The Violin Maker (9 page)
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.”
“Does every violin maker do this?” I asked.
“No. Some guys take two measurements and that’s it. I think I’m kind of a maniac.
“It’s a work technique. Not a particularly efficient one, but we’re not judged on high efficiency—which is a very good thing. I wouldn’t survive, or I’d certainly have to alter my work style, if I had to be more efficient.
“But it’s all part of a process of becoming—I don’t know what you call it—I guess a more
subtle
worker. The thing is that you start to care more and more about less and less.”
What is the essence of craftsmanship? Often, our ro
mantic notion is that it is unnameable, unquantifiable—that certain
je ne sais quoi
. But perhaps the opposite is true, that the beating heart of excellence longs to measure and quantify, to continually care more and more about less and less. James Beament, in his great book on the violin, concluded that Stradivari was a genius, but not the kind of wildman, wunderkind genius that people love to imagine. Guarneri better fit that mold. Strad was a genius of maturity and continuity. He took great pains in his work, and continued to take great pains for a very long time.
Was I watching someone similar in this former factory in Brooklyn? As more and more became less and less, I’d seen a concomitant shrinking of the tools. There were two big machine-shop-style band saws that Sam and Deitmar used to cut the rough wood blocks down to size. Sam spent one afternoon with a big gouger, a tool the size of a billy club, getting rid of excess wood on the one-piece maple back. The tape I’d recorded while he worked is full of the sound of him grunting heavily as he lunged at the wood. It sounds like he’s in a boxing ring doing some sparring. The wood itself, being gouged away, let forth a noise that sounded uncannily like a scream.
Such rough work was a small part of the process. The carving quickly became more refined, done with smaller gougers and then a set of planes as the preliminary graduation of the thicknesses was done. The carving left less and less wood and more and more of something that looked like a violin. As work progressed to the final stages, I saw Sam working on the back with one of those thimblesize finger planes, a tool that would seem at home in a
dollhouse workshop. I spent a whole afternoon watching him work on the final thickness graduation of the violin top with a scraper that removed wood not in pieces, not even in shavings, but in grains. He’d weighed the piece before he started, scraped and scraped for several hours and weighed it again when he was finished. The sum difference in his day’s work was three grams.
The shrinking physical scale of the work was obvious. The expanding mental side was less so.
One day, as the violin was coming together, I arrived at the shop to find Sam with the all-but-finished top turned upside down on his worktable. Onto it he was fitting a carved piece of wood that looked a little like the tail fin of a 1950s vintage car. This was the bass-bar, another part of the fiddle that would never be seen again after the instrument was completed, a kind of support beam that is glued to the inside of the belly, running longitudinally down the front, a little to the left of the center line of the instrument, under one of the feet of the bridge that held the strings tense above it. Not only does it provide support against the pressure of the string tension, but it is also considered an important factor in creating the ultimate sound of the fiddle.
Sam had carved the bass-bar with a sharp knife, and even now, as he worked fitting the piece, he’d occasionally slice a small piece away, almost like he was whittling something. The bar was made from a piece of the old spruce Sam had bought on a trip to Europe. “I selected the wood very carefully,” he told me. “It’s really old stuff, and it went through the whole process we use for the top—
analyzing its density and strength and all that. Some people prefer stiffer bass-bars, but I’ve gone toward liking softer, lighter bars for whatever reason. I think they’re a little more lively, though I couldn’t prove it.”
Sam had positioned the bar on the underside of the violin belly and attached it temporarily with a little clamp that had been developed by his teacher Carl Becker. I asked him to narrate what he was thinking while he worked.
“Okay,” he began, “what I’m doing is I’m fitting it very carefully. There’s spring to the bar. You can see that on the ends there’s about three-quarters of a millimeter where it’s standing up from the top.” I pulled a credit card out of my wallet and asked Sam to measure the thickness with a precise caliper he used. The credit card was just about three-quarters of a millimeter.
When those ends were fitted and glued, the thicker center portion of the bass-bar would flex the violin top upward. The bar was located approximately under the lowest pitched string of the fiddle, the G. A few inches away, the sound post, a small cylindrical spruce rod, would be wedged under the bridge about where the highest pitched string—the E—is stretched.
“Spring of the bass-bar is a whole pet topic,” Sam said. “At this Violin Society of America meeting where I’m going soon, it’ll be very controversial. There are people who think it’s an awful thing to do. It’s true that it has to be done very, very carefully in order not to screw up the instrument. But I think if it’s done right it makes a difference tonally, for the better.
“But at a meeting of violin makers, in some hotel ball
room, all you have to say is ‘What do you think about tension in the bass-bar?’ and it’s like throwing a grenade into the room. I had a friend ask that question once and then he just walked out. Hours later people were still arguing.”
