“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 romantic 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 ballroom, 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.”
He worked for another hour or so on the bass-bar, which looked like a couple of Popsicle sticks carved into a streamlined, aerodynamic shape. I kept imagining the scene where a whole hotel ballroom full of people shouted at one another, fighting about how this little stick should be carved and where it should be placed. While he worked, Sam talked about his theories on how the bar could change the sound of a violin, emphasizing either the lower or upper end of the frequencies, altering the responsiveness. “I don’t know how much you really want to know about this,” he said, several times. “I feel like I’m just starting to get an understanding of this. There could be more to know.” By the time he finally glued the bar onto the top it had been dark for a while and a blustery wind had started to blow.
“It’s starting to come together,” Sam said on the sidewalk outside the shop as we were about to part, me for the subway back to Manhattan, him for the walk home. “It’s starting to look like a fiddle.”
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 clo
se.
“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.”
At other times, after scraping for several minutes, Sam would take hold of the top in both hands and give it a twist.
“The fiddle is vibrating all over the place in all kinds of different ways,” he said. “The strength of the plate is important in various dimensions. One is cross-wise flex. That’s probably the most important.” He twisted the top to demonstrate. I realized that I had skipped a breath, fearing that he would break the carefully carved piece in half. “It’s not just important how much it moves but the type of movement. Is it a crisp response? Does it want to jump all the way back, or does it have a kind of gummy, more leathery feel to it. That softer leathery feeling could actually make a better, warmer sound. But it’s not an absolute and I prefer a crisper feel, because generally it will probably give a louder, more clear-sounding instrument.
“All these tests,” he said, “pitches, feel, weighing—they’re not so much a guide to what I actually do; they’re more warnings against doing anything weird or dangerous.”
From spending time with Sam while he worked I’d come to recognize certain common themes, and the one that came up most frequently was represented by a phrase he repeated again and again: “All things being equal.” He would begin an explanation like that and then go on to tell me a rule about arching, or thicknesses. Almost always, as he finished his explanation, he would conclude with another phrase: “Of course, things are never equal.” There were just too many variables in the equation.
“Part of making decisions when you’re building a fiddle is going from general ideas of what would probably be good to very specific details of what would be good in this situation. What I’m doing now is pretty fussy. But I am actually finding places to take material away. It would have been much more convenient to establish the thicknesses and never mess with it again.
“It’s hard to know which is a really significant part of what you’re doing and which is just an incidental part. And that’s true at every stage.”
For crucial parts of this violin, Sam was now within tenths of a millimeter of having everything that wasn’t the Drucker violin removed for good. There was no going back, and yet there was still a lot of work to do. Some of it was what Sam would call whacking away at wood: carving the scroll, the neck, the fingerboard. He’d pop the rib structure with its blocks and linings off the mold, and eventually, after he’d worried over everything some more—maybe even removed a little more wood—he’d glue the back and belly into place.
Sam had revealed much of himself over these months. Maybe not as much as Joseph P. Reid, the guy who thought you could build a Stradivarius in your basement, would imagine. But plenty. Like it or not, Sam’s character and nature were built into this box. Would it be simply average, or somehow magical? And how could you really know the difference?
Chapter 9
WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW?
I wish Strad had left us a little book or something,” Sam Zygmuntowicz told me more than once. “Something that said, ‘Make it thinner here, here, and here; leave it thicker there, there, and there and you’ll get a particular sound. That would be nice. But, of course, he didn’t do that.”
Despite his teenage work at Zapf’s in Philadelphia, his training with Peter Paul Prier, his intense summer tutorial with the esteemed Carl Becker, and his five-year boot camp apprenticeship with René Morel, Sam maintained that most of what he’d learned about building good instruments came from studying great instruments, particularly the 1716 Cessole Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù’s 1735 Plowden. “They have been like textbooks,” he wrote once for The Strad. Textbooks “that I can study again and again. They are archetypes of great sound and style.”
Yet after I’d been hanging around his workshop for several months, Sam revealed something that is an open secret among those intimate with famous old fiddles, but not very well known to most music lovers, let alone laymen. “People don’t like to talk about it,” Sam said, “but most Guarneris and Strads have been tampered with in one way or another.”
The implications of what he said didn’t seem terribly important at the time; but the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Sam had used a very good, evocative analogy to explain what he meant by “tampering.” “It’s like those old American cars in Cuba that were there before Castro, and are still running. They’re classic Chevys or Fords, but chances are that most of the parts are different.” Turning this over and over in my mind, I suffered a small crisis of faith and understanding. Here I was, beginning to fully appreciate this strange, hermetic world I’d been allowed to enter. A world that seemed to contradict everything we modern Americans held dear: progress, innovation, speedy technical advance. A world where less and less meant more and more. In this world the experts seemed to agree on one thing: the work of some artisans in a small Italian town three hundred years ago might never be surpassed, and was rarely, if ever, duplicated. How could this theory, this peculiarly fascinating worldview, hold up if the work of the old guys had already been altered?
First I had to learn what had been changed on those Guarneris and Stradivaris. It turned out to be a lot.
The setting for music making in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was substantially different from what came later. Among the few solid facts known about Stradivari’s workshop is that he filled orders from kings in France and England. The music that would be performed on these fiddles would truly be “chamber” music, concerts given by small ensembles in relatively small palace halls. The sonic requirements placed on these fiddles were light, and their sweet, light sound matched perfectly the Baroque music they were playing. But as the decades passed and a new, larger, and more democratic class of audience emerged, concert halls got larger, and with them the size of orchestras. The very music got heavier and denser. Fiddles simply needed to be louder.
Some believe it was part of Stradivari’s great genius that he anticipated the change, and his later instruments were more powerful. But still not powerful enough to stay in running order for hundreds of years. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most older violins were taken apart and the original bass-bar replaced with a larger, thicker bar. The neck was lengthened and tilted at a sharper angle to allow for a longer fingering board and stronger strings at higher tension. Often, when the instruments were apart for these changes, the new craftsmen would regraduate the tops and backs. Of course, they were unable to add wood (except patches to repair worn spots or cracks); they always removed wood, making the bellies and backs thinner.
Sometimes, they considered more drastic action. The Hill brothers, while researching their book on Stradivari, found the account book of a Spanish priest who took up fiddle making in late-eighteenth-century Madrid. In one entry, the priest, Dom Vicenzo Ascensio, recounts how the curator of the Spanish Royal Court instruments brought him a Stradivari violin dated 1709, and “requested me to improve the quality of the tone, which was bad.”
Padre Ascensio took the fiddle apart, made some alterations, but made a worried note in his book that his “improvements” were probably not e
nough. “If after this work the violin is not improved, I think it hopeless unless I put a new back and belly to it.” According to the Hills, the court musicians were satisfied with what was left of the Stradivari and didn’t ask for any more “improvements.”
More than a century later, Sam Zygmuntowicz wrote that “the original intent of the old makers is only half the story.” He then described what might be the common history of a typical Stradivari or Guarneri instrument: regraduated by the Italian makers named Mantegazza; given a longer neck by the famous French copyist Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who worked in Paris in the mid-1800s; patched and restored by the Hills in London just before the turn of the twentieth century; fitted again with another new bass-bar by the master restorer Simone Sacconi in post–World War II New York. Where in all that retrofitting could one even find the maker’s original intent?
I wondered, considering how carefully Sam had worked on his bass-bar—its carving, its placement, its controversial much-argued-over springiness—wouldn’t Stradivari and Guarneri have done the same? What did it mean that, decades later, someone who wasn’t Stradivari or Guarneri had pried open their masterpieces and stuck in a new bass-bar, like some Cuban mechanic putting a rebuilt carburetor into a 1958 Impala? If Sam spent so many hours, days, and years studying those old fiddles, keeping notebooks full of detailed graduation charts that looked like topographical maps—whose work was he actually analyzing?
And I thought of a game Sam liked to play when he met with his colleagues during that summer week in Oberlin. After the dinner dishes had been cleared, as the makers finished their wine, or popped open another beer and socialized a bit before returning for the evening session in the workshop, Sam would get the attention of the table and ask a simple question, yet one among his particular craft that was loaded with portent. Okay, Sam would say, getting an impish look, “What do we really know?”
The Violin Maker Page 10