Word: luthier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...