Learn who you are. Your level of experience and your personality are going to show in your work, and that’s the way that it should be. Don’t try to make your instruments look or sound like anyone’s but your own.…
Working at the HatchSpace
This summer and fall, I’m working every Wednesday afternoon at the HatchSpace, a woodworking cooperative in downtown Brattleboro. It is an opportunity to experience what it is like to work in a different space, one that has lots of other…
Strad, Ford, and Italy
In order to study, learn from, and react in an orderly way to all that the great violin maker Antonio Stradivari’s work has to offer, I have undertaken an annual series of 300th anniversary instruments, making copies of Strad violins…
Sharing the Craft: Ethan Brossard
Ethan Brossard, a high school senior at the Academy of Charlemont, has been spending time in the shop with me on recent Saturdays learning about the craft of violin making. Ethan is a woodworker and cellist who plays in a…
The 15” Cut-Away Viola, Revisited
In the 2006 edition of my newsletter The Scroll, I wrote about an experimental 15” viola model I was developing.
¡Santiago de Cuba!
We traveled to Santiago de Cuba with a group of 21 New England artists & musicians. Of our fellow travelers, more than half are musicians, but our group also included a printmaker, a piano technician, teachers, and a film maker.
Koff Model Violin
Robert Koff offered me encouragement in many forms, one of which was access to and insight into his Vuillaume violin. He played this violin in the Julliard Quartet for several years and he considered it the perfect instrument, with a dark chocolaty quality and plenty of power and punch. Robert’s violin was made in the Paris workshop of Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, probably around 1860.
Maggini 1610 Commission
Until recently, the work of Giovanni Paolo Maggini has not been of great interest to me. Perhaps it is the number of ill-conceived copies I’ve seen that clouded my view. Jack Harris approached me with the idea of building for…
Viola #524, 1789 Storioni
I got to know Kazuko Matsusaka and her viola, attributed to Lorenzo Storioni, thorough our involvement with Yellow Barn and Eric Rosenblith’s summer International Music Institute in Fryeburg, Maine. I had expressed admiration for the simple, straight-forward approach to design…
#695, “Steinhardt” Storioni Violin
My desire to understand what is important in a successful violin has led to special interest in successful instruments that do not follow the usual patterns. Friends in the Guarneri Quartet encouraged me to approach Arnold Steinhardt, first violin in…