A couple weeks ago I had to drop the kid off at a Dungeons & Dragons game down south, and since it was more or less on the way, I dropped in to visit the (literally) world-famous
Gryphon Stringed Instruments. After a delightful hour there, I stopped by to visit a violin maker/repairer nearby, Jerry, before heading home. He was writing a song about his friends in New England he'd visited over the summer, and we chatted about that and my violin interests, and he had me try a violin and bow he was selling: Chinese, but by a Chinese shop he had advised and trained. He said it had been played for a while by a youth orchestra musician, whose teachers/conductors--ironically, of Chinese background themselves--banned Chinese instruments. That's a pretty big hammer for that problem, because there's no shortage of good-to-amazing instruments coming out of China now, and no shortage of bad-to-middling instruments coming from elsewhere, like Romania and Bulgaria.
I see where they're coming from: as with all things made in China, the secret to high quality is developing relationships with makers who know you will pay for it. A friend of mine who insists on running his own email server once discovered he was getting a lot of spam from Turkey, and realized that he didn't know anyone in or near Turkey and could reasonably expect not to get valid email from Turkey, and just black-holed all of Turkey from his email server. That's a lot more effective than banning Chinese violins, though.
This particular Chinese violin was radically different than my rental (which another luthier had pegged as Romanian, speaking of middling instruments). It was light and subtle; to get a good sound out of it, I had to play better, and it rewarded my better playing. Next to it, my rental felt like the tank it was, built with its freedom to resonate bounded by its ability to withstand being rented out to beginning (and often young) violinists. Jerry said he'd picked out the bow, a $200 carbon-fiber number, to match the violin, and in fact it did sound better with that bow than with my own. The violin felt so much lighter, the bow felt so much heavier.
Except I got out the kitchen scale, and the violins weighed the same, and the bows weighed the same. It was weird. The weight is just distributed around differently. Bows are the obvious cases, there: professionals can spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a bow, and presumably they would be happy to fritter away that money on food and rent if they didn't feel like it helped their music. It's a stick! But it's the
right stick, with the weight and the springiness distributed all just so.
This kind of "home trial" is routine with stringed instruments, and as far as I know is almost unique in retail. Anyplace you'd want to buy a violin online from has a 7-day or more return policy, from
SHAR or
Fiddlershop down to
this random guy who's so far out in the sticks of Illinois that's he's outside of St. Louis. You want that assurance even more for expensive instruments, of course--bear in mind that "expensive" in violins starts at like $9,000--at the same time that musicians are increasingly less likely to be able to float the cost on their credit card. So you give them an ID and a deposit or whatever, and you borrow the thing to try it out in your everyday surroundings.
Jerry may or may not have been sober that afternoon, but it was also a $1,200 setup he was offering at the "New England discount" price of $900, so he didn't look at an ID or anything, just had me write my name and address down. He said he didn't think I'd want to bring it back, so obviously that instrument was named the Foster Puppy Violin.
It was not quite the right violin for me, nor a great time to be spending $900, so I did bring it back, but I was struck by the experience and I decided to upgrade to the third and final tier of rental from the place I've been renting from.
Last weekend I went out to do that, but I decided to check out another, perhaps more obviously sober, luthier in the vicinity. He had photos of stunning instruments on his website--which is rad, most people don't bother--and no prices, which is common and doesn't mean much, but still feels ominous. I played a few old-ish violins in the $1200-2000 range, German and Czech, and they were
so different. Instruments below $900 or so aren't usually very distinctive, but these were. One was full and rich, one was bright and sharp, one seemed sort of mysterious but wasn't what I wanted. The one I liked was a German violin from 1889 or so, and I suspect if I were ready to spend $1800, I could have taken it home happy. It may still be there when the time comes. There are so, so, so many violins.
In the 1800s, as Europe and North America industrialized, the violin-making centers in France and Germany stepped up production of what are called "trade" violins: imported into the U.S. and sold through stores and catalogs like Lyon & Healy or William Lewis & Son. (I don't know why Italy lost out on this trend.) They came at all levels of finish and quality and wood, but in particular many of them were built with the fronts and backs too thick, because it was cheaper to mass-produce them that way.
Now, 120 years later, they're still too thick, but now they're made of 150-year old high-quality European wood, so there's a long-running side business in taking these violins, which originally sound kind of muted and boring, taking them apart (which violins are meant for), and "re-graduating" or "re-voicing" them, carving and sanding away the overly thick plates so they can resonate. This is a specialized form of wood-carving, and you have to know what you're doing, but if you have the skills and motivation, you can buy an old German violin for a few hundred dollars, re-graduate it, and maybe sell it for a few thousand. The 19th-century charmer I played is one of these, discounted because of a
particularly tricky repair that automatically devalues the instrument by 40-60%. (The luthier said some people seek them out for that reason.)
Someday.
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