what I was watching seemed to be the work of a kindly wood-carver—a Geppetto—but Sam was obviously more than that. There was also an acoustician and an engineer at work. As he approached finishing the spruce top, his progress got slower and slower. He would often stop scraping, make a measurement with calipers he kept close by, and then refer to a notebook on his desk where he kept detailed information on previous fiddles he’d built.

  He opened the book to a fiddle he’d made in 1993. “It was not a very high-profile musician,” Sam said. “But it was actually a somewhat interesting fiddle. I recorded wood choice, arch height, exact thicknesses.” The thicknesses were written on a sheet of paper with a violin outline drawn on. Rings were drawn within the shape that looked like the swirling gradient lines on a topographical map. In more than two dozen spots were measurements of the final wood thickness down to a tenth of a millimeter.

  “If there’s anything I can measure,” Sam said, “I measure it, on the theory that it will become interesting in later years. I’ll make some varnish notes, and some evaluations of the sound, and if I can I’ll follow up and see how the sound might have changed over time.”