The Violin Maker (16 page)

“You learn about yourself over time,” he told me. “And I think this whole experience convinced me that I may just be a Strad player after all.”

In his workshop in Brooklyn, Sam Zygmuntowicz came to accept that with this one fiddle he’d lost the contest for a violinist’s soul. “Gene’s really tried to take to my violin. But it’s like a demon that he wrestles with. He hasn’t fallen in love with it.”

Sam did what craftsmen do—went back to work. He had years’ worth of commissions to fulfill, and when he sat at his workbench, each day was another step in trying to better understand the complicated dynamics of those magical wooden boxes he built. He was coming to believe that the best innovation in his trade might simply be a fuller and more clear-sighted understanding of the tradition he’d inherited.

“Not all Strads are great, but there really is something to these old fiddles,” Sam said. “Violinists on Gene’s level have the most highly calibrated ears and hands on earth, and there’s a consensus feeling that there’s
something
in there. And you’re really not going to go forward by denying it.

“There are very, very subtle differences between a Strad and ordinary violins.”

Not many people in the business think Sam Zygmuntowicz makes merely ordinary violins. He might be as close as any living luthier to understanding what those subtle differences are and, most importantly, making them disappear. So he keeps working, long removed from those days when some guys in a little town in Lombardy had gotten things awfully right. Here it is, the twenty-first century, Brooklyn, and with every measurement he
makes, every cut and scrape, the old guy looms over his shoulder.

In the end, the violin maker told me, “Stradivari and I have a complicated and intimate relationship. I’m willing to yield ground—somewhat graciously—to Strad. For now.”

I
n the fall of 2003 and spring of 2004, as it neared two years since Gene had received his new violin, the Emerson Quartet descended into an ornate theater at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in the upper reaches of Manhattan to record the music of Felix Mendelssohn. It was another of the comprehensive and definitive projects for which the quartet had become known, for it would include all seven of the nineteenth-century German prodigy’s full string quartets, a few shorter pieces for four fiddles, and, as a bonus, the well-known Octet, masterfully written by Mendelssohn when he was just sixteen years old.

Naturally, there was a question of how the Emerson
Quartet
would go about recording the Mendelssohn
Octet
. In an unusual twist, the group decided to perform all eight parts themselves, using the technique called over tracking, where parts are recorded separately and then combined onto the final finished track. The technique is quite common in popular music but virtually unheard of, and somewhat frowned upon, in classical music recording. To add more spin, the Emerson chose to use four old Italian instruments for half of the parts and four Sam Zygmuntowicz instruments for the other half. Since the Zygmuntowicz Drucker fiddle had come into the quartet, violist Larry Dutton had been won over and commissioned Sam to build him a new instrument, an altered version of his 1796 viola built by the Milanese maker named Pietro Giovanni Mantegazza.

Considering their track record, few would question the musical seriousness of the Emerson, though some critics would call the Octet concept something of a stunt. When I heard about the project it seemed to me a playful volley in the continuing game of comparing old instruments to new. The musicians vowed to never reveal publicly which parts were played on which instruments. Would listeners be able to tell?

All of this “seemed like a wild yet intriguing idea,” Gene Drucker would write in liner notes published with the recording, which would win the group another Grammy. As the quartet was nearing completion of the Octet recording, Gene invited me to come and watch a session.

Whatever wildness had originally struck the musicians when they’d had this idea, by that point they had
settled into a more mundane workaday professionalism. The record label had commissioned a video to be made of the Octet recording, and as I watched it later, the players seem downright giddy with excitement as they listen to playbacks of the Emerson Quartet playing with the Emerson Quartet. On the day I visited they were doing touch-ups of shorter sections, and the breaks to hear playbacks were brief and to the point. During a longer break for lunch, no one mentioned music at all; the talk centered on travel arrangements for an upcoming tour and future bookings.

When the musicians went back to work after lunch, settling into chairs on the microphone-cluttered stage of the theater, I sat in a backstage chamber with their producer and recording engineer, Da-Hong Seetoo, in front of a bank of computers that he had built himself and a large monitor and keyboard that served as his control panel. He’d win a Grammy Award for this project, too. Da-Hong, who studied at Juilliard and is an excellent violinist, handed me a musical score covered with highlighted passages, designating the parts that each musician would play.

In a live performance, each player would stay on one part for the duration—second violin, say. But for these special recording conditions, the Emerson had deconstructed the Octet, and parts were mixed and matched for each “take” of the recording to make the music flow better.

When Da-Hong would punch the “record” button and the live quartet would join the four instruments
already recorded, the sound in the control room was full and solid and wonderfully exciting. I followed the score closely. Try as I might, I could not even guess which instrument was being used, a Zygmuntowicz or a Cremonese masterwork. Later, Gene all but verified for me which instrument he’d used for the first violin part. I won’t reveal the secret, but I can say that though I have listened to the recording dozens of times, I still can’t tell the difference.

This just seemed to accentuate some misgivings I was having at this time. As I tried to make sense of my long journey exploring the world of violins, I had to play a variation of the game Sam Zygmuntowicz liked to start with his colleagues in Oberlin; I had to ask myself,
“What have I really learned?”

My first answer was always, “What a strange world it is.”

I suppose that’s what happens to anyone who tries to understand magic. Once its techniques are known and observed a lot of the magic goes away. After all the hours I’d spent watching Sam cut and carve the Drucker fiddle, and now, hearing it played marvelously alongside a Stradivari and a Guarneri del Gesù that was being used by Phil Setzer, I could appreciate why the old guys’ violins were so revered: they sounded great. But so did the new Zygmuntowicz. At least to my ears.

During one break in the recording session, I was sitting in the control room chatting with Phil Setzer. While he talked, he absentmindedly cradled and stroked the violin he was playing that day.

Because he used his Zygmuntowicz violin almost exclu
sively, Setzer had to borrow an old fiddle for this project, and he’d been able to use one belonging to David Fulton, who is a computer software millionaire and in recent years has amassed one of the best collections of violins in the world, many of which he lends to top performers. Fulton had lent Setzer the favorite fiddle of the late Isaac Stern, the 1737 Guarneri del Gesù known as the Panette.

There we were, sitting on folding chairs in a rather dingy basement room. Setzer pushed the fiddle in my direction and asked, “Have you ever held anything worth five million dollars?” He let my fingers grasp the del Gesù for a brief moment and then pulled the violin back with a comic flourish. I have listened to the sections of the finished Octet recording where I know Setzer is using the del Gesù, and, once again, I cannot pinpoint a real difference, let alone a $4.975 million difference.

I understood Sam’s position that it was futile to keep questioning whether the old instruments really were better—accept the fact and keep working. But in the final analysis of what I’d learned about new fiddles and old fiddles and the violinists who played them, I once again found that Sir James Beament seemed to get it right. In the last chapter of
The Violin Explained
he concluded that it was simply the prime market force of supply and demand that determined the astronomical prices paid for the famous old guys’ violins. However, Beament wrote, “They do not make any different sound, and no audience can tell what instrument is being played. But if a player thinks he plays better on such an instrument, he will.” And, “audiences are even more susceptible to suggestion
than players.” That’s not going to change anytime soon.

In the year after he finished the violin for Gene Drucker, Sam went on filling his various commissions. Then, in May of 2003, the estate of Isaac Stern put up for sale the two del Gesù copies Sam had built for the Maestro. The sale was handled by a new online auction house named for the great hunter of violins, Tarisio. Sam’s copy of Stern’s Panette sold for $130,000, which was a record price for an instrument crafted by a living violin maker.

In the weeks and months after that auction, Sam dealt nearly constantly with calls for new commissions. He raised his price for a new fiddle to more than $40,000. Despite that (or maybe because of that), his waiting list just kept getting longer. Soon, it would include two of the most heralded strings players of our time. One was superstar violinist Joshua Bell, who played on a Stradivari known as the Gibson ex Huberman, a fiddle whose history was picaresque, and included going missing for decades after being stolen from backstage at Carnegie Hall. The other was Yo-Yo Ma, who has lifetime possession (on loan from an anonymous owner) of one of the most revered instruments in the world, the cello known as the Davidov. It had previously been used by Jacqueline du Pré.

“It happens that a number of my clients own Strads,” Sam told me. “They’re coming to me for something very specific. Unfortunately—though I’m not really complaining—that sets the bar a little higher.”

Before finishing this book, I joined Sam for one last time in Oberlin. He’d stopped attending the workshop dedicated to violin making and had switched to a weeklong gathering of researchers in violin acoustics that included scientists and more technically minded violin makers. Sam said he felt he’d learned about as much as he could about building the box from his violin making colleagues; he was now most excited about understanding the science underlying how the boxes vibrated. “The key to innovation,” he told me, “is more knowledge.” But even the scientists were still trying to discover the “secrets” of Stradivari. Not long before this, a climatologist from Columbia University and a dendrochronologist from the University of Tennessee (one of the men who’d been part of the tree ring circus dispute over the authenticity of the Messiah) published a paper speculating that the wood Stradivari used in his violins was especially strong because it grew during a peculiar 70-year climatological period known as the Maunder Minimum, or “little Ice Age,” when colder weather would have made trees grow slower and denser.

Nobody mentioned that discovery in the few days I spent sitting in on the acoustics workshops at Oberlin. Most of the information presented was rather opaque—PowerPoint presentations full of charts and equations. Luckily, like the violin makers I’d first met here in Ohio, the acoustics group held a friendly cocktail hour and dinner and then most people headed back to the workshop for more informal, at-ease evening sessions. I’d been in these workshop rooms before. It was the same building where on a hot night several years ago, a violin maker had introduced me to the notion of the magical box. This
time, things were different. The centers of attention this night were acoustic testing machines that could record a spectrum of sound output from a fiddle that was carefully positioned before a microphone and tapped on the bridge with a little hammer. Compared to this, the violin making workshop had indeed seemed like a bunch of old Geppettos carving away. Now the rooms had the look and feel of a laboratory.

Late that night Sam took me to his workbench and showed me an instrument he’d created for testing. “Here’s Gluey,” he said, holding up the violin. It was a cheap factory-made fiddle that he’d taken apart, scraping the belly and back as thin as he would ever dare. He put in a bass-bar, gave the fiddle some varnish, and set up the strings and sound post for a professional player. Then he made a bunch of veneerlike patches in various sizes that he could stick on and pull off the belly and back as he wished. The purpose was to test how changing thicknesses in various places affected the vibration of the top and back plates and how that altered the sound. Though much of the experimentation was recorded the old-fashioned way—using unreliable ears—Sam also had built his own contraption, which measured the sound spectrum created by plucking one of the strings. The results are recorded by special acoustics software on his laptop computer.

Over the next few hours Sam talked and talked and tested and tested. Time seemed to stop for him, and I got more and more tired. He said things like: “We’ve gone from a static approach to a dynamic approach. Violins
aren’t static; they’re changing all the time. Every part is moving.” At one point he pulled out his laptop and showed me a three-dimensional “movie” of a violin vibrating, complete with air being pushed out of the f-holes.

“Isn’t this cool?” Sam asked. “What’s important is what’s invisible, but I think technology will help us see the invisible.”

Whether he was right, or whether he would ever realize his notions, or whether that will help him make fiddles better than those of the old guys, I don’t know. But I finally understood then that I had been given a window into a room that few of us ever see in the modern world. What I’d witnessed in his workshop was craft; what I was seeing tonight seemed to be the true soul of craftsmanship. Sam was here, essentially, on vacation. He’d been in the workshops since early morning and it was approaching midnight. As the great sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in his study of work in the book
White Collar
, “The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living…. There is no split of work and play.” Not only was Sam Zygmuntowicz a very successful violin maker, but he was also a lucky guy.

I had been playing the trumpet a lot around this time, and one job I got was to perform in the backup band for a variety show. This was not your run-of-the-mill variety show but one produced, directed, and largely starring priests from the diocese of Scranton, my hometown, where I’d played at the funeral of the governor and heard
the young violinist play Irving Berlin, and, for all intents, started on this whole project.

For this show, there was only one short and frighteningly disorganized rehearsal in the late afternoon before the first performance. In the run-through of one number, a priest with a very good voice sang Charlie Chaplin’s song “Smile,” accompanied by an accomplished pianist, who happened also to be a monsignor. After the first time through the lyrics they asked me to play a short solo but said I wouldn’t have to play it during the actual show.

The night of the performance, a young violinist showed up to play that solo—the same young violinist who’d played “How Deep Is the Ocean” in church and spun a web of sound that enveloped hundreds of mourners and made them hold their breath. He wasn’t quite so young now; he’d gone through a conservatory and was starting his career. He played beautifully, infusing Chaplin’s song with more sophistication and an even richer sound than he’d achieved with Irving Berlin’s tune. The odds were against him: the show was in a big, sterile auditorium, with such acts as a priest doing ethnic jokes and others lip-synching and dancing to the disco hit “YMCA,” but once again, the violinist reached the heights of poignancy.