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Master violin makers indulge passion for working with wood
Mar. 18, 2006. 01:00 AM
JOHN MOORE
CREMONA, Italy—Someone once said the violin is the musical instrument that most closely resembles the human voice. Philippe Devanneaux would go further than that. To him, the violin also has a soul.
Devanneaux has been crafting beautiful instruments for more than two decades since he moved from his native France to this town on the banks of the Po River, an hour's drive southeast of Milan.
"The wood is a living material," says Devanneaux, 46, who was just a child when he began fashioning musical contraptions from boxes, elastic bands and coconut shells.
"When the maker creates the violin he puts all his soul in it. He gives it a certain sound, a certain feel. After he is done, each musician who owns the violin will add his own feel to the instrument through the way he plays it. So the violin grows and develops its own character."
Violins — and their cousins, violas and cellos — are the heart of Cremona, which has a population of only 70,000 people, but has more than 120 violin makers.
It's a tradition stretching back 500 years. Cremona was the home of the masters of Italian violin-making — Andrea Amati, who is credited with creating the basic design of the modern violin in the 16th century, and Antonio Stradivari, the greatest violin maker of all.
The instruments are everywhere around town, in restaurants, on buses, tucked under the arms of cyclists and displayed in the many workshop windows. And young people are drawn from all over the world to learn the luthier's craft, either as apprentices to one of the resident masters or at the Violin Making International School of Cremona, founded in 1938.
With my guide, Patricia Kaden, I'm visiting Devanneaux's workshop in Cremona's beautiful, historic town centre. The workshop is cluttered with piles of wood. Gouges, planes, scrapers and clamps hang from the walls, jars of exotic substances like myrrh, propolis and gum arabic, are arranged on shelves. The smell of cut wood, oil and lacquer hangs in the air.
Devanneaux selects three blocks of wood, which must be dried naturally for at least 10 years before being carved. He holds each piece in turn between two fingers, taps them with his knuckle and asks me to select which one I think sounds best. I choose the one with the deepest sound and, incredibly, I get it right ... but for the wrong reason.
"It's not the pitch of the sound," says Philippe. "What's important is the clarity. It has to be a clean, clear sound. The wood is the most important part in making an instrument. You have to be able to select and evaluate the quality of the wood and that comes through experience. And you have to have a good ear ... two good ears, actually."
The violins are made from spruce and maple — spruce for the top and maple for the ribs and the back. Philippe gets most of his wood from the Balkans. Patriotically, I make a case for Canadian maple, but Philippe shakes his head.
"With Canadian maple we can make syrup, not violins," he says. "The wood is too hard."
Once the wood is chosen, Philippe lays a template over the block and makes a rough cut of the shape. Small pieces of wood are glued to the base, and the ribs are fitted along its length.
The top is rough-carved, then painstakingly shaped using a variety of scrapers and planes — including one about the size of a child's pencil sharpener — until the desired smoothness is achieved. The parts — the back, ribs, top, fingerboard, tuning pegs — are assembled exclusively with glue; no fasteners (screws, nails) are used.
Philippe constantly checks the violin's thickness, flexibility and smoothness. It is meticulous, you could even say tedious, effort, but Philippe works with the good humour and passion of an artist devoted to his craft.
"Every day you learn something new ... about thicknesses, about varnish, polishing," he says. "There's always some place for improvement." It takes two months to go from block of wood to finished instrument. And the violins are expensive; Philippe charges on average 4,000 euros ($5,500 Canadian) for a professional quality instrument, while student versions go for 2,000 to 3,500 euros ($2,700 to $4,800).
But, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for.
"There are no mass-produced violins in Cremona," says Philippe. "In China, there are factories that mass-produce instruments that you can buy for $30, but the quality just isn't there. Here, everything is hand-made according to the techniques of Stradivari and the masters of the past."
The finished instruments in his shop are magnificent. Suprisingly lightweight, polished to a spectacular sheen (up to 40 coats of varnish are applied), topped with an ornately carved scroll.
"It (the scroll) has nothing to do with the sound," says Philippe, "but it's beautiful and each maker has his own way of doing it. It's like the signature of each maker."
We leave Devanneaux's shop and walk over to the town hall to visit the collection of violins at the Palazzo Comunale. En route, we stop at the Stradivari Museum, which houses a splendid set of tools and instruments — templates, carving knives, saws — all in perfect condition, and essentially identical to those in Philippe's workshop.
At the town hall, we are escorted into a room containing six violins made by the Cremonese masters Stradivari, Amati and Andrea and Giuseppe Guarneri, each suspended by wires in its own glass case. We are followed discreetly by a smiling (but very well-armed) security guard since each of the violins is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Patricia says the collection was begun in the 1960s when the town was able to raise the funds to acquire some instruments. Others were donated by private owners. The latest acquisition, Il Vesuvio, a gorgeous Stradivarius, on the back of which the wood grains resemble stripes of flame, came to the museum last November.
They are all magnificent, but these museum pieces aren't just museum pieces. As we're admiring them, a man enters and carefully removes one of the priceless instruments.
"It's very important that each violin is played," explains Patricia. "Every day, the curator of the museum comes here and plays all the instruments. That is necessary to keep them in good shape."
And it's my lucky day. By special arrangement, Antonio de Lorenzi, a musician with the local orchestra is giving a recital for a tour group. We sit in the long meeting room and he begins to play.
I had never heard a violin played solo before; the power of the sound is astonishing. The spectators seem entranced — under a sonic spell. When the pieces are done, the room is momentarily silent; applause seems superfluous. It's apparent that all present consider themselves favoured.
That evening, we sit in the piazza under the tower of Cremona's ancient cathedral chatting with Francis Kuttner, an American luthier who jokes that he "commutes" between his home in San Francisco and Cremona.
Francis talks about his love of the craft of violin-making (he doesn't play) and about the quirks of earning a living at the trade.
"There is a certain cachet about having a violin from Cremona," he says. "But most musicians — if they can afford it — want `old' Cremona, they don't want `new' Cremona."
But, economic realities aside, it is still exerts a magical, artistic magnetism, something that stirs the creative soul.
"It's the love of working with the wood," he says, "the craft of creating something so beautiful."更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
Master violin makers indulge passion for working with wood
Mar. 18, 2006. 01:00 AM
JOHN MOORE
CREMONA, Italy—Someone once said the violin is the musical instrument that most closely resembles the human voice. Philippe Devanneaux would go further than that. To him, the violin also has a soul.
Devanneaux has been crafting beautiful instruments for more than two decades since he moved from his native France to this town on the banks of the Po River, an hour's drive southeast of Milan.
"The wood is a living material," says Devanneaux, 46, who was just a child when he began fashioning musical contraptions from boxes, elastic bands and coconut shells.
"When the maker creates the violin he puts all his soul in it. He gives it a certain sound, a certain feel. After he is done, each musician who owns the violin will add his own feel to the instrument through the way he plays it. So the violin grows and develops its own character."
Violins — and their cousins, violas and cellos — are the heart of Cremona, which has a population of only 70,000 people, but has more than 120 violin makers.
It's a tradition stretching back 500 years. Cremona was the home of the masters of Italian violin-making — Andrea Amati, who is credited with creating the basic design of the modern violin in the 16th century, and Antonio Stradivari, the greatest violin maker of all.
The instruments are everywhere around town, in restaurants, on buses, tucked under the arms of cyclists and displayed in the many workshop windows. And young people are drawn from all over the world to learn the luthier's craft, either as apprentices to one of the resident masters or at the Violin Making International School of Cremona, founded in 1938.
With my guide, Patricia Kaden, I'm visiting Devanneaux's workshop in Cremona's beautiful, historic town centre. The workshop is cluttered with piles of wood. Gouges, planes, scrapers and clamps hang from the walls, jars of exotic substances like myrrh, propolis and gum arabic, are arranged on shelves. The smell of cut wood, oil and lacquer hangs in the air.
Devanneaux selects three blocks of wood, which must be dried naturally for at least 10 years before being carved. He holds each piece in turn between two fingers, taps them with his knuckle and asks me to select which one I think sounds best. I choose the one with the deepest sound and, incredibly, I get it right ... but for the wrong reason.
"It's not the pitch of the sound," says Philippe. "What's important is the clarity. It has to be a clean, clear sound. The wood is the most important part in making an instrument. You have to be able to select and evaluate the quality of the wood and that comes through experience. And you have to have a good ear ... two good ears, actually."
The violins are made from spruce and maple — spruce for the top and maple for the ribs and the back. Philippe gets most of his wood from the Balkans. Patriotically, I make a case for Canadian maple, but Philippe shakes his head.
"With Canadian maple we can make syrup, not violins," he says. "The wood is too hard."
Once the wood is chosen, Philippe lays a template over the block and makes a rough cut of the shape. Small pieces of wood are glued to the base, and the ribs are fitted along its length.
The top is rough-carved, then painstakingly shaped using a variety of scrapers and planes — including one about the size of a child's pencil sharpener — until the desired smoothness is achieved. The parts — the back, ribs, top, fingerboard, tuning pegs — are assembled exclusively with glue; no fasteners (screws, nails) are used.
Philippe constantly checks the violin's thickness, flexibility and smoothness. It is meticulous, you could even say tedious, effort, but Philippe works with the good humour and passion of an artist devoted to his craft.
"Every day you learn something new ... about thicknesses, about varnish, polishing," he says. "There's always some place for improvement." It takes two months to go from block of wood to finished instrument. And the violins are expensive; Philippe charges on average 4,000 euros ($5,500 Canadian) for a professional quality instrument, while student versions go for 2,000 to 3,500 euros ($2,700 to $4,800).
But, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for.
"There are no mass-produced violins in Cremona," says Philippe. "In China, there are factories that mass-produce instruments that you can buy for $30, but the quality just isn't there. Here, everything is hand-made according to the techniques of Stradivari and the masters of the past."
The finished instruments in his shop are magnificent. Suprisingly lightweight, polished to a spectacular sheen (up to 40 coats of varnish are applied), topped with an ornately carved scroll.
"It (the scroll) has nothing to do with the sound," says Philippe, "but it's beautiful and each maker has his own way of doing it. It's like the signature of each maker."
We leave Devanneaux's shop and walk over to the town hall to visit the collection of violins at the Palazzo Comunale. En route, we stop at the Stradivari Museum, which houses a splendid set of tools and instruments — templates, carving knives, saws — all in perfect condition, and essentially identical to those in Philippe's workshop.
At the town hall, we are escorted into a room containing six violins made by the Cremonese masters Stradivari, Amati and Andrea and Giuseppe Guarneri, each suspended by wires in its own glass case. We are followed discreetly by a smiling (but very well-armed) security guard since each of the violins is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Patricia says the collection was begun in the 1960s when the town was able to raise the funds to acquire some instruments. Others were donated by private owners. The latest acquisition, Il Vesuvio, a gorgeous Stradivarius, on the back of which the wood grains resemble stripes of flame, came to the museum last November.
They are all magnificent, but these museum pieces aren't just museum pieces. As we're admiring them, a man enters and carefully removes one of the priceless instruments.
"It's very important that each violin is played," explains Patricia. "Every day, the curator of the museum comes here and plays all the instruments. That is necessary to keep them in good shape."
And it's my lucky day. By special arrangement, Antonio de Lorenzi, a musician with the local orchestra is giving a recital for a tour group. We sit in the long meeting room and he begins to play.
I had never heard a violin played solo before; the power of the sound is astonishing. The spectators seem entranced — under a sonic spell. When the pieces are done, the room is momentarily silent; applause seems superfluous. It's apparent that all present consider themselves favoured.
That evening, we sit in the piazza under the tower of Cremona's ancient cathedral chatting with Francis Kuttner, an American luthier who jokes that he "commutes" between his home in San Francisco and Cremona.
Francis talks about his love of the craft of violin-making (he doesn't play) and about the quirks of earning a living at the trade.
"There is a certain cachet about having a violin from Cremona," he says. "But most musicians — if they can afford it — want `old' Cremona, they don't want `new' Cremona."
But, economic realities aside, it is still exerts a magical, artistic magnetism, something that stirs the creative soul.
"It's the love of working with the wood," he says, "the craft of creating something so beautiful."更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net