The Violin Maker (8 page)

That sure was a lot of words! Certainly, armed with that extensive nomenclature, I could analyze the sound of Drucker’s Strad. But, Pickering warned, to someone with a scientific view these words are red flags. They might be comprehensive, but hardly precise.

Scientists have been studying the sound of the violin for about as long as the violin has been around, and you could easily get into an argument with any violin maker on whether it’s done any good. There is evidence that Galileo studied the properties of the pitches of plucked strings in the mid–1600s.
⁵
But it wasn’t until the 1880s that a German scientist named H. L. F. Helmholtz figured out how to accurately measure the vibrations that create sound and became a pioneer in the science of acoustics.

Just as often, it is not only the required courses in technical musical analysis, but also the required course in acoustics that make music students like me decide to drop out. The field is full of sine waves and amplitudes and cycles and frequencies, but all the layman really needs to
understand is something called the harmonic series. Basically, no musical tone is pure. If it were, listening to it would be torture. Instead, if you walk up to a piano and play a middle C, that tone would be prominent, but also sounding is a C one octave above that, and a G above that, and another C above that, and an E above that, and another G still higher, and more and more tones, all in a fixed mathematical relationship. It is the relative strength of the various tones in this harmonic series—think of them as ghost notes—that contributes fundamentally to the quality of sound. Some instruments—like flutes—don’t produce a very rich and full overtone series. What gives the bowed string instruments their character is that they all produce a full overtone series. But not all overtone series are created equal, and that’s what separates the great instruments from the lesser.

By now, many great fiddles have been acoustically analyzed and measured. The scientists know, for instance, that a certain great Stradivari has stronger frequencies in some areas of its sound spectrum than in others. But there is no way to translate that into a set of rules for someone like Sam Zygmuntowicz to follow in building a new instrument. And usually, even very smart people like Gene Drucker do not speak the language of acoustics. He could not go into Sam’s workshop and write a bunch of equations on a blackboard. The fiddler and the luthier are stuck with using words, vague and nebulous words.

And so, as is true with so many other facets of the fiddle, when it comes to analyzing sound, sentiment often trumps science.

For instance, Jacques Français, the famous dealer descended from generations of luthiers, said that his father always told him that a violin began to sound like its owner, and the longer it was played by one person, the longer it would take to change sounds when acquired by a new owner. There was a strong school of thought that says the fiddler makes the fiddle. In the late 1970s, Alexander Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet left his del Gesù in a taxi and it looked like it would be lost forever. When his friend the flutist and journalist Eugenia Zukerman (then wife of violinist Pinchas) called Schneider to commiserate over his loss, he told her he had mourned for a while, but then realized: “You play as you are, and what you are as a human being will come through no matter what you play on.”
⁶
This view is supported by Sir James Beament, the Cambridge don who wrote the wonderful
Violin Explained
. In listening experiments he’d done, Beament reported, people could often recognize, sight unseen, a
player,
but almost never an
instrument
.

Then there is the question of what I was really hearing when I tried to analyze Drucker’s sound. I remembered Gene’s common phrase—what you hear under your ear. Since I don’t play the fiddle, I could not experience that particular sensation. I was listening to the Bach on a recording, and more often than not with headphones, so I was getting more intimate contact with the sound than someone sitting in a concert hall. In fact, Gene told me
later, the Bach was recorded in two sessions with two different producers, two different technologies (analog first, then digital), and two locations that were quite different acoustically—a resonant church and a dry college recital hall. All sorts of technical work was required in the final mixing of the music to make it sound consistent and “natural.” So, I might know how a recording engineer could simulate the sound of five rows back from the stage, but I would never really know what the violin sounded like in Drucker’s left ear, and that was really the most important place, since that spot was the locus of the complicated feedback loop that gives each player his or her particular sound. It is at this point that connection between violinist and violin begins to be not just intimate, but downright symbiotic. Pinchas Zukerman once described it this way: “You feel the vibrations going through your head, deep into your throat. At very intense moments I actually choke when I play. But there are also moments of intense physical pleasure.”

Out of the thirty-two sections that make up Bach’s works for solo violin, the most famous is the final movement of the Partita no. 2 in D minor—the Chaconne. There is a whole literature devoted to that section alone, fifteen or so minutes of music that plenty of people think is among the most glorious ever written. Based on a relatively simple theme, the piece provoked one of Bach’s biographers, Spitta, to write that the Chaconne was a triumph of spirit over substance. That might seem like something of an
insult, unless you read Yehudi Menuhin’s autobiography. There, the violinist recounts his early fascination with the Chaconne (he was a prodigy in all aspects) and his youthful belief that if he could play the Chaconne—and play it well enough—in the Sistine Chapel, he might just be able to bring about peace on earth.

Nobody knows the exact circumstances of how Bach wrote any of the unaccompanied partitas for violin. But there is one event from that period in the composer’s life that opens up vast spaces for speculation and poignancy.

Bach was in his early thirties when he was working in Axhalt-Cöthen, married and already the father of several children (he’d eventually father twenty). His patron, Prince Leopold, was an avid traveler, and he often convinced his kappelmeister to accompany him. When Bach returned from one such trip in 1720, he found that his wife, Maria Barbara, had died in his absence. Could his mourning explain why these pieces are so counterintuitive, why there is such majesty in music designed for one lonely fiddler?

Over the months I was listening to Drucker playing Bach, I began to gravitate more and more to the Chaconne. I bought the book of sheet music that contained the piece and followed along, often amazed that anyone could actually navigate the technical demands. Even listening with the advantage of someone trained in music, I marveled that Gene could simply play all the notes. It’s true that I am a mediocre musician, but I know enough about performing to understand that getting through all those notes
and
turning them into music was like the difference between drafting and animation.

I usually listened late at night (after my fiancée was safely asleep), lying on the carpet in front of the stereo, high-tech headphones clamped on my ears. There were technical aspects of Gene’s performance on the violin that I would probably never understand: the complicated choreography of bowing, fingering, vibrato, and things like that. There were aspects of his sound that I might never be able to adequately describe, even armed with an arsenal of words from Peter Paul Prier and Norman Pickering. Yes, it was full and ringing and round and brilliant and smooth and noble. It was even classy and aristocratic, whatever that meant. In the end, it was the
effect
of the sound, not its components, that became so important to me.

Listening to Bach a lot is a pretty sublime way to spend your time. One day in the midst of all this profound sublimity I got a call that yanked me rudely back to harsh reality. My uncle had suddenly become unable to speak, and during emergency brain surgery to remove a tumor his gall bladder had burst, leaving him unconscious, in septic shock, and being kept alive on a respirator in an intensive care unit.

His name was Santino and he’d been a lifelong bachelor. Besides his sister and two brothers, I was his closest relative. His older brother, my father, had recently been diagnosed with lymphoma and was too compromised by chemotherapy to even dare enter the hospital. His older sister, my aunt, couldn’t deal with her brother’s impending death. After a week of increasingly awful heroic medical procedures, all futile, it was obvious that he would not pull through. So it fell to my other uncle and me to decide finally to let Santino die. And, as things worked
out, it fell to me alone to give the final order and to witness his death.

I drove to the hospital in Scranton on a warm June day, a day not unlike the day of the funeral of former Governor Casey, where I’d heard that young violinist play the Irving Berlin song and begun this trip into the world of fiddles. During the drive I listened to Drucker play the Bach Sonata in G and the Partita no. 1, but my thoughts were almost everywhere but the music. I pulled into the hospital garage, parked in a dark corner space, and kept the CD playing. Gene was into the Partita no. 2 and the Chaconne was coming up and I figured another fifteen minutes wouldn’t make much difference right then.

There are moments in Drucker’s recording when you can hear the violinist breathe, and listening to it then it seemed like the true breath of life. This great edifice of sound that Bach had created was a monument to the spirit of mankind. I’m stealing a phrase from someone, though I can’t remember whom: this music was an echo of the human soul itself.

I believe we absolutely need music in our lives—sometimes only music will do. I was too preoccupied that day, but later I realized how lucky I was at this moment to have one of the immortal works of music, performed on an instrument created by the greatest craftsman of all time, played by one of the brightest performers of his generation. If you think that maybe any music would have been solace right then I can assure you that’s not true. A few moments later, as I sat in the intensive care unit, watching a nurse gently and competently unhook all the ma
chines that kept Santino alive, a kindly volunteer walked in with a Celtic harp and asked if I’d like her to play. I didn’t want to be rude. I said sure and asked if she knew any Bach. She didn’t but played “Amazing Grace.” When she finished I asked her to please leave.

I might never know the right words to use to describe the great sound of the Stradivari, or to analyze the genius of Bach, but I knew now in some fundamental way what Gene meant when he talked about the “soul nourishment” that playing immortal music on that fiddle had given him. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts, but the parts were essential.

Not long after that I opened again those liner notes Gene had prepared. Of the Chaconne he’d written: “To say that it expresses all the joys and sorrows of this life, as well as a yearning for something beyond life, is no great exaggeration.”

When next I returned to Sam’s studio, there seemed to be much more at stake.

V
iolin making is one of the most noble crafts of man, being one in which the mental and artistic genius of the maker find full freedom. A man’s true character and nature will be revealed by the violin that he fashions. If he is a true artist he will build his very soul into the instrument.

I came upon that passage during my very first day looking into violin books at the New York Public Library. It is from a book called
You Can Make a Stradivarius Violin
, which was written around 1950 by a man named Joseph
V. Reid. Reid was born in Canada and ended up in Illinois, working as an engineer for the American Can Company, and in his spare time trying to make Stradivarius violins. His book is much less eccentric than Edward Heron-Allen’s, but no less charming in its earnest postwar can-do attitude.

After reading Reid’s book there was a period where I daydreamed that I might try to build a Stradivarius violin myself. Reid made the whole undertaking seem practical and manageable, like building a coffee table in the basement, or putting together a ham radio from a kit. But I realized that the level of my woodworking skills was just high enough to, say, build a new deck on the back of a little house I own in the Catskills. In the early fall I started doing that in between visits to Sam Zygmuntowicz’s workshop in the city.

The fall became glorious that year, and Sam had cleared the odds and ends from his workbench and was ready to work on the Drucker fiddle in earnest, hoping to make a delivery date in the new year—May 17, to be exact, which would be Gene’s fiftieth birthday. We started to develop a routine. Sam would call me in the afternoon, usually, and say, “You should come over tomorrow, there’s something you might want to see.” Since I learned early on that Sam rarely arrived at work before 10
A.M
., if the weather was fair, I would leave my apartment in the early morning and walk down into Chinatown, up and over the Brooklyn Bridge, and toward his studio on the far edge of downtown Brooklyn. I now had a set of keys, so I could let myself through the courtyard gate and into the old factory building. His studio door was never locked.

One day I pushed through that heavy metal door, crossed the large room with its worn rugs and furniture and grand piano, and entered the workshop to find Sam with the guts of Gene’s violin. To start, he’d performed a series of transfers of the model outline he’d decided to use—his adaptation of the Plowden Guarneri that he called the Zowden.

“I had worked on the real Plowden in René’s shop,” Sam told me. “That’s the fiddle that I would put on my desk during my lunch break and just stare at while I was eating my sandwich. So I got some basic info on it and designed my standard model from there.

“Later the owner called me and asked if I’d like to make a
real
copy of it. I made casts with silicone and exhaustive measurements. But the model we finally renamed the Zowden was one I’d fixed up a little bit. There’s a certain amount of slippage between the signified and the signifier, or whatever you would say. You see the real thing and you trace it and you take it home and draw it and it’s always different. For instance, I tried to regularize and fix what I thought were bumps and lumps in the original, and I think I made it symmetrical from side to side, where the original is asymmetrical.

“With any of these things there’s a weird relationship with the real thing. Distance always creeps in. When people talk about personal style a lot of what they’re talking about is slipping away from the original—people were trying to do it just like the original but they didn’t. But that’s a digression.”

However near or far his version strayed from Guarneri’s famous fiddle, to start building it, Sam had traced
the shape onto a thin sheet of aluminum, and cut that. The aluminum template was then used to carefully cut another outline onto a thick wood block. That shaped wooden piece was the mold, a kind of chassis on which the actual violin would be built.

Now, Sam held up the chassis for me to look at it. In strategic locations on the characteristic feminine shape were small wood blocks, about the size of blocks with which a child might play. Imagining the body to be that of a woman, one block was where the neck joined the torso, two were on either side of where the torso met the waist, two were lower down, on either side of where the hips met the waist, and one last block was at the very center of the bottom, where, on the fiddle, a tailpiece would be attached to help hold the strings tense. “Stradivari often used willow for the blocks,” Sam told me. “For Gene’s fiddle I used spruce. Anything that’s lightweight and strong works fine.”

These blocks would never be seen again, once the fiddle was put together. “The blocks are pretty much purely mechanical,” Sam told me. “You have to have a good surface to glue the ribs. But there’s some aesthetic component. Once it’s done, it’s the basis for the outline of the instrument. I’ve made the curves in the blocks a little flatter, so altogether it’s a little less voluptuous, a little more of a solid, stocky profile. But not by a lot.”

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 describ
ing 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
sim
ply 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.”