Word: luthier
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...dismay is tempered by excitement over a new generation of instrument makers who, utilizing research by Nagyvary and others, are producing violins, cellos and violas almost indistinguishable in quality from a Stradivarius. Lin himself often plays on a violin made by a Brooklyn-based luthier, Sam Zygmuntowicz. Idaho-based cello maker Christopher Dungey has made instruments for the world's top cellists. Lin says, "We don't know whether the modern instruments we're using will be, after 100 years of vigorous playing, equal to Stradivarius. They already sound pretty darn good right...
...Woodshop Walter” has only been at Harvard for seven months, he has been a Cambridge local for quite a while. “I was a street musician in 1979 in Harvard Square,” said Stanul, an accomplished, self-taught classical guitarist and luthier (one who makes stringed instruments...
...says his two careers in listening have always run parallel to one another. After graduating from SUNY Binghamton with a joint degree in philosophy and psychology, he built furniture while serving in a New York hospital’s psychiatric ward. A chance encounter with a 70-year-old luthier (guitar maker) in rural Maine inspired him to begin his first apprenticeship crafting violins. In 1988, he opened his own shop in Cambridge and began studying part-time to become a psychologist, graduating from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology in 1998. “Violinmaking holds up the angst...
...clash of opinion reverberates among the luthiers, or violinmakers, as well. Some figure that Stradivari got his wood from as far away as Germany, but most agree that the supple spruce in the tops of his fiddles came from the southern slopes of the Alps, and the curly maple in the bottom and sides from the eastern shores of the Adriatic. To find identical cuts of wood, U.S. Luthier Fernando Sacconi scavenged demolition sites in Italy last summer and salvaged planking from 400-year-old houses. To duplicate the seasoned willow that Stradivari used for braces, one U.S. luthier uses...
...director of the Mittenwald violin school in Germany. "Delightful as the Stradivari varnish might be to look at," he says, "it hardly contributes anything to the sound." Time, say the experts, is far more important. "A man reaches his prime around 40, a violin at about 100," explains Cremona Luthier Pietro Sgarabotto. Thus many luthiers insist that old violins are better only because they are older, that a century from now the fiddles being made by such modern masters as Sacconi, and Carl Becker Sr. of Chicago, will equal the fabled Strad. That, of course, remains to be heard...