The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop by John Marchese

Author:John Marchese
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780061850592
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-01T10:00:00+00:00

It would be early spring by the time just about everything that didn’t look like Gene Drucker’s violin had been cut and gouged and scraped away. I had begun to collect discarded material which I would take home in my pocket and store in a little glass jar. There was a small section of the purfling, a stiff little sandwich of wood smaller than a toothpick. There was one of the f-hole shapes that Sam had cut into the top, the discard that gave the violin one of its most distinctive features, like an incredibly fancy doughnut hole. These two shaped pieces sat on a bed of wood shavings from both the clean spruce top and the fancier flamed maple back. A few of the shavings were broad and curled, like a sliver from a wedge of good Parmesan cheese. Most were smaller, thinner slices, like what’s left when you sharpen a pencil with a knife. This was all I was going to get. As work progressed and Sam labored to perfect the fiddle, all that got scraped away was dust. Once he suggested I smell the spruce as he scraped at it, and I snorted some of what might have been Gene’s fiddle as if it were cocaine.

“I’m starting to really know this wood,” Sam told me one afternoon when I came into the shop. It was a dreary day with a hard, cold rain, and Sam sat at his worktable with the violin top. He’d swung the bulb of an architect’s lamp directly over where he worked. He pulled a small, thin metal scraper across the wood with quick, short strokes.

“I’m in the mood to find every little place to take away more material,” he said. He scraped away for a while, then lifted the wood plate off the worktable and held it near his ear. With a knuckle he tapped at the wood, keeping his ear close.

“I’m listening for a couple things,” he said. “If all other factors are the same, the higher the note, the stronger the piece.” A few times he whacked at his architect’s lamp, because he knew that produced a certain pitch that he could use for comparison. Sometimes Sam picked up a little wooden recorder, the kind children learn to play in school, and blew a few notes, trying to match what he’d just heard from his wood plate. “My life would be simpler if I had perfect pitch,” he said once.

“Besides pitch, the other thing I’m listening for,” he said, “is the quality in that pitch. Does it have a full sound? Does it sustain? How hard a hit does it take to make it sound? None of this is random—there are whole schools of thought on what the pitches should be.” He scraped more, tapped and listened more. “This top is very light, so my tendency is to leave it thicker. But there’s a danger to leaving it too thick. And, there’s also a danger in making it too thin.”

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