Free The Violin Maker by John Marchese Page A

master a fiddle on which he’d done a complicated restoration. “He was the first real violin maker I’d ever met, and he was nice enough to talk to me,” Sam remembers. “He just looked at my violin and said, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as it could be.’” After Sam finished his first year at the violin school in Salt Lake City, he was offered a job in Becker’s shop. Sam went to work with Becker for a summer, when, following his own tradition, Becker moved out to a Wisconsin farm and focused on making violins.
    “It was a really intense experience for me,” Sam remembers. “In Wisconsin it was total immersion and human contact deprivation, except for the Becker family. I lived in a cabin in the woods without water or plumbing. Washed in a lake. Carried my water from the next piece of property.
    “It was great. Carl was a great teacher—a very clear, analytical mind. Quite a bit of what I still do is based on what I learned there.” Sam thought about leaving school and staying with Becker. “But,” he says, “it’s a family business, and I knew I would never be a Becker.” He returned to Salt Lake City to finish his degree. Though he is careful not to say anything bad about the school’s director, Peter Paul Prier, he makes it clear that they were not always on good terms. “It was kind of frustrating,” he says of his time in Salt Lake. “I never had anyone really engage me in a challenging way.” Another Salt Lake student remembers that on graduation day, Sam stood up and sang the song “My Way.”
    It was through the influence of Carl Becker and then René Morel that Zygmuntowicz became firmly convinced that before he could become himself, he would have to learn the skills required to uphold the tradition of his craft.
    One day, while we sat in his shop, Sam recalled something Carl Becker had told him during that summer more than twenty years ago, and he suddenly veered off the specific subject—which was the arching of a violin belly—and said, “There’s a great essay by T. S. Eliot called ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ I thinkthat’s a great essay. One of his points is that if you’re really an incredibly original thinker then it’s great that you make up totally new things. But the tradition is a guarantee that the average person doing average things is going to work at a good level. A certain level of knowledge has been accumulated, and the difference between us and our predecessors is that we have more to draw upon. And part of what we draw upon is them. Their experience is now part of our knowledge base.”
    The Hill brothers espoused this idea many years before Sam Zygmuntowicz—or Eliot for that matter. Stradivari, they wrote, “was in touch with the outcome of well-thought-out experiments, and the traditions which had been evolved and transmitted by the different makers during this long period…. Each generation added its link to the chain, and Stradivari finally welded the whole together.”
    In the many hours I would spend with Sam watching him work, there was plenty of time where the only sound in the room was the relentless raspy scratch as he scraped at tone wood with one of his tools. But this was one of the times when he was building a head of steam to talk.
    “There’s a beauty to traditional systems like violin making,” he said. “If you just take a beautiful fiddle as a model and try to make one like that, you will hit most of the important points—automatically. You don’t really need to understand it, if you stay within the established system.
    “To some extent that’s the way it was done by the old guys. Since they had been such a part of an ongoing tradition and had been working for a number of generationsin a similar style and living in the same area where there was direct transmission from one craftsman to another, it was a reasonable assumption that the accumulated experience was onto something.
    “You could safely say that the violin has