cathedral, Cremona
The following is taken, in part, from a piece that I wrote while working as a violinmaker in London. The year was 1976. This was later published in the book The Violin Makers: Portrait of a Living Craft by Mary Anne Alburger.

When I received my acceptance letter from the Violin Making School in Cremona, I was living in Brooklyn, sharing digs with a guy who was into writing crime novels and working in Manhattan. I had saved up my fare to travel to Italy by my late night studying of the racing forms, which gave me many small wins on the horse racing, which I would place bets at OTB offices around the city. Finally I had saved just enough money to book a one- way passage aboard the Micaelangelo cruise ship, in the cheapest shared cabin above the engine room. The journey took about 15 days, and was great fun.

The school didn’t start you off immediately making instruments; there were preparatory exercises first. But I was forced into the situation where I had to start making a violin at home before my first one at the school, and I always got help from other students who were more advanced. I was always scrabbling around, and in a sense that was good, because it made me work very hard. I had to work, I had to be very busy, and I couldn’t do anything else, since I had to make and sell instruments in order to live.

Morassi was my first maestro, and after a while I went in with Bissolotti, who was just beginning to teach violin making at the school, although he had been a professional violin maker for many years and was already quite famous. Myself, a chap from Philadelphia and two Italians, one of whom was his son, were Bissolotti’s first pupils, and he gave us a great deal of attention. I was very fortunate, since he was an excellent teacher and a remarkable craftsman.

As it turned out, the hours I had scheduled in Bissolotti’s and Morassi’s workshops were staggered, and since I was keen to learn as much as I could, I would go up to Morassi’s workshop in my free time as well and work with him. The school was in the old building in Plaza Marconi. The ground floor had a snack bar and the ticket office for the bus station. I lived just around the corner, sharing a flat with Bruno Montagne, a talented violinmaking student from France. He acquired an old piano and loved to play Fats Waller and Chopin. We had no heating or hot water and the toilet was outside. It got very cold in the winter.

I also worked in Stefano’s Conia’s workshop, where I gained a lot of respect for him and his work. I learnt a great deal about technique there, and also about varnish, since he let me use his own varnish on my instruments, which showed me the importance of varnish application, since my varnishing didn’t look nearly as good as his.

When I finished the school in Cremona, I travelled with an English mate up to London. We shared a flat with Angela Styles, who was a restorer with Charles Beare.There I met Gimple Solomon, a remarkable restorer and character. He introduced me to Malcolm Sadler at Ealing Strings who gave me my first job as a violinmaker in his shop. This was remarkably good fortune for me because this was (and is) one of the best violin shops in the U.K., and I had many opportunities to see and study many great instruments and bows. It was a big and fantastic workshop with some of the best restorers and a great bow maker, Michael Taylor.

Although there are old classical violins where one sees ‘mistakes’ and irregularities, they are irrelevant to me. I think it is more important to get an impression from the instrument as a whole than by unduly focusing on details. Also, I believe that intuition must be well developed in a master craftsman, and that it develops in direct proportion to the quality of one’s attention, level of intellectual knowledge, physical knowledge (the knowledge in ones body which comes through working experience) and emotional knowledge ( a respect and attitude for what one is doing). This intuition is what comes to the aid of the craftsman in his decisions about how to link together all the factors that go into the making of an instrument.

There are many choices and decisions, some of them quite subtle: which particular pieces of wood are the most suitable together; which types will work best for a chosen model ; how to shape the wood in the arching and thicknessing; what feels too stiff or too flexible; how to match and determine the exact relationship between the carving of the scroll, the purfling, the f holes; placing, fitting and shaping the bass bar, and so on. It is when the quality of line is very beautiful and elegant and all the different aspects are in harmony, when nothing looks out of place, that an instrument has that fineness that is unmistakable to the trained and experienced eye.

When you begin making you must learn how to work with a gouge, chisel, knife and plane, how to sharpen your tools, how sharp they need to be and how to stand and hold them. That is quite important, because the object really is to work with a minimal amount of unnecessary tension, to do the job in the most economical way.

This is something one builds up over a period of time, the knowledge your body has if it is not interfered with too much or becomes ingrained with too many bad habits. It’s just a matter of being serious about your work, undergoing a suitable training from a master and opening up to it.

I think it is useful for a maker to keep in mind that the instrument he or she is making is something with a potential which is waiting to be activated and nurtured by the bow and which is waiting to be given life and directed by the player. It saddens me see a well made instrument that has been poorly finished and set up both of which forfeit much of its tonal potential. For a musician to put real meaning and life into music he or she must certainly strive to be at one with their instrument, which is more difficult if it is not easy to play on or does not give what is asked of it.

It is surely more important how one does something than what one does. It is unfortunate for us all that many are brought up to look at this the other way around. We can see this tendency in every walk of life, from the violinist who merely plays the notes and not the music, to the factory worker who is mainly interested in what he is going to spend his pay on. However, the possibility exists for one to use work as an avenue for self- development and discovery as well fulfilling our needs. Perhaps we all need to clarify just what are needs are.