Free The Violin Maker by John Marchese Page B

been resistant to innovation,” he said. “There’s a funny chapter in Heron-Allen’s book that I think is called ‘The Violin, Its Variants and Vulgarities.’ It lists all kinds of things, like a porcelain violin and a fiddle with a gramophone horn coming out of it, a trapezoid violin—things like that.
    “People often ask the question of why the violin hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. The implication is that it would somehow be better and more natural if it did. But why? If you look at natural forms they’re quite resistant to change. Most mutations die out. People often ask why there haven’t been improvements in violins. Well there have, but most people don’t know enough to understand. There have been huge changes, but the basic chassis looks the same.” He had stopped working on his fiddle. It turned out he was just getting started. “This brings me to a tirade,” he warned.
    “If I may be so obnoxious as to say so—violin making is a kind of un-American activity. It goes against one of our fundamental beliefs, which is that things always get better and the new replaces the old— Progress.
    “There is really no good answer to why people still play music from three hundred years ago. But to the people who do it and who like listening to it—they would ask, ‘Why would you play anything else?’
    “The other thing is that violin making has been immune to mechanization and standardization. There havealways been a lot of articles that start something like this: ‘For three hundred years the secret of Stradivari had eluded violin makers. Now professor so and so at the university of so and so may have found the answer….’
    “The reason this is appealing as a story is that it’s the American way. There must be a trick. It’s like the secret of vulcanizing rubber is to add sulfur to the rubber and, Eureka! And the guy who patented the process became a millionaire. An enterprising guy without the wool pulled over his eyes sees to the heart of the matter and finds the trick, patents it, and cashes out.
    “It’s a very foreign idea that violin making is not all that mysterious, but it is one of those things where the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago. The requirements haven’t changed, and therefore the results haven’t changed and therefore it’s a very complex custom that is only learned through long application and a great deal of knowledge. It’s not arcane knowledge; it’s something any guy can learn— if you spend thirty years doing it.
    “At the heart of all those articles is the idea that someone is going to figure out the secret and then they’ll be able to make millions of violins that are affordable, instead of those really expensive violins that people pay lots of money for and—the implication is—are not really worth it. Once they find the trick they’ll be able to mass-produce them. That’s the unspoken thought behind that.” Then, Sam picked up his knife, started cutting the fiddle again, and was quiet for a long while.
     
    It seems that almost every aspect of violin making has its parallel in violin playing . Though there are always new prodigies popping up, no one who loves classical music would argue too strongly against the idea that, as Sam said about his craft, “the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago.”
    Gene Drucker had the advantage of growing up in a musical household and essentially followed his father into the same trade—a tradition that was quite common among the great violin makers. But Drucker will tell you that his strongest musical influence was not his father, but his private study with Oscar Shumsky. Shumsky was the last student of Leopold Aüer, a Hungarian born in the mid–nineteenth century, who had a brilliant musical career in czarist Russia. Tchaikovsky wrote his only violin concerto for Aüer and planned to dedicate it to him. In 1918, after the Bolshevik revolution, the violinist came to