The Violin Maker Part 1

The Violin Maker.

A Search for the Secrets of Craftsmans.h.i.+p, Sound, and Stradivari.

by John Marchese.

Acknowledgments.

First off, I have to thank Hana Smith for her contributions to this book.

The two men at the center of The Violin Maker The Violin Maker, Sam Zygmuntowicz and Eugene Drucker, were in many ways collaborators as much as subjects. Sam graciously opened his workshop and spent many, many hours allowing me to look over his shoulder while he worked. I greatly appreciate the time he took to tutor me in the intricacies of his craft and his patience while trying to teach someone whose learning curve is often shaped more like a parabola.

Gene generously gave me opportunities to watch him make music and teach music and openly shared his thoughts and feelings. His musicians.h.i.+p is enlightening and inspiring. His literary skills will soon be on display with the publication of his first novel, The Savior The Savior.

In some way, both men inform nearly every page, though, of course, any mistakes or inaccuracies are mine alone.

Thanks to the nice folks who worked in the Brooklyn workshop: Wiltrud Fauler, Dietmar Schweizer, and Gladys Thomas Toscano.

My appreciation also to the other members of the great Emerson String Quartet-Phil Setzer, Larry Dutton, and David Finckel-who were always friendly and helpful, and, along with their colleague, remarkable and inspiring musicians. Da-Hong Seetoo, their brilliant producer and engineer, was great fun to be with.

I owe a debt to the Violin Society of America and the people who run and partic.i.p.ate in the annual workshops for violin makers and acousticians at Oberlin College. They are top craftsmen and researchers who are pus.h.i.+ng the art of violin making forward in its fifth century. They willingly shared their knowledge, expertise, jokes, food, and booze. They include: Gregg Alf, Pam Anderson, Tom Croen, Joe Curtin, John Dilworth, Chis Dungey, David Folland, Chris Germain, Feng Jiang, Francis Morris, Frank Ravatin, Ben Ruth, Ray Schryer, Fan Tao, Marilyn Wallin, David Wiebe.

At HarperCollins, Marjorie Braman was the person who lit the spark for this book. When the resulting flame seemed like it might become eternal, she showed great patience. And when there was finally a ma.n.u.script, she deftly guided it with a sure hand and a light touch. Every writer should be so lucky.

Once again, my agent, David Black, came through in the clutch. If only the Jets would draft him.

Last and most, I have to thank Jana DeHart, my living companion, traveling companion, erstwhile research a.s.sistant, and irrepressible scout. She helped in so many ways that to say this book couldn't have been done without her would be a gross understatement.

Chapter 1.

THE MAGICAL BOX.

This story is about a craftsman entering the prime of his career who let me follow him as he tried to build a musical instrument that might top the work of the man who many think is the greatest craftsman who ever lived. His name was Antonio Stradivari, and he died more than 250 years ago.

Not long after I first met Sam Zygmuntowicz in Brooklyn, he invited me to join him in Ohio, where he was spending two weeks that summer teaching at a workshop of violin makers held at Oberlin University. The town of Oberlin is a quiet and neat place that seems to just pop out of cornfields about thirty-five miles southwest of Cleveland. The college dominates one side of the town with a mix of Gothic and modern buildings set on plush, trimmed lawns. There is a green and shady central square with clumps of tall trees that is dotted with monuments to fallen soldiers and murdered missionaries.

I drove to Oberlin in the first week of July, and the weather was shockingly hot and sticky. The shade of the square would have been a cool refuge at midday were it not for the fact that the college concurrently was hosting a festival of Scottish culture. Each day, bagpipers strolled on the thick gra.s.s under the tall trees, blew up their bellows, and emitted that ineffable sound that always makes me think a small farm animal is being slaughtered.

So, like me, most of the violin makers avoided the square at bagpipe time. It seemed a strange coincidence that aficionados of the world's most annoying musical instrument would be in the same small midwestern town as two dozen people obsessed with the world's most glorious musical tool. They didn't mingle. The bagpipe has its fans, of course. Tucked under the right armpit, the windbag can sound less than noxious. I have heard an African-American man in Philadelphia play good jazz on the thing. And on the green and shady lawn of a cemetery, pumping out "Amazing Grace," the bagpipe can sound sublime.

In fact, I had been to a funeral not long before traveling to Oberlin, and that funeral, in a strange way, had helped bring me here. The former governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, had died in his hometown of Scranton, and he was buried after a large and elaborate ma.s.s at the city's Catholic cathedral. I was hired to play trumpet in a bra.s.s quartet that supplemented the church organ on regal processional music and accompanied a large choir through serious liturgical hymns. The choir loft was packed with instrumentalists and singers added for this special service.

In the midst of the ma.s.s, after communion had been taken, a young man who sat near me stood among the gathered musicians and tucked a violin under his chin. He then played, accompanied by only a soft piano, the former governor's favorite song. It was Irving Berlin's "How Deep Is the Ocean." Typical of Berlin, the song makes a lot out of little. The range is barely more than an octave. There are no long leaps between any two notes. The melody climbs through its range in a series of relaxed steps, like an old man on a staircase. It is a simple, pretty tune.

My guess is that the violinist may never have heard the seventy-year-old song before he'd been asked to play it. He was only a teenager, just finis.h.i.+ng high school and headed for a top music conservatory-not a prodigy, really, but a talent. That was evident from the first phrase of the song, as he dug his bow into the thick low string of the fiddle. The kid had a sound a sound.

The church was packed with politicians, many of whom seemed more interested in being noticed than in mourning their dead colleague. But the moment that kid made his first notes on the fiddle, the crowd stilled and all the extraneous noise seem to rush from the church as from a vacuum. For the next few minutes, as the boy played Berlin, there was virtually no other sound in the large marbled vault. Even the accompanying piano seemed to disappear.

The violin in its low register sounded like a beautiful moan. On the second time through the chorus, the young man leaped to a higher octave and added more vibrato. The song became a sigh. The voice of the violin was singing without words. He climbed higher for the last notes-in the lyrics a final question: "How high is the sky?" "How high is the sky?"-and it made the air in the church seem like crystal, like it could be shattered with a touch. When the violin stopped there was a long, long moment where it seemed the hundreds of listeners held their breath, lest they break the spell.

I have played the trumpet professionally for twenty-five years, never at a high level, but often with very good musicians. If I think of all the music created in the hundreds of gigs I've played, that one tune in a church-a Tin Pan Alley standard interpreted by a teenager with talent-is a highlight. It may have been the special circ.u.mstances, yet the more I wondered why, I came to think that it was the sound of the violin. The standard encyclopedia of music, Grove's, explains it simply and authoritatively: "The violin is one of the most perfect instruments acoustically." Acoustic perfection seems like something that can be measured and quantified, and, I would find, many have tried. But the sound of a violin eludes the grasp of mere numbers.

After the ma.s.s, on the sidewalk outside the church, I ran into a big city newspaper reporter I know, a tabloid guy who covers politics and who is typically tough and cynical. "When that violin played I nearly lost it," he told me. "I think everybody did."

I didn't say anything then-I might not even quite have known it myself-but after those few minutes listening to the young violinist in the church, my goal would be to find something. I wanted to learn what makes the violin so special. How is it that this hunk of wood with the funny shape can express so perfectly the deepest and most profound human emotions?

I thought of my own musical experience, my life as a listener. As a music student in college, I had to work my way through the standard symphonies. I did a pedagogical survey of jazz and studied most intently the great trumpeters, something I still do. But as the years pa.s.sed and music became more my avocation-my love, not my living-I was drawn to the sound of strings. Sure, I still might listen to jazz at dinner, or put on a symphony for Sunday morning. But at those times when the lights went out and I really wanted to listen, listen, to let sound take me either out of myself or farther in, it was Pablo Casals playing Bach's unaccompanied cello suites, say, or a performance of Beethoven's late string quartets. to let sound take me either out of myself or farther in, it was Pablo Casals playing Bach's unaccompanied cello suites, say, or a performance of Beethoven's late string quartets.

I suppose my new search could have begun with violin lessons, but it seemed awfully late in the game for that, and I had enough trouble keeping up with the demands of the instrument I already knew how to play. One of the greatest violinists of all time, Eugene Ysaye, wrote, "The violin is a poet whose enigmatic nature may only be divined by the elect." Wouldn't that be the people who build build them? them?

I did what people do nowadays-typed "violin makers" into an Internet search engine. Immediately, I had a dozen names, but Sam Zygmuntowicz stood out. First, because his surname seemed unp.r.o.nounceable-it's Zig-muntoe-vich. Secondly, since he lived and worked in Brooklyn, I could get to his shop by subway from my apartment in lower Manhattan. As I got to know him and the world of violins, I would realize that I'd made a lucky choice. Violin makers, I would learn, can argue a lot about little things, but there would not be much debate that Sam is among the best and most successful violin makers working today. Sure, he told me when I got him on the phone, he wouldn't mind someone watching him make a violin.

And so, a month later, my pilgrimage into the world of fiddles began in earnest with a trip to Oberlin, Ohio.

I arrived a few days after the workshop began. Two dozen violin makers had taken over the college's sculpture studio, a long bas.e.m.e.nt room, with a wall's length of workbenches under a high bank of windows just above ground level. They worked all day and long into the night, with breaks for impromptu symposia on subjects that then seemed hopelessly arcane to me. At one, there was a heated discussion on how to cut perfect miters for the purfling, the thin strips of inlaid wood that run around the edges of a fiddle. At another, a violin maker from Michigan showed everyone how to make casts of famous old instruments using newfangled resins used in automotive design in Detroit. Twelve hours later, people were still making casts. Obviously, this was dedication that bordered on obsession.

Some of the partic.i.p.ants in the workshop were officially instructors and some were students, but the division seemed blurry. Around five each afternoon, the cla.s.smates started cracking open wine and whiskey bottles, and began a working c.o.c.ktail hour. Then they moved to a campus dormitory for a communal dinner lubricated with wine and beer. Then back to the studio for more work. By then, nearly everyone was a little blurry. It was late on another hot day in Oberlin that a violin maker from Boston and I sat outside in the chirpy and muggy night, sprawled on a loading dock behind the art studio, hoping to catch a breeze. Inside, his colleagues were still carving away at fiddles well past midnight.

"It's amazing," he told me, "that people like me come here from all over the country and the world, and get together to do what we do for a living. And all we really do for a living is make boxes."

Of course, this made the job seem a lot less interesting and compelling than I imagined. A mere box could not have frozen those hundreds who attended the governor's funeral. Building just a box would hardly attract a few dozen professionals to this torrid little town to spend their summer vacation working at their craft. But before I could question the violin maker he explained it all.

"The thing is," he said, "they're magical boxes."

Chapter 2.

THE LUTHIER.

The magical box is smaller than a bread box and just about infinitely more complex. There are at least sixty-eight different pieces in a violin, and usually seventy, because finding a large unblemished piece of wood is rare, so the belly and back plates typically are made by joining two pieces. Except for a few metal screws that help make minute adjustments in the tuning of the strings-and the strings themselves-every bit of the thing is made of wood.

This is an object that is formed with a thousand cuts. They start with the roughest-the felling of a tree in the forest-and get progressively smaller and more painstaking. In the late stages of construction, the difference between right and wrong is measured in millimeters, often fractions of that. Building a violin begins in butchery and ends in surgery.

They are called luthiers, the builders. The name is derived from the lute, a bulbous guitarlike instrument that was all the rage in medieval music, and the term is now applied to those who make or repair a whole range of descendants and relatives, from fiddles to guitars. Though its origin is traced back to a primitive sticklike thing called the rebec played by Moorish nomads in the first millennium, the violin as we know it appeared rather suddenly in the middle of the sixteenth century. In little more than a hundred years its design was perfected. The laws that govern the building of this box were decided upon a short time before the laws of gravity were discovered, and they have remained remarkably unchanged since then. It is commonly thought that the violin is the most perfect acoustically of all musical instruments. It is quite uncommon to find someone who can explain exactly why. One physicist who spent decades trying to understand why the violin works so well said that it was the world's most a.n.a.lyzed musical instrument-and the least understood.

Consequently, a luthier, a really good one, is at once a woodworker, an engineer, an historian, a mechanic, and a shaman. What kind of person takes up this trade?

"My parents were Polish concentration camp survivors," says Sam Zygmuntowicz. "They resettled in Sweden and moved to Philadelphia in 1952. I was their first child born in America. My father started a laundry business.

"From a very young age I was highly involved with art. I won a couple of school art contests for sculpture. My older brothers had studied violin but didn't continue, so I wasn't offered violin lessons. I was interested in music though, and I finally took a few guitar lessons when I was around seven years old. Then I picked up the recorder on my own. I got interested in traditional folk music and bought a five-string banjo when I was thirteen and taught myself to play.

"Later that year my family moved, and near our new house was a drainage ditch leading to a park. There were some bamboolike reeds growing there, which I thought would make good flutes. I went to the library and looked for books on flute making. Of course, I didn't find much. I did find a big book on organology, and from that I gleaned some information about Aztec bone flutes and such. I also found a book on guitar making and another that was an introduction to instrument acoustics.

"But the most important book I found was a charming old book called Violin-Making as it was, and is. Violin-Making as it was, and is. I think that book inspired quite a number of current violin makers." I think that book inspired quite a number of current violin makers."

Sam had sent me this biographical sketch by e-mail before we'd actually met in person. I made a date to visit his studio the next week. Before that, I went to the New York Public Library to see if it had a copy of Violin-Making as it was, and is. Violin-Making as it was, and is. The book was available, but reading it wasn't easy, because the copy at the library was old and rare. Before I was allowed to touch it the librarians confiscated any pens in my possession and made me wear white gloves. This made note taking too difficult, so I just paged through and read bits. I tried to appreciate how this peculiar book could inspire a young man like Sam Zygmuntowicz, but I have to admit that at first the book's main inspiration on me was a p.r.o.nounced drowsiness. The book was available, but reading it wasn't easy, because the copy at the library was old and rare. Before I was allowed to touch it the librarians confiscated any pens in my possession and made me wear white gloves. This made note taking too difficult, so I just paged through and read bits. I tried to appreciate how this peculiar book could inspire a young man like Sam Zygmuntowicz, but I have to admit that at first the book's main inspiration on me was a p.r.o.nounced drowsiness.

If this was the key to understanding the motivation to modern lutherie, it was an odd one. Published in 1885 by a polymath Edwardian dandy named Edward Heron-Allen, this amateur's guide to the world of fiddles is one of the most eccentric books I'd ever seen, full of untranslated phrases in Latin and Greek, poems in tribute to the violin, and a guide to building a fiddle so exhaustive and detailed that you'd have to a.s.sume the author suffered from attention surfeit disorder. Later, when I asked Sam what it was about this book that inspired him so much, he said: "It just made violin making seem romantic."

There was one thing I'd written down after reading Heron-Allen, when the librarians gave me my pens back. His primary injunction as he begins the treatise is this: "Given: A log of wood. Make a violin."

That's the process I wanted to pursue with Sam: watch him take a log and turn it into a fiddle, follow the instrument from its roughest stage to its first performance. If I were a romantic like Mr. Heron-Allen, I might quote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to describe what I was hoping to see.

Fas.h.i.+oned of maple and of pine,That in Tyrolean forests vastHad rocked and wrestled with the blast;Exquisite was it in design,Perfect in each minutest part,A marvel of the lutist's art But I was heading for Brooklyn and was more than willing to settle for a little less romance.

It was a cool and sunny spring day when I first went to meet Sam. On the subway to Brooklyn, I tried to guess what he would look like. Was there some kind of badge or special outfit that a luthier could wear to give a signal of his status, like the way a white lab coat says doctor doctor? Could he, like an auto mechanic, wake in the morning and slip into his trade by donning a stiff set of matching pants and s.h.i.+rt with his name st.i.tched over the s.h.i.+rt pocket?

Apparently not.

My first glimpse of Sam Zygmuntowicz was through a chain-link fence. I was standing on a littered sidewalk on Dean Street in Brooklyn, across the street from the busy loading dock of a tile and flooring store whose front doors faced Flatbush Avenue, a main, wide artery of the borough, where I'd just fought my way across four lanes of angry traffic. Behind us was downtown Brooklyn, a mid-rise cl.u.s.ter of fancy stone structures from a more prosperous past, and a few gla.s.sy new buildings that promoters were pointing to as signs of Renaissance for the borough. A few blocks in the other direction was Park Slope, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and impressive brownstones, one of New York's great gentrified enclaves, set on a rising hill that begins at the famously polluted Gowa.n.u.s Ca.n.a.l and runs up to Frederick Law Olmsted's Prospect Park. I knew that Zygmuntowicz lived in a row house in Park Slope and that he commuted to work (usually on foot) in this adjacent neighborhood that was still so nondescript and generally bereft of charm that on the day of my first visit the real estate people had still not invented a cute new name for it.

The chain-link fence through which I spotted Sam surrounded a small, unpaved, and weedy driveway leading to the loading dock of a converted six-story factory building, where at one time workmen inside the brick walls and wired windows had manufactured stuff like sporting goods. Now, most of the s.p.a.ce is residential and a lot of the residents work where they live, occupied doing new cottage industries like producing video, or art, or, in Sam's case, violins, violas, and cellos. He'd lived in this building for a while, before he got married and started having children.

To say that Sam Zygmuntowicz didn't look like I expected a violin maker to look is absolutely true. But what difference does it make, since I didn't know then what I was expecting? The image didn't come to me until months after this first meeting, when Sam, a little frustrated by the simple-minded questions I was asking him, said testily, "I hope you're not going to do what people have a tendency to do with violin makers: make me seem like a kindly old wood carver-like Geppetto."

Banish the thought, I told him at the time. But when I considered the question later, I realized that the old man who'd carved Pinocchio was kind of what I was hoping for.

That first morning, Sam came across the parking lot to unlock the heavy Master lock on the swinging gate of the fence. He gave a small wave as he emerged from the building and walked slowly toward me. He was, like me, a middle-aged man of average height and medium build, who somehow looked shorter and heavier than he really was. And he was dressed nothing like Geppetto. No suspenders, no heavy leather ap.r.o.n, no knickers. He had a youthful and friendly face, a little mottled, and wore large gla.s.ses. His hair was thick and wiry, black with some touches of gray. He was wearing what I would learn is his characteristic outfit: comfortably cut dark cotton chinos and a plaid flannel s.h.i.+rt. On his feet he had leather sandals over dark socks.

The gate between us opened, Sam stuck out his hand and said, "You found it all right?" Then he glanced around for a moment, a little shy and embarra.s.sed by the ba.n.a.lity of his question. I was standing in front of him, wasn't I? "Of course you found it all right," he said, and swung the gate open wide to let me through. He locked up behind me and led me across to the building. We trudged up four flights of wide stairs and arrived at a landing with a big steel door. Sam pushed it open, and we entered his studio.

Inside was a scene similar to any number of lofts I'd visited around New York. The exterior walls were concrete and pocked in places. The wood floors showed some scars. Sun poured in through high windows that filled most of the south wall. Just inside the door sat an ebony baby grand piano on a well-worn carpet, a few plants flanking its keyboard, and a music stand tucked into the curve of the soundboard. To the right was a seating area with a broken-in maroon couch and mismatched chairs placed on another threadbare carpet. Every item of furniture seemed to come from the kind of store that some would call antique antique and others and others thrift thrift.

Beyond that there were some homemade cubicles that created a hallway leading to a kitchen where I could glimpse the corner of a giant old commercial stove and table. On a cabinet leading to the hall was a big marionette dressed in a tuxedo, holding a violin in one wired hand and a bow in the other. (This was long before his Geppetto complaint, but Sam would later a.s.sure me that he had no hand in carving this fiddle-playing puppet.) Across from the puppet was a gla.s.s-fronted barrister's bookcase, and as we pa.s.sed it I tried to catch the t.i.tles of a few of the books stuffed inside. Understanding Wood Understanding Wood. The Violins of Antonio Stradivari The Violins of Antonio Stradivari. And, of course, Violin-Making as it was, and is. Violin-Making as it was, and is.

Although most of the loft had a thrown-together, do-it-yourself feel, this bookcase sat against a new wall that looked professionally built. To the left of it was a pair of polished doors in a buff rosewood finish. Just to the side of those doors hung a small black-and-white framed photo of Sam standing with Isaac Stern, the two of them holding a fiddle together and lifting it toward the camera. On the photo was an inscription from the legendary violinist that read "To Sam, thank you again for your wonderful craftsmans.h.i.+p."

I had read what I could about Sam before coming to visit, and I knew that this was one of the most prestigious commissions of his career, one that had generated a buzz about him in the relatively small and insular world of violins. Maestro Stern was among the faction of top soloists who preferred the fiddles of Giuseppe Guarneri, known in his time around Cremona, Italy, as del Gesu. If the violins of the older and more productive Antonio Stradivari were considered the Rolls-Royce of the trade, those made by Guarneri del Gesu were on the order of Jaguars-more erratically made, but powerful and distinctive. Stern had long played one of the most coveted of Guarneris, called the Panette (most top violins have been labeled at some point in their lifetime, usually by a dealer appropriating some cachet from a famous previous owner). The famous soloist had heard of this young, up-and-coming luthier named Zygmuntowicz who was gaining a reputation for his careful copying of famous instruments. Stern commissioned a copy of the Panette. After it was built, Stern brought the new instrument to a rehearsal with some of his friends, including Yo-Yo Ma, and played it without mentioning that it was a duplicate. Until the great old violinist said something himself n.o.body noticed he was not playing his regular great old violin. Soon, Maestro Stern asked Sam to copy his other great Guarneri, the Ysaye. Word spread quickly, and Sam's reputation climbed.

"Someday, maybe, I'll tell you the story of that fiddle," Sam told me. Then he pushed open those double doors and led me into the workshop of his studio, the inner sanctum of his professional life.

From talking on the telephone with him, I had a basic understanding of how the business worked. Unlike some luthiers, who produced fiddles and then sold them through dealers, Sam took commissions from violinists themselves and then designed each fiddle for the particular player. He was able to make between six and eight violins in a year. (He also usually had one cello in the works at any given time.) When we met his price was $27,000 for a violin and $46,000 for a cello. Because he had more customers than hands, the wait from commission to delivery was about two years, and the larger cello could take five.

"Usually," Sam said, "when I talk to people about violin making I don't get that technical. I talk about the business aspects, the people aspects-things that are understandable to people who have similar concerns in their own field."

I was interested in the business and personal aspects of his trade, of course, but entering Sam's studio for the first time, looking around, I found myself focused on the technical part. The technical part seemed like a wonderful mystery made manifest all around me-a tableau of saws and chisels, files and brushes, stained jars filled with pigments and solvents. Everywhere-on tables, hanging from wires, tucked into storage slots-were the familiar parts of fiddles: the curved, feminine-shaped backs and bellies, the nautilus twist of the scrolls, the flat, dark wedge of the fingerboard.

The workshop had a main room about twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, with a windowed wall lined with a workbench that was actually a jerry-rigged progression that began with an old wooden desk on one end and progressed through a series of grafts that included tabletops and built-in counters, supported by legs and drawers. Sam spends most of his workday seated in a padded modern office chair on the left. To his right sat a young woman with thick, light brown hair and an equally thick Austrian accent. Her name is Wiltrud Fauler, and she is one of two a.s.sistants that Sam has imported from Europe. The other, Dietmar, soon emerged from a small room in the far right side of the shop, looking like a factory worker in his blue ap.r.o.n smock, except he was barefoot. Both Wiltrud and Deitmar were friendly but had a p.r.o.nounced shyness and reserve that seemed natural for folks who spend their workdays concentrating on things and not on people. After we were introduced and exchanged a few pleasantries, they quickly turned their attention back to their workbenches and over the next few hours said very little and that, mostly, to each other in German.

Sam Zygmuntowicz didn't miss the irony of a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors hiring two a.s.sistants who were German. He was a practical businessman.

"In Germany," Sam told me, "it's quite different from here. They take pride in putting out things of very high quality. It's a very honorable thing. It's a career track much earlier. And it's not like the kids with discipline problems get stuck in the vo-tech school."

Sam had his share of discipline problems while getting through school in Philadelphia. His mother kept many of his report cards, and they were full of complaints about a boy who kept a messy desk and didn't always pay attention. When he began to focus on violin making as his future, his parents couldn't fathom lutherie as an occupation for their son and tried to get him an apprentices.h.i.+p with the local carpenter's union. At fifteen he landed a job helping to repair school violins at a Philadelphia music store called Zapfs. When he was eighteen he enrolled in the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City. It was founded by a German immigrant named Peter Paul Prier, who'd learned the trade in Mittenwald, a Bavarian town with an intense tradesman culture that produced thousands of violins in the last century. The only equivalent to Mittenwald was Mirecourt, a town in France's Vosges mountains, where violin making was an honored and prolific town trade. After college Sam worked for five years in the Manhattan restoration shop of Rene Morel, a Frenchman who'd trained in the workshops of Mirecourt.

"I guess I consider myself only a demi-American in my work att.i.tude," Sam says. The route that took him from reading Heron-Allen as a teenager in the Philadelphia library to running his own thriving shop in Brooklyn is, he understands, not a journey that most people today want to travel.

"Our society has gotten more materialistic," he says. "People go into professions to make money. There's nothing like the traditional craft that you do in your village, where you go into it when you're twelve and seven years later your apprentices.h.i.+p is done and for five years after that you're a journeyman and by the time you're twenty-five you can be a master, and maybe by the time you're thirty you can open your own shop.

"You can't even legally hire a twelve-year-old in this country. It's just not set up that way. And most people who go into violin making don't go into it seeing it simply as an honorable craft-like being a drywall taper or a plumber. People consider it a kind of art, and they go into it with the expectations people bring to art. Or for a lot of people, being a violin maker is kind of like being a boat builder: something slightly romantic, an alternative lifestyle thing.

"Because of that I don't think people get the kind of training that they should get, because that's not what they went into it for. They didn't get into it to get yelled at by a Frenchman in very colorful ways."

The Frenchman he was referring to was his former boss, Rene Morel, whose craftsmans.h.i.+p is highly respected and whose mercurial nature is widely known. Many of the world's top fiddle players come to Morel to maintain and repair their instruments. And many of the instruments they bring are among the most valuable on earth. In a small gem of a book called The Countess of Stanlein Restored, The Countess of Stanlein Restored, the writer Nicholas Delbanco follows the restoration of a Stradivari cello by that name, which belonged to his father-in-law, the eminent musician Bernard Greenhouse. Greenhouse had waited decades to have his beloved instrument given a major overhaul. And he would trust the job only to Morel. the writer Nicholas Delbanco follows the restoration of a Stradivari cello by that name, which belonged to his father-in-law, the eminent musician Bernard Greenhouse. Greenhouse had waited decades to have his beloved instrument given a major overhaul. And he would trust the job only to Morel.

During his time at Morel's shop on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, Sam told me, "I used to sit at lunch with a two-million-dollar violin open on my worktable, and just stare at it, trying to understand it, trying to take it in." After he left the employ of Morel and opened his own shop, Sam's reputation grew on his ability to make uncanny copies of old instruments, as he did for Isaac Stern. "If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," Sam wrote once, "it is also the most direct route to learning a complex and elusive aesthetic."

Sitting with him this first day, listening to him talk, catching glimpses of the work routine of Wiltrud and Dietmar, I began to get a feel for the workaday aesthetic of his shop. It seemed like a wonderful place to spend your time. A high-end sound system supplied a subdued soundtrack. I could see that many of the CD cases stacked near the stereo were cla.s.sical recordings-a number were by clients he had mentioned-but what came out of the speakers this morning was an eclectic mix of folk and bluegra.s.s and only a little cla.s.sical. Sam is a self-taught fiddler who plays folk, country, klezmer, swing-everything but but cla.s.sical music. Wiltrud is a cla.s.sically trained violinist who plays with a semiprofessional orchestra in New York. (Dietmar plays just enough to test fiddles in the shop.) "Wiltrud teases me," Sam says, "that I like to listen to hillbilly music." cla.s.sical music. Wiltrud is a cla.s.sically trained violinist who plays with a semiprofessional orchestra in New York. (Dietmar plays just enough to test fiddles in the shop.) "Wiltrud teases me," Sam says, "that I like to listen to hillbilly music."

Surrounding Sam were tools. A series of gougers looked like elongated woodhandled spoons ranging in size from a few inches to a foot long, their tips ground to a sharp edge to rip through wood. My eye lighted on a set of wood planes. The largest was the same size I have used myself, the kind you buy in a hardware store to get rid of extra wood on doors that don't close right. But in this shop the planes get increasingly smaller, and lined up they look like a set of unnested Russian dolls, shrinking down to a little shoe-shaped thing that is about the right size to jump around a Monopoly game board. To use it, you'd have to hold it between two fingers like the handle of a teacup.

In my library trip before coming to Brooklyn, I'd read some of the articles Sam had written about his craft over the years, mostly for the top journal of the string world, the English magazine called The Strad The Strad. In one piece, Sam described his work as "more than a complicated carpentry project." But to someone like me, walking into his shop for the first time, it appeared that what he does is exactly exactly a complicated carpentry project. Almost everything in the workshop seemed designed to fas.h.i.+on and transform wood. And, leaving out the small room with large band saws that Dietmar worked on sporadically through the morning, everything has a look of timeless tradition. A few tools look so weathered that it seems Stradivari himself could have handled them. a complicated carpentry project. Almost everything in the workshop seemed designed to fas.h.i.+on and transform wood. And, leaving out the small room with large band saws that Dietmar worked on sporadically through the morning, everything has a look of timeless tradition. A few tools look so weathered that it seems Stradivari himself could have handled them.

"The fact is," Sam said, "my shop in many ways could be any shop throughout history. Some of the tools are more sophisticated-clamps and things. We have electric lights and we heat glue in an electric pot. But I would say that Stradivari could walk into this shop and, after a few hours of looking around, could work here quite comfortably."

This was the first of many times that Sam would drop the famous name Stradivari into the conversation. Over the months that followed, I would come to realize that the influence of the Italian craftsman who died in 1737 is felt almost constantly by modern violin makers. His presence was consistent and powerful, like a moon pus.h.i.+ng and pulling the oceans in an everyday way. In the many hours I would spend in his workshop, Sam's nonchalant talk of "Strad"-or, for variation, "the old guy"-would sometimes make it seem that Stradivari was working still. In a way, Sam was Strad's apprentice, and the old guy might as well have been there in the shop each day, sc.r.a.ping away at a fiddle and muttering to himself in Italian.

The more I thought about Sam's situation, the more remarkable it seemed. His occupation appeared to refute one of the very basic rules of our culture: that science and technology keep making things better. In a world of billion-dollar search engines, phones that play movies, bioengineering and string theory, a shop in Brooklyn can still strive to produce a product that matched a tool more than three hundred years old. Was it craftsmans.h.i.+p or alchemy?