The Violin Maker Part 2

Make a fiddle.

Trouble is, there really are no givens in violin making.

After we both returned to New York from Oberlin, I began to call Sam regularly and invite myself to Brooklyn for visits. He kept a.s.suring me that he was going to get started on the fiddle for Gene Drucker anytime now. There were a few odds and ends to clear off his workbench. And it was summer, and, as might be expected of anyone who thinks of himself as only a demi-American, Sam was following the European ethos and planning a long vacation. In this case, off to Italy to visit his wife's relatives in the northern lake region. And maybe a side trip to a wood dealer near Brescia, just about an hour's train ride from Stradivari's home, Cremona.

Good-tone wood for a high-end fiddle doesn't exactly fall from trees. And choosing the right wood is the crucial first step in building a new instrument. "There are decisions I have to make first that will predetermine the quality of the instrument," Sam told me. "The character of the wood will definitely predispose the character of the sound. The nature of the fiddle is in its materials."

Two kinds of wood are used predominately-spruce for the belly, or sound board, and maple for the back. Both are quite common, but coming up with the perfect raw material is nearly as much of an art as the careful carving that will follow. In 1866, the top violin maker of the day, Jean-Baptiste Vuillame, wrote to a client, "If you could see the bother I have and the lengths I go through to find the right materials for my violins." Times haven't changed.

One day I arrived at his studio and asked Sam to show me his wood supply. I'd seen one violin expert compare the experience to visiting the wine cellar of an oenophile. Sam put down a fiddle he was repairing and said to follow him. We headed out of the workshop and down the hall toward the kitchen.

Past the big commercial stove was a short, dark hallway leading to a bathroom. One wall was lined with simple wood-framed shelves that climbed from the floor all the way to the high ceilings. On those shelves rested what appeared to be hundreds of pieces of wood, looking like a very large and eccentric collection of children's blocks.

Sam led me over to the shelves and gave them a proprietary look. With a small sweeping gesture he said, "I've spent thousands of dollars on this stuff. There's forty or fifty thousand dollars here-probably more than that." He reached into the stacks and moved a few pieces, in the way someone would s.h.i.+ft books while searching on a library shelf. "Probably," he said, "like many violin makers I will end my life with some of the best pieces of wood sitting here gathering dust. I've told my wife that after I'm gone a lot of handsome young violin makers would do almost anything to get their hands on this wood."

I asked Sam how he picks a piece from all these when he's starting to build a violin.

He reached up and pulled a thin triangle of wood from the shelf. Held between his hands, it looked like a very wide s.h.i.+ngle of clapboard siding for a house, though it was less than two feet in length. Sam rubbed the wood.

"You can tell a lot about the wood just by running your hands over it," he said. "You hear that little hiss? This is tone wood, so it has to make a sound. It's spruce, which is used in almost all stringed instruments as the soundboard. Pianos, guitars, mandolins, fiddles-it's the universal choice. That's because it happens to be the strongest wood per unit of weight. It's very light but very strong. They also make masts for s.h.i.+ps with it."

Sam pushed the piece of spruce toward me and into better light. Close up, I could see thin bands of dark wood alternating with broader bands of light wood, almost like a corduroy. "There's an alternation between summer and winter growth in a conifer tree like spruce," he told me. "It grows fast in the summer and then slows down in the fall and virtually stops in winter. Functionally, those broad bands of lighter wood are very light, but they're reinforced by the very hard bands of darker wood. It's kind of why corrugated cardboard is so strong, or the beams in a ceiling with air s.p.a.ce in between, or the rebar in concrete. Spruce is naturally engineered to create the same structure."

The particular piece he has handed me was sawn on what is called a quarter cut, taken out of the spruce log like a piece of pie. Usually, two of these pieces would be joined together at the thick ends to make a violin belly, which, in finished form, is no more than ten inches wide, fourteen inches long, and only four centimeters at its thickest-half that in many places. A pie cut of wood like this could cost anywhere from fifty dollars well into the hundreds. Factors that affect the cost include age, quality of the cut, pedigree, and what the violin maker is willing to pay.

"This stuff is really old," Sam told me. "It came from a shop in Paris that was run by Jacques Francais's father, Emile. So I know it's at least eighty years old, and probably older. I spent a b.l.o.o.d.y fortune for it, and some of it has been disappointing. But you look at a piece like this and you just say, WOW! It's as old as the hills and it's split well. I'm pretty sure the belly of the fiddle I'll make for Gene will come from this stock."

For the violin's back, maple is the standard. The back is not quite so vital to sound production as the belly, but it is very important for the look of the fiddle. The natural flamelike design in maple can be hypnotically beautiful. "Imagine a woman with curly hair," Sam said, "and imagine setting her hair with epoxy and then grinding off the ends, cutting across all those layers of fibers. Great-looking maple, when you turn it, catches the light in different ways. Some grains absorb the light, some reflect it. And when you turn it again it s.h.i.+fts."

It seems that from the very beginning of violin making, luthiers have been looking for a piece of wood to make them say WOW! Making a magical box requires at least a little sorcery. Among the many tangled tales that have been told about the "secrets" of the great makers of Cremona, the nature and handling of the wood ranks second as a subject of speculation. Only the varnish on that wood has inspired more conjecture, suspicion, and downright superst.i.tion. Perhaps it's coincidental that picking the wood is the first job in building a fiddle, and varnis.h.i.+ng is the last.

Almost any kind of wood could could be used to make a violin. A captured American flier fas.h.i.+oned a fiddle from beech bed slats in a World War II German prison camp. Pinchas Zukerman played that instrument once and claimed it sounded pretty good. But spruce and maple are by far the most common. Of course almost nothing is commonplace in lutherie, or without history and mystique. be used to make a violin. A captured American flier fas.h.i.+oned a fiddle from beech bed slats in a World War II German prison camp. Pinchas Zukerman played that instrument once and claimed it sounded pretty good. But spruce and maple are by far the most common. Of course almost nothing is commonplace in lutherie, or without history and mystique.

Some think that the spruce must be from a high alt.i.tude and a bad soil-a tree that had to fight hard for its life is somehow better equipped to stand up to the stresses of music making. Some go as far as to recommend that one must only use the wood from the south side of trees that have grown on the south side of a hill. There is a whole school of speculation that Stradivari and Guarneri somehow "treated" their wood, and that is why their instruments are so glorious.

This speculation has a long history. I had found a copy of Edward Heron-Allen's strange little book, Violin-Making as it was, and is Violin-Making as it was, and is, and it had become my bedside table companion. He devoted a chapter to tone wood. It is characteristic of the book as a whole: peppered with Latin phrases, containing a thicket of footnotes that support an argument that is detailed and certain in its judgments. "The best maple to be had for our purpose," Heron-Allen wrote, "is that which grows on the southern slopes of the Carpathians." Elsewhere, he decided, "There is no proof in existence that the old Italians used any artificial means for drying or preparing their wood."

It wasn't long after Heron-Allen published his treatise that the Hills released their definitive study of Stradivari. Their combined expertise dwarfed that of the obsessive amateur, but they had to deal with the same wild theories of woodcutting and wood treatment. The Hills' sober and studied conclusion on the quality of Stradivari's wood was that he used better stuff when he was being paid more for an instrument, and that some years there was simply higher-quality wood to be had than others.

"The height of absurdity is reached," the Hills wrote, "when we are gravely informed by...a German professor of violin...that the secret of the unrivalled tone of Stradivari and of other fine instruments may be found in the fact that the bellies were made of 'Balsam Pine,' a wood which grew in Northern Italy at the period when those makers flourished, but has since gradually become extinct."

But the height of absurdity hadn't been fully reached back in the 1800s, at least not according to the violin makers I met in Oberlin. During one workshop I attended, the name Nagyvary came up, and there was a collective snicker. Joseph Nagyvary is a Hungarian who fled the Communist regime in that country when he was a student in the 1950s. He dreamed of becoming a professional violinist but ended up with degrees in chemistry and has been teaching biochemistry and biophysics for several decades at Texas A&M University in Waco. On the side, he makes his own fiddles and regularly posits new theories on what makes the great fiddles great.

In 1977 Nagyvary gave a presentation at the annual convention of the Violin Society of America, in which he said that his scientific studies led him to believe that the chemistry of the cla.s.sic Cremonese instruments was as important as their design and workmans.h.i.+p. His theories dated back to his days as a student in Switzerland. Every summer he would take a vacation in Italy. When poking around the museums and old palaces of Lombardi, the province containing Cremona and Milan, he noticed that anything old and wooden had been riddled by wood-worm. But not fiddles. He speculated that Stradivari and his contemporaries treated their wood with antipest chemicals. Studying tiny chips of old instruments under powerful microscopes, he found traces of borax (which served as an insecticide and made the wood harder and more brilliant sounding), gums from fruit trees (which helped to prevent mold), and crystal powders, which would be inedible to pests.

Nagyvary tried to convince modern violin makers to use these substances on their new violins to re-create the sound of Stradiviari, an achievement he continues to attempt himself.

Sam Zygmuntowicz confessed to me that he has tried wood treatments over the years but has come to the conclusion that they are not worth the trouble. He sticks to the principle that all good quality wood of a certain age will make a good violin, leaning away from the modern science of Nagyvary (whom Sam considers an eccentric who has some good ideas and would be better off if he didn't keep announcing he'd discovered "the secret") and toward the more commonsense approach of the Hill brothers.

That day, shuffling through the dusty stacks of his wood collection, I asked Sam if he had ever come across any extinct wood on his buying trips. He just shook his head and laughed. "Once wood is fifty years old it gets a little difficult to even say the exact age," he said. "That's because wood ages a little bit like a cheese, from the outside in. There's a stage where it's curing all the way through and you're getting real oxidation. It really changes something about the wood. If you look at a violin top that's been made with wood that's less than fifty years old you can see a little bit of light through it, like a lampshade. But really old wood-like Strads-all those fiddles are opaque. And it's not because they're thicker; they're often thinner than newer fiddles. Something has oxidized within the wood and changed its nature in some way. It feels different. It smells different."

Sam let me feel and smell the spruce from Emile Francais that he was planning to use for the Drucker violin. The smell was mild and dusty, and the feel was almost sandy and much lighter than I expected. What about the maple back?

"When I was first starting out," Sam said, "there was this catalog put out by a wood dealer. He had all these categories-slightly flamed to very nicely flamed aged maple. There were eight categories, and each was more expensive than the last. And then there was a final category that you couldn't even buy through the catalog that was called 'Exhibition Piece Indeed!'

"I'd go to his place in Vermont and spend two days going through every piece of wood in his place. One day I saw that in the back there were these boxes that had some of these pieces in them and they were just gorgeous. And I asked him to sell me some, and he'd say, 'Oh, I'm saving those to pay for my kids' college education.'

"And then on one trip I bought four grand's worth of wood and I convinced him to sell me one of those maple pieces that was Exhibition Piece Indeed! So for Gene, the back will be Exhibition Piece Indeed!"

Sam began to place back the pieces of wood he'd drawn from the shelves. "I can make just as good fiddles out of really top-quality newish wood," he said. "Meaning ten years old. I've had fiddles that turned out really smas.h.i.+ng with wood that was eight years old. It's the intrinsic quality of the wood that's important." He was slipping the old piece of spruce back into its slot. "I don't want to make a fetish out of old wood," he said. "You can really get seduced by really old wood. And you can make a bad fiddle with old wood if you're not careful.

"But, all other things being equal, older is better."

That idea would dog the rest of my days in the world of violins.

Chapter 6.

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT.

The design of the violin-those sensuous, feminine curves of shoulders, waist, and hips (Man Ray famously superimposed the instrument onto the back of a shapely woman)-is the result of a long-simmering stew of intellect, practicality, and even some mysticism. It has been thought that the violin's shape and workings were influenced by such varied forces as the geometries of Pythagoras, the transcendent theories of Plato, and the workbench savvy of Stradivari and his forbears. But the real reason a fiddle looks the way it does is simply because that's what works best-though no one really knows why.

"To many people a violin is a beautiful object," writes the Cambridge don Sir James Beament in his wonderful and witty treatise called The Violin Explained The Violin Explained. "To a physicist it is a hideously complex shape."

A hundred years ago, Edward Heron-Allen, in his typical way, gave detailed and explicit instructions on how to design a violin outline using a ruler and compa.s.s (he admitted to borrowing the technique from an earlier work by Jacob Augustus Otto). The process involves starting with a perpendicular line as long as the violin will be, usually around fourteen inches. Then that line must be divided extremely carefully into seventy-two equal parts. Next, scribe twenty-four horizontal lines using certain of those seventy-two reference points. After that, the compa.s.s comes out and a series of arches must be drawn and it gets even more complicated. I tried one day to design a violin using Heron-Allen's technique and after a few hours had a piece of paper covered with straight lines and curved lines that looked like the plan for the worst highway interchange ever devised. Heron-Allen was operating in a day before the adjective a.n.a.l-retentive a.n.a.l-retentive was in the vocabulary, but it would be hard to imagine accomplis.h.i.+ng this feat of draftsmans.h.i.+p without a prodigious gift for patience. Even the fussy author described the design technique as "terribly complicated" and conceded that it was practically unnecessary. Even in his day, perfectly good fiddle outlines based on the masterworks were readily available to him. It was pointless to start from scratch. was in the vocabulary, but it would be hard to imagine accomplis.h.i.+ng this feat of draftsmans.h.i.+p without a prodigious gift for patience. Even the fussy author described the design technique as "terribly complicated" and conceded that it was practically unnecessary. Even in his day, perfectly good fiddle outlines based on the masterworks were readily available to him. It was pointless to start from scratch.

It is now more than four centuries since a lot of trial and error produced this hideously complex, yet practically perfect, shape. A modern luthier like Sam Zygmuntowicz has any number of models to help him make that shape. Like almost all current makers, his favored exemplars are Stradivari and Guarneri. It is almost unheard of to mix models by the two dead Italians, though they worked contemporaneously in the same small town and followed a remarkably uniform tradition. Since the days when Sam worked to make nearly exact copies of some great old instruments, he has evolved more and more, always adding a little extra Zygmuntowicz into the mix. He is unafraid to broaden a shoulder slightly, say, or add some weight to a hip. But the changes remain slight. Sam is always performing his own balancing act between tradition and innovation.

Following his standard procedure, Sam started the Drucker fiddle by building a rib structure around a wooden mold. The ribs are thin strips of wood, barely thicker than veneer. Usually, violin makers use maple for the ribs, often matching the maple that will be used for the back. The ribs are the connector between belly and back. If you lay a violin down on a table and think of it as a house, the back forms the floor, the belly is the roof, and the ribs are the walls-in this case undulating walls bent into shape by heating the thin wood, much as boat builders steam boards to make them bend into shape for the curved hull.

Sam keeps a number of molds in the shop, some based on Stradivari instruments, some on Guarneri, and some of his own devising, though a casual observer could never tell the differences among them. The molds are the practical engineering behind the magical box, and they look the part. If the finished fiddle will look like a shapely woman, the molds more resemble manikins. Usually, the blocks are drilled through with a number of half-dollar-size holes, which allow clamps to be inserted to help hold the newly curved ribs to their shapes. The holes make the forms look like an outsize fiddle-shaped Swiss cheese.

To choose which shape he would follow for the Drucker violin, Sam was forced to make an intuitive leap of faith. After their early discussions about simply making a modern copy of the Rosgonyl Strad, Gene's input could only be musical, not technical.

"Gene hasn't given me a lot of guidance," Sam said. "He just showed me what he does and the instrument he has now and what he doesn't like about it and what he does. I let him play a couple of fiddles I had here in the shop and I could see what he was gravitating toward." That was the sound of a Guarneri del Gesu.

Giuseppe Guarneri was born in Cremona in 1698, and became the third generation of a violin-making family that included his grandfather Andrea (a somewhat older contemporary and lesser-known rival of the young Stradivari), and his father, who through some twist of fate became known mainly in relation to his his father and signed his instruments "Giuseppe, son of Andrea." Though he didn't really need to, in order to separate his work from father and signed his instruments "Giuseppe, son of Andrea." Though he didn't really need to, in order to separate his work from his his father's, young Joseph began labeling his instruments with a cross and the letters father's, young Joseph began labeling his instruments with a cross and the letters IHS IHS, and thus became known as "del Gesu."

As a craftsman, Antonio Stradivari was the Laurence Olivier of luthiers, a technically skilled and disciplined workman who labored n.o.bly through a long life, a professional whose normal working level was higher than most, and who regularly scaled peaks of genius. Guarneri was the James Dean of the craft. The Hill brothers also wrote a book on the Guarneri family. In the chapter on Giuseppe del Gesu they repeat the unproved theory that he may have been killed at the age of forty-six. There is some evidence that he quit making violins for a time to run a tavern. One theory claims that some of his fiddles were produced while he was serving a stint in jail. One thing is certain: the man had talent. Despite the turmoil of his personal life, the Hills concluded that Guarneri del Gesu "gave to the world, during fifteen to twenty brief years, violins...which will ever be acclaimed by the lover of our subject as instruments of unsurpa.s.sable charm and originality."

In broad strokes, the great instruments made by Guarneri-there are just dozens left today-are considered more powerful and darker sounding than Strads. The great solo violinists covet Guarneris for that reason. Over the years, Sam Zygmuntowicz designed a violin model that closely approximated a well-known Guarneri known as the Plowden. "It's from 1735, and it's my favorite," Sam says. "It's just right when he was at the peak of his craftsmans.h.i.+p and knowledge."

When Zygmuntowicz worked at Rene Morel's restoration shop, the actual Plowden would arrive for repairs. "I didn't even know who owned it," Sam remembers. "I used to put it on my desk during lunch break and just look at it, like a book-just stare at it while I was eating my sandwich. And I would sort of surrept.i.tiously take measurements and set up quick kamikaze photo sessions. So I got some basic information on it and I designed my Guarneri model from there."

Because the model morphed into something of his own, Sam, as a little inside joke, grafted the first letter of his name onto the t.i.tle and began calling his model the Zowden. For Gene Drucker's instrument, Sam would alter the Zowden shape a little by introducing some of the characteristics of a 1742 Guarneri that was once owned and played by Jascha Heifetz, the David. (Heifetz's will left it to a museum in San Francisco.) It is yet another example of the tangled knot of tradition and whimsy in the violin world that gives the well-known, collector-quality Cremonese violins their names. For instance, the Plowden is named for a collector and amateur violinist, Lord Plowden, who owned the fiddle almost two hundred years ago. Sometimes, a famous violinist becomes inextricably linked with an instrument and it comes to be named for him, like the Kreisler. But that did not happen with the great Paganini's favorite fiddle, an instrument that was so powerful that it was descriptively nicknamed the Cannon and is still called that. Perhaps the most legendary violin Stradivari ever made was one that was still in his workshop when he died and, according to one legend, had been played only once by the master himself. It is called the Messiah. It still is never played but sits in a gla.s.s case in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, a gift from the Hills of London, the family of dealers whose three siblings wrote the famous book on Stradivari.

Sam Zygmuntowicz was able to get his hands on and study a fair number of the greatest violins during his time with Rene Morel and Jacques Francais. The shop, on the eleventh floor of a nondescript building on 54th Street in Manhattan, is a sort of Lourdes for great string players traveling through New York. At any given time millions of dollars worth of Cremonese fiddles are in for repair and healing. Morel, who often schedules his time in fifteen-minute segments, spends much of each day adjusting violins for a continuous stream of glamorous soloists and workaday orchestral fiddlers, who feel their instrument is out of sorts.

Sam speaks often of his apprentice years at the shop, sometimes describing it as a sort of postgraduate training, other times making it seem like a sentence at a prison work farm. In the days I spent with him at the violin-making workshop in Ohio, Sam several times made good-natured jokes that he and many of his peers were ex-hippies in various stages of reconstruction-men (and a few women) of a certain age who'd been drawn to the trade by a 1970s-vintage desire to avoid corporate life, get closer to nature, and learn a craft. Sure enough, quite a few of the other violin makers I met in Oberlin lived in small rural towns and gave off a faint whiff of patchouli.

Rene Morel was no hippie looking for an alternative lifestyle. He'd been trained in Mirecourt to execute the various techniques of violin making-the many cuts-with skill and efficiency. Morel often told the story of arriving as a young man at the great Manhattan restoration shop of the day, the House of Wurlitzer, and amazing everyone with the speed and accuracy of his carving.

"Guys like Rene were just expected to turn out fiddles," Sam said. "It was all handwork and they were trained to be very good technically, very fast, consistent and uniform. It wasn't all that inspiring-looking work, but each of those guys was expected to do a minimum of two violins a week, and the fast guys did three.

"I never have practiced that particular brand of production. I don't think I could do it. You don't waste any unnecessary action. You don't reflect on anything. It's kind of the opposite of my personal process, which includes a lot of patient reflection. But the actual techniques of people like Rene Morel and Carl Becker-these old guys really know how to get it done."

Carl Becker is a Chicago-based violin maker, now in his nineties, and one of the most respected in the country. Sam stopped to visit Becker when he was on a cross-country tour as a teenager and showed the master a fiddle on which he'd done a complicated restoration. "He was the first real violin maker I'd ever met, and he was nice enough to talk to me," Sam remembers. "He just looked at my violin and said, 'Well, it's not as bad as it could be.'" After Sam finished his first year at the violin school in Salt Lake City, he was offered a job in Becker's shop. Sam went to work with Becker for a summer, when, following his own tradition, Becker moved out to a Wisconsin farm and focused on making violins.

"It was a really intense experience for me," Sam remembers. "In Wisconsin it was total immersion and human contact deprivation, except for the Becker family. I lived in a cabin in the woods without water or plumbing. Washed in a lake. Carried my water from the next piece of property.

"It was great. Carl was a great teacher-a very clear, a.n.a.lytical mind. Quite a bit of what I still do is based on what I learned there." Sam thought about leaving school and staying with Becker. "But," he says, "it's a family business, and I knew I would never be a Becker." He returned to Salt Lake City to finish his degree. Though he is careful not to say anything bad about the school's director, Peter Paul Prier, he makes it clear that they were not always on good terms. "It was kind of frustrating," he says of his time in Salt Lake. "I never had anyone really engage me in a challenging way." Another Salt Lake student remembers that on graduation day, Sam stood up and sang the song "My Way."

It was through the influence of Carl Becker and then Rene Morel that Zygmuntowicz became firmly convinced that before he could become himself, he would have to learn the skills required to uphold the tradition of his craft.

One day, while we sat in his shop, Sam recalled something Carl Becker had told him during that summer more than twenty years ago, and he suddenly veered off the specific subject-which was the arching of a violin belly-and said, "There's a great essay by T. S. Eliot called 'Tradition and the Individual Talent.' I think that's a great essay. One of his points is that if you're really an incredibly original thinker then it's great that you make up totally new things. But the tradition is a guarantee that the average person doing average things is going to work at a good level. A certain level of knowledge has been acc.u.mulated, and the difference between us and our predecessors is that we have more to draw upon. And part of what we draw upon is them. Their experience is now part of our knowledge base."

The Hill brothers espoused this idea many years before Sam Zygmuntowicz-or Eliot for that matter. Stradivari, they wrote, "was in touch with the outcome of well-thought-out experiments, and the traditions which had been evolved and transmitted by the different makers during this long period.... Each generation added its link to the chain, and Stradivari finally welded the whole together."

In the many hours I would spend with Sam watching him work, there was plenty of time where the only sound in the room was the relentless raspy scratch as he sc.r.a.ped at tone wood with one of his tools. But this was one of the times when he was building a head of steam to talk.

"There's a beauty to traditional systems like violin making," he said. "If you just take a beautiful fiddle as a model and try to make one like that, you will hit most of the important points-automatically. You don't really need to understand it, if you stay within the established system.

"To some extent that's the way it was done by the old guys. Since they had been such a part of an ongoing tradition and had been working for a number of generations in a similar style and living in the same area where there was direct transmission from one craftsman to another, it was a reasonable a.s.sumption that the acc.u.mulated experience was onto something.

"You could safely say that the violin has been resistant to innovation," he said. "There's a funny chapter in Heron-Allen's book that I think is called 'The Violin, Its Variants and Vulgarities.' It lists all kinds of things, like a porcelain violin and a fiddle with a gramophone horn coming out of it, a trapezoid violin-things like that.

"People often ask the question of why the violin hasn't changed in hundreds of years. The implication is that it would somehow be better and more natural if it did. But why? But why? If you look at natural forms they're quite resistant to change. Most mutations die out. People often ask why there haven't been improvements in violins. Well there have, but most people don't know enough to understand. There have been huge changes, but the basic cha.s.sis looks the same." He had stopped working on his fiddle. It turned out he was just getting started. "This brings me to a tirade," he warned. If you look at natural forms they're quite resistant to change. Most mutations die out. People often ask why there haven't been improvements in violins. Well there have, but most people don't know enough to understand. There have been huge changes, but the basic cha.s.sis looks the same." He had stopped working on his fiddle. It turned out he was just getting started. "This brings me to a tirade," he warned.

"If I may be so obnoxious as to say so-violin making is a kind of un-American activity. It goes against one of our fundamental beliefs, which is that things always get better and the new replaces the old-Progress.

"There is really no good answer to why people still play music from three hundred years ago. But to the people who do it and who like listening to it-they would ask, 'Why would you play anything else?'

"The other thing is that violin making has been immune to mechanization and standardization. There have always been a lot of articles that start something like this: 'For three hundred years the secret of Stradivari had eluded violin makers. Now professor so and so at the university of so and so may have found the answer....'

"The reason this is appealing as a story is that it's the American way. There must be a trick. It's like the secret of vulcanizing rubber is to add sulfur to the rubber and, Eureka! And the guy who patented the process became a millionaire. An enterprising guy without the wool pulled over his eyes sees to the heart of the matter and finds the trick, patents it, and cashes out.

"It's a very foreign idea that violin making is not all that mysterious, but it is one of those things where the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago. The requirements haven't changed, and therefore the results haven't changed and therefore it's a very complex custom that is only learned through long application and a great deal of knowledge. It's not arcane knowledge; it's something any guy can learn-if you spend thirty years doing it.

"At the heart of all those articles is the idea that someone is going to figure out the secret and then they'll be able to make millions of violins that are affordable, instead of those really expensive violins that people pay lots of money for and-the implication is-are not really worth it. Once they find the trick they'll be able to ma.s.s-produce them. That's the unspoken thought behind that." Then, Sam picked up his knife, started cutting the fiddle again, and was quiet for a long while.

It seems that almost every aspect of violin making making has its parallel in violin has its parallel in violin playing playing. Though there are always new prodigies popping up, no one who loves cla.s.sical music would argue too strongly against the idea that, as Sam said about his craft, "the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago."

Gene Drucker had the advantage of growing up in a musical household and essentially followed his father into the same trade-a tradition that was quite common among the great violin makers. But Drucker will tell you that his strongest musical influence was not his father, but his private study with Oscar Shumsky. Shumsky was the last student of Leopold Auer, a Hungarian born in the midnineteenth century, who had a brilliant musical career in czarist Russia. Tchaikovsky wrote his only violin concerto for Auer and planned to dedicate it to him. In 1918, after the Bolshevik revolution, the violinist came to America and for the rest of his life primarily devoted himself to teaching. Before Shumsky, Auer had taught Efrem Zimbalist and Jascha Heifetz.

In his own treatise on the subject, Violin Playing as I Teach It Violin Playing as I Teach It, published in 1921, Auer attacked the notion of upholding traditions of performance practice, like copying an exact vibrato, or slavishly following a bowing technique. He thought it sucked the life out of new talent. Yet he was a living link in a great chain. One of his teachers was Joseph Joachim, another Hungarian who studied in Vienna, played for a time in Leipzig, and landed in Berlin. While Joachim lived in Vienna, according to the violin encyclopedist Alberto Bachman, he turned the Austrian city into "the Mecca for all violinists." Bachman traces Joachim's artistic family tree back to Joseph Bohm, from Bohm back to Pierre Rode (who has a famous Stradivari named for him), and from Rode back to Giovanni Battista Viotti, who is widely acknowledged to have invented violin playing as it has come down to us. "It is not too much to say," Bachman writes, "that whenever we may have occasion to admire some violinist at the present time, we can go back to Viotti in order to discover the origin of his art."

So, from Gene Drucker to Giovanni Battista Viotti, two violinists born on different continents two hundred years apart, we essentially have only six degrees of separation. It's impossible to quantify the influences, but there is a golden braid connecting the men who keep the tradition with those who invented it. This legacy is not willed like an antique breakfront. If you read T. S. Eliot on the subject, you would learn that Tradition "cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." Gene Drucker, in his understated self-estimation, says, "I was always a practicer." Of the influence of Oscar Shumsky, Drucker says, "It would be impossible not to model one's approach to violin playing and music in general after such a strong example." When he hears some recordings from his early career, Drucker thinks, "I sound like the poor man's Shumsky."

There is another line in Eliot's essay that seems to apply more directly to violin makers. The artist, he wrote, "must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same."

One day in 1987, Sam Zygmuntowicz took on the challenge of taking new material and trying to duplicate the unimprovable. It was a major moment in his career.

When Sam first struck out on his own, after his apprentices.h.i.+p with Morel, he initially gained notice in the violin world for his ability to copy old instruments. Stewart Pollens, a violin historian who curates the stringed instrument department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had seen a couple of Sam's copies at violin conferences. He convinced the most prestigious journal of the string instrument world, The Strad The Strad, to commission Zygmuntowicz to copy a Guarneri del Gesu fiddle built in 1733, the one that had come to be known as the Kreisler. Pollens doc.u.mented the process for the magazine.

In a way, copying a great fiddle is like studying with the master himself. "It's a little bit like taking coaching from someone-very detailed coaching," Sam says. "Not from a person, but from the instrument that person created. Studying a violin from the outside is like learning French in high school. Making Making a copy is like going to France and living there for a couple years." a copy is like going to France and living there for a couple years."

For this project, Sam only needed to travel to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where the Kreisler is kept at the Library of Congress's Music Division. There, he performed two parallel feats of learning. The first was to take the violin and, as he says, "turn it into information."

The features most of us notice about a violin are gross characteristics, the kind of things we might use to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist-high forehead, brown eyes, weak chin. In fiddle terms the features a layman would be able to describe are the color of the varnish, the width and curves of the shoulders and hips, the depth of the "waist," which is technically known as the C bout. With a little training and experience, an observer might be able to pick out the way the tricolor outline of purfling is laid into the circ.u.mference of the instrument, and maybe the flare of the corners or the distinctive wood carving on the nautilus-shaped scroll on top of the neck.

But to Sam Zygmuntowicz that level of observation is like discerning that the leaves of a tree are green. Using precise rulers and calipers, he measured the Kreisler to tenths of a millimeter. Years before, when the instrument was taken apart for repair in Morel's shop, he'd gotten measurements of the graduated thicknesses of belly and back. He had a chart that a.n.a.lyzed the varying thicknesses of the belly in such detail that it resembled a topographical map. In the Library of Congress, he traced all the outlines and the shape and placement of the distinctive f f-shaped holes that are cut into the violin's belly on either side of the bridge. He took photographs in different kinds of light, trying to understand the real nature of the varnish. He even played the fiddle himself to get a sense of its sound.

Sam later wrote his own article on the copying process for The Strad The Strad. "To a luthier," he wrote, "copying is a window back to a golden age. Makers often study the minutiae of these instruments with a zeal that borders on fanaticism, and with a reverence that is almost religious. The process of copying lies somewhere between detective work and a spiritual quest. You try to push away the veil of time and see not only the finished product, but how the old makers achieved their results."

Years later, he would talk about copying Guarneri to a gathering of the Violin Society of America. "Making a copy of an old instrument seems like a clear-cut objective," Sam told his colleagues. "It is a technical challenge, but conceptually it shouldn't be so bad: measure the original, find some matching hunks of wood, and carve away anything that doesn't look like a Guarneri."

Even then, his goal was to make more and more instruments that looked and sounded like a Zygmuntowicz. Not only did his prowess as a copyist give him insight into the minute techniques of the masters, it also advanced his reputation-as a copyist. A cover story in The Strad The Strad was a piece of advertising that no violin maker could buy. The magazine quoted Jacques Francais calling Sam's finished Kreisler copy "probably the finest copy of a Guarneri I have ever seen." Another violinist who dealt with Francais ordered his own copy of the Kreisler from Sam. Not long after that, Sam got that call from Isaac Stern. The Stern commissions only added to Sam's reputation in the wider world (he ended up on what was then called Public Television's was a piece of advertising that no violin maker could buy. The magazine quoted Jacques Francais calling Sam's finished Kreisler copy "probably the finest copy of a Guarneri I have ever seen." Another violinist who dealt with Francais ordered his own copy of the Kreisler from Sam. Not long after that, Sam got that call from Isaac Stern. The Stern commissions only added to Sam's reputation in the wider world (he ended up on what was then called Public Television's MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour) and in the more hermetic society of string players. With this success, though, came the danger that he would be not freed by the tradition, but hobbled. Violin makers can charge more for faithful "antiqued" copies than they can for modern instruments that actually look new. It could have been a lucrative course to make copies all his life.

By the end of his speech to the Violin Society of America, Sam promised that he would soon give up making copies. "Copies are a kind of sport," he said, "but if you see a lot of Guarneri copies together it is like watching a convention of Elvis impersonators."

Sam then pushed increasingly to convince violinists that he could build them a fiddle that looked quite similar to the old masters, but what he really hoped to do was create a new sound they were looking for, conceiving the fiddle not so much as a re-creation of a museum piece, but as a living, working machine for making music. The higher the level of the client, the more important it became to make not a copy, but a Zygmuntowicz.

"It is almost unfortunate that through putting too much stress on each project I have transformed what would normally be a more relaxed craft into a higher stress one," Sam told me. "It doesn't have to be that way. I could just make one violin after another in my style and I think I would do all right-someone would buy them.

"Many of the projects have a little story in my mind-who it's going to, how it's going to work, if if it's going to work." it's going to work."

Gene Drucker became a kind of test case for this new process.

It remains the constant, enduring paradox of violin making. No matter how much modern makers learn of the traditions, no matter how much scientific a.n.a.lysis they apply to the materials and techniques, no matter how careful their measurements and a.n.a.lysis of the old instruments, they are still confronted by fiddle players yearning for something that is incredibly hard to describe: a sound.

"Different violinists are known for very distinctive types of playing and sound," Sam Zygmuntowicz says. "Of course, a musician almost never knows enough about it technically to come to me and tell me how to achieve that sound."

Gene Drucker, though an exceptionally articulate man, was no exception. As he had told me, "There's a problem when it comes down to describing sound. The words we have available to us simply don't work very well."

It was time for me to enter the unnameable realm of sound.