March 2012
Violin Maker's Wife: A Week of Hard Labor
March 23, 2012 01:21Post No. 6
This past week has been a whirlwind – for us both (it may not appear so thus far, but the truth is that the Violin Maker’s Wife also has a Life, i.e. work, three kids – one of whom is a teething baby - a dog, laundry, and so forth…)
In addition to finishing his sister’s viola and fixing a double bass for an orchestra, Yonatan managed to cut the four instruments according to the ribs he prepared on the forms, and to almost complete the carving – or gauging – of all four external arches (a process called in English Roughing, but I of course love the Italian name better; they call it “sgrossatura” – read sgro-sa-too-ra – with the accent on the “tu”).
As you can see in the pictures below, this is extremely hard, physical work, as the violin maker has to put all his weight behind the gauge and push through the maple and spruce wood. The shavings (trucioli, remember?) are rough indeed at the beginning of the process, then they become smaller and more curved, and finally, when the general shape of the external arch is reached and the surface needs to be smoothened, they become thinner and more paper-like.
What the pictures can’t show you is how this back-and-forth gauging movement of the man-and-chisel-duo looks like a rather beautiful dance, with the growing mountain of golden trucioli as testament of progress made. Of course there are those who use electrical tools to speed up this phase, especially when building the larger instruments, but not my Very Own Violin Maker! He loves the feel, smell and texture of the wood, and even though his hands, arms, shoulders and back hurt (who do you think is asked to massage them at the end of the day?!?), he would have it no other way than to work on every detail manually. Oh well.
Honestly, I must say that even though I have been a nature lover – and obsessive tree climber – from early childhood, I never knew there was so much to wood. At the Stradivari school in Cremona, Yonatan studied not “only” the technical aspects of making a violin (and viola and the rest of them), but also about the properties of the wood used for this purpose, and how the special trees are grown in a few select locations in northern Italy and the Balkans, in very specific conditions and under the supervision of expert rangers (yes, yes, that’s who they are!). To make a long, complex and pretty amazing story very short: the trees are intentionally grown in very harsh conditions, to make sure that they grow only slightly thicker from year to year, so that the rings in their trunks are close together, giving the resulting wood the necessary qualities of strength and flexibility. So the trees suffer harsh winters, viciously competing for light, water and soil, and we receive a material that can be shaped into a playing instrument – when it vibrates it sings.
Wow – I got a little sidetracked … back to the Quartet So now the instruments are no longer blocks of wood glued together, but are actually taking the shape of two violins, a viola and a cello. You can see that in addition to carving the external shape, the contour of each instrument is flattened, to prepare for one of the most challenging phases… but I am getting ahead of the process again.
additional pictures of the Quartet building process have just been added to the Quartet slideshow!!
'till next week!
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Violin Maker's Wife: Of Giunta And Of Trucioli
March 15, 2012 13:57Post No. 5
Well, a "Giunta" (read joon-ta) is what's called the Center Joint – that is the line that glues together both parts of an instruments' front or back. A violin may look like its wood had been bent into an arch, but actually it's carved from a block of wood that looks like a slice of pizza, created by cutting a radial slice of the huge maple and spruce trees used for this purpose. The violin-maker takes this "pizza-slice" and cuts it to two thinner slices – and then comes the part of the Giunta: the two slices are opened like two pages of a book and need to be glued together back to back in the most exact manner. To that end, each of the sides needs to be planed and shaved until they fit each other perfectly, with not a crack, not a hair of air left between them. 
Let me tell you – it is a serious challenge for young violin makers, and it takes many hours and many many wood shavings – trucioli in Italian (read troo-cho-li – now doesn't that sound so much better than 'shavings'??) to reach that exact pairing of the two sides.
The trucioli that fall off the wood are beautiful – they are thin and curved and look like waves, snails and curls, and they give off the most wonderful wooden smell….which brings me to one of our first experiences in Italy.
When we first came to Cremona, we lived in a small quaint apartment right under the roof of an old building (what the Italians call "sotto-tetto"). It had a slanting ceiling and windows that came up to our waist. It had two relatively large rooms, a very small kitchen and an un-proportionately large, tile-covered bathroom. We quickly realized Yonatan will have to set up a workshop at home and since we used the two rooms to live and sleep in, the only place left was… the bathroom, which is where he put his first workbench. Our oldest son Itamar was a little more than a year old at the time. He just started talking his first steps and loved crawling around on the sawdust-covered floor of that bathroom-turned-workshop and play with those golden, fragrant trucioli. Below you can see a typical picture from those early Italian days.
Of course by now gluing the "Giunta" has become routine, and if you are an Attentive Reader of this blog, you saw in my last post that the center joints for all four instruments are already complete, since they were really prepared before the forms were made. So this week Yonatan is working on the "roughing" – crudely carving the external arch-form of the fronts and backs of all instruments. This is really the most physical part of the entire process, seriously taxing the hands, shoulders and upper torso – and that's usually just for a single instrument! Yonatan said it's nice that this phase fell on one of the coldest weeks in the usually mild Israeli winter. This process is done with heavy gloves, but Yonatan still has painful blisters on his palms – who said it's easy to build a Quartet?!?!
We'll see how much he has managed to accomplish by next week, but for now I leave you with one of my favorite "trucioli" pictures, taken back in Italy by my sister's husband Eyal, who is a great photographer: 
Shabbat Shalom!
Post no. 4 Over the past weeks, in parallel to working on the Quartet, Yonatan has been building a new, relatively large viola with body length of 42.5 – almost a small cello… This particular viola is being built for a special person – Yonatan's sister Galia who is one of the best viola players of her field in Israel, and likes to play large violas that have a particularly large sound. Galia's new viola will also have an unusual color – golden-yellow rather than the "classical" shades of amber, brown and reddish-orange. I can't wait for the day that Galia gets up on stage with this lovely new viola that her brother built especially for her – how cool is that? Don't worry, I'll keep you posted :) So for his sister's order-made viola Yonatan designed a new model – with a so-called "large ass" (meaning a wider lower section..). After he saw how beautiful this new model looks, he decided to use it for the Quartet viola too, but since the Quartet viola will be shorter, this meant building a new form and basically starting all over again. (While a violin's measurements are very rigid and the length of its body is basically always the same, a viola is more versatile, and its length may vary from 39 cm to up to 44cm. This may sound like not much of a difference, but for viola players this is like … well, like the difference between wearing an S and an XL shirt for most of us). So when you think about the process of building a new instrument, it may appear to be a linear process – wood needs to be worked, glued, shaved, and modeled – and made into something new. But in reality, this is much more like art than it is like carpentry… you should see the look on Yonatan's face on the days when this artistic indecision is happening: he walks around the house all tangled up, all engrossed with the pros and cons of the various options. I may be trying to talk with him about my day, the kids' day at school or what to prepare for dinner, but then I can see in his eyes his mind is far far away... occupied, no doubt, with the intricate differences between a "small ass" and a "big ass" model. What chance to I stand? Until finally a decision is made, often based as much on his gut instinct (meaning experience, professionalism and intuition combined) than on plain logic. Which I guess is another reason why I find this sphere so intriguing and fascinating: you never know when an artistic consideration may come your way. Here you can see the three other instruments with ribs already glued and ready, while the viola form is still "naked". Don't worry. By next week it too will have its ribs attached – provided not too many clients come along with emergency repairs – and all four instruments will again be more or less in the same phase. We have about 9 more months to go and the quartet is beginning to take shape, but still lots and lots of challenges ahead of us – will Yonatan make it on time? I guess this week's post turned out to be a bit more technical than I had planned. Sorry about that. Still trying to find the ballance. So to make things more interesting you are invited to see Galia playing with the terrific Panic Ensemble, in a really original and beautiful clip "Spring in Your Heart". I now leave you with a last, life-altering question that will be answered next time I write: "What is a Giunta?"
Post No. 3 This time I have to begin with an apology – apparently I jumped the gun and with my excitement (about the quartet building project? This blog? Both?) I ran ahead of the actual building process… It seems that at present the "ribs" have been bent and adjusted to only the violin molds and the cello mold. The viola has been left somewhat behind since Yonatan decided to change the model for it. Why? That's for the next post… But this is actually one of the things I find most fascinating – and honestly at times most frustrating – about the violin-making process: it is just so very, very, very labor-intensive. When people walk into Yonatan's workshop, they always ask what both of us have come to call the "Classical Four Questions" (CFQs). It happens quite often because the Artisans' Compound at Kibbutz Ein Carmel, where his workshop is located among carpenters, jewelry makers, pottery makers, a glass-blower and so forth, is open to the public on the first Shabbat of every month, and draws a surprisingly substantial crowd. We are always amused by how predictable people are: young or old, women or men, they all stand there, admiring the functional disorder of the beautiful workshop, muse things over, and then ask the same, identical CFQs, usually in the very same order, as follows: (1) So how long does it take to build a hand-made violin? (2) So what wood is this made of? (3) So how much does a hand-made instrument cost? and (4) Can one make a living out of this? (To this last question which, depending on the person's tone and attitude, may sound concerned, disbelieving, condescending or just plain rude, Yonatan sometimes answers: "Actually, it would be nice if you could leave a small donation in the collection box on your way out"). As for the first question: it takes over 250 hours (net!) to build a violin or viola and about twice or even three times as much to build a cello (a double-base is a project of a whole other scale, which maybe I'll dedicate a post to write about). So yes, constructing hand-made string instruments is one of the most painstaking, exact, minute-detailed jobs I have ever come across. Of course not all violins in the market are hand-built– maybe even most of them are not. Many violins are serially made, either in factories or in mass-production workshops (where numerous people are working, each making the same piece over and over, which are then assembled into a single instrument). Many violin makers around the world spend the majority of their time (and make most of their money…) fixing and restoring instruments, as well as trading them. Of course Yonatan does that too, and enjoys the problem-solving and creative-thinking required to fix and restore instruments, as well as the ability to learn from working on a variety of instruments, some of them constructed by excellent makers. But in all honesty, his love for this profession centers on the art, the process, the magic of creating new instruments from raw blocks of wood. So by now the "ribs" – thin pieces of maple wood – have been bent, using water and a bending iron, and then fitted on the molds to create the rib cage on three of the quartet instruments. I guess now you know one of the major reasons why I will never become a violin maker - and why this is the perfect job for Yonatan - it just requires an enormous amount of patience… You can see additional pictures from the construction process in the new Quartet Presentation here:
More entries: February 2012
You can see more of his work here.
Violin Maker's Wife: The Viola that was Left Behind
March 11, 2012 13:13
So what's the deal with the viola? Why was it left behind? Well, the answer is that after having picked the model and prepared a form he had already used and liked before for the viola, Yonatan had second thoughts and finally decided to use a brand new model of his own invention.
Violin Maker's Wife: How Long Does It Take to Make a Violin?
March 1, 2012 12:59
http://www.haiviolins.com/in-progress.html.
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