You see, we don’t have tons of surviving ‘real-world’ examples of instruments coming from the [...]]]>

While in London last November I visited the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit at the National Gallery and spotted a lovely painting of an angel playing a lira da braccio (credited to Napoletano). My interest was piqued.

You see, we don’t have tons of surviving ‘real-world’ examples of instruments coming from the Renaissance (or earlier), so luthiers working in this field of early music often have to model their work on paintings and sculptures rather than technical drawings. This one looked to be a pretty good example to work from.

I lucked out and found that they did have a postcard of the painting in the gift shop. My plan to ‘translate’ this period painting into a working instrument could get underway. So how did I get from the painting on the left to the viola da braccio on the right? Read on.

In nearly all musical instrument iconography, the artist gets some details very clearly rendered and other details (perhaps those he/she was less interested in, or those harder to depict) are not. This can prove troublesome to the translating luthier. In this particular painting, it’s easy to see (due to some wonky perspective) that the instrument the painter used as a model was played as a lira: The bridge is flat and enables the musician to bow chords, rather than single or double-string melodic lines. As a result the musician need never incline the bow to one side of the instrument or the other. He/she can just keep it parallel to the plane of the strings and saw away. That would probably explain the placement of the bridge near the widest point of the lower bouts of the lira–if you never have to incline the bow, it simply doesn’t matter. The bow won’t strike the edges of the soundboard because you’re always bowing ‘flat.’ I, however, wanted to make an instrument to be played as a viola da braccio, allowing the musician to play strings singly and in pairs. The bridge, then, had to be curved and allow for the bow to angle back and forth. It’s here where things started to get complicated.

Then an even larger issue arises. How big is this instrument exactly? Given the variable sizes of musician angels, and the variety of tunings for playing the music of the spheres—and the likelihood that the composition of the painting may have been more important to the artist than accuracy of scale—I elected to make the instrument based on a string length common to the modern viola. By doing so I hoped to keep it a manageable size, and to make the finger positions familiar for modern players. With this decided, it was then time to break out the posterboard, pencils, compass, French curves, rulers and erasers to draw a basic plan.

The string length gave me the foundation for the instrument to be based on. I first moved the bridge a bit ‘up,’ that is, closer to the middle of the instrument’s box for it to work for playing melodies. With that done, I could decide how much of that distance would be neck and how much would be box. Choosing what I felt was a comfortable arrangement, I then set out to draw the box and neck in the basic shape and proportions provided by the artist. Once I was satisfied with the results (signaled to me by a feeling of ‘Hey, this is starting to look about right!’), I then traced the shape of the box onto a piece of 3cm plywood to make my internal mold. I cut out the mold with my bandsaw, refined the edges with a rasp, and cut out the center to reduce its mass. With the mold ready, I prepared the end blocks (note how this instrument disposes with the corner blocks common to the violin family) and set about bending this one long rib around the mold. (I have a video of this bending process here.)

The back of the viola is not visible in the painting, but I guessed it would likely be flat. To prepare it, I first planed a piece of wood to a suitable thickness, and then traced around the edge of the ribs with a pencil and a small bolt (helping me to keep equal distance all the way round), thus designing a lip extending slightly from the box’s periphery. With the back cut out and the lip refined, I then joined the back to the ribs. I kept the mold inside during the joining to help maintain the ‘ideal’ form it ‘expressed.’

The ribs and back complete, I set my mind again to how exactly I wanted this instrument to work. Looking again at the painting, it appears the soundboard on this lira is rather flat. I believe it was probably completely so. With no need to incline the bow when playing, the bridge can be quite short (as it doesn’t need to provide bowing ‘clearance’), and such a short bridge doesn’t put much pressure on the soundboard. So, what happens when you decide to make the bridge curved? It will have to be taller for one, which adds pressure on the soundboard. (And it would have to be really quite tall indeed to allow bowing ‘clearance’ at the bridge position shown in the painting.) And thus arises a dilemma–keep the soundboard flat but thick to keep a taller, curved bridge from pushing it in (and lose some volume and resonance), or carve the soundboard, providing a ‘dome’ structure that can bear the increased pressure of a taller bridge.

I chose to carve a dome. I felt that such a soundboard was the best choice to make in terms of clarity and volume (which early music players undoubtedly needed when playing music for large social events with people talking, eating, and drinking). Moreover, I have encountered several fiddles and violas da braccio made with flat soundboards, which if they had played well previously, simply collapsed over time. The flat soundboard, not able to provide the resistance necessary to remain flat, started to cave in, and over a period of years made the instrument unplayable. I guess this begs the questions: ‘Did early luthiers make good trade in removing and replacing flat soundboards every few years for musicians? Were musicians okay with having the most crucial part of their instrument be disposable?’ Other soundboard solutions exist, I am sure; but for this prototype, I thought it best to use a system I was sure would work.

Looking at the inside of the soundboard, you can see that I also added a bass bar for reinforcement under the pressure of heavy bass strings. It also serves to transfer vibration to either end of the sound board. Additional support and vibration transfer will be done by the soundpost (or ‘anima’). Though the soundpost is not itself pictured, you can see that the box of the viola has a bar running horizontally across its back to receive the pressure from it. Without such reinforcement, the post would slowly push through or crack open the back.

With the two halves tuned and ready, I again used the pencil and bolt to design my equidistant lip for the soundboard. And after testing how well everything fit, and giving the two parts a good cleaning, I joined them (in a gluing involving about 30 clamps like that pictured above).

I simplified the neck from the painting somewhat, choosing not to make the strings pass through the neck and into a carved pegbox ‘chamber.’ My prototype simply has the strings passing over the nut and directly to the pegs, which are inserted from the back. This certainly lightens the instrument overall, and also saves some wear and tear on the gut strings, removing an additional point of friction which would fray them. The key concerns for the neck were to make a ‘handle’ comfortable for the player, and space the pegs far enough apart that tuning wouldn’t be a misery.

Having carved the neck, it remained to join the neck squarely (both longitudinally and laterally) to the box. Unlike the modern violin, earlier instruments did not have the neck secured to the box by means of a dovetail joint. Instead, the neck was glued directly to the ribs and top block, and typically secured with a nail through the block and going into the neck. This means that necks were joined to the box before soundboards (otherwise, how would you get that nail hammered in?), but with the advent of modern glue technology, a good aliphatic glue secures the neck joint brilliantly.

The rest of the process is largely a matter of cleaning, varnishing, rubbing down, varnishing again, rubbing down again, (and so on) and finally setting up, about which I feel as though I could write a four-season television drama…

I will spare you!

You can follow more work coming from my workshop by visiting me at Google+  –add me to one of your circles! I also have a page with updates and announcements on Facebook.

Edit: 30.05.2012 – a video of the viola being played at Tage Alter Musik

The full text can be found below [...]]]> I recently gave an interview for the newsletter of the Viola da Gamba Society of Great Britain, ‘The Viol.’ We spoke about my training on the job as a luthier, the act of instrument making, and even touched on the methodology of teaching and practicing luthiery.

The full text can be found below or download it as a pdf.

Matthew Farley: Viol Maker

Our occasional series featuring individual viol makers has up till now focussed on well-established names such as Jane Julier, Richard Jones and Michael Plant. By way of contrast, the following article introduces us to someone who is just starting out on his career as an instrument maker, whose name will probably be unfamiliar to most of us.

Matthew Farley was born in Tennessee in November 1974. He spent his childhood in Oklahoma, and his teens and early adulthood in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied Literature and Fine Arts at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, leaving the United States in May 2001 to pursue a career teaching English as a foreign language. He has been living in Europe (first Poland, then Italy) ever since. He exhibited for the first time in Greenwich in 2011, his last and best exhibition of the year!

Matthew's workshop at the start of the day.

How have you ended up living in Italy?

My wife, who’s Polish, was offered a position as a researcher in a laboratory in Rome, and I ‘followed’ her there. I thought, ‘Why not? The teaching qualifications that I’ve got should support us well enough over there.’ I found, however, that pay for teachers in Rome was no different than in Warsaw, despite the cost of living being much higher. Suddenly I discovered that what had been a comfortable income in Poland wouldn’t cover even the rent on our apartment in Rome. So I spent a year or a bit more teaching, feeling increasingly discontented with how little teachers were valued and compensated. There are just too many of us native English speakers in Italy for there to be much demand for us.

How did you come to start making viols?

I was teaching at an American university with a new campus in Zagarolo, out in the suburbs of Rome, and I had this student in one group who was really talkative and personable – and always with a bit of wood dust on his jacket. That was Marco Salerno. We got to talking in between classes, and I asked him what he did. Once he explained, I was really keen to see his workshop – and once I set foot in it, I knew I wanted to make instruments like him.

And was that your first foray into the world of viols and early music?

Pretty much so. I mean, music wasn’t absent from my home growing up. My sister played viola in the state youth orchestra when I was little, and my father has been an avid harmonica player for years, and me – I got interested in making music when I found an LP of Big Bill Broonzy in the trash outside my dormitory. I immediately got a guitar and started learning how to play country blues by Big Bill, Mississippi John Hurt, and guys like that – but viols and early music were something that my wife introduced me to when we were dating. And then, actually making them – that possibility had never occurred to me – ever! But there the possibility was.

My wife graciously agreed to let me start an apprenticeship with Marco, and I began working for him a few days a week. As I gained some experience and skill, my duties increased. Marco was always setting new challenges in front of me: jobs requiring more careful planning, a better eye, a more refined touch. At the same time he was helping me to plan and prepare a small workshop of my own in Rome: picking out basic tools, getting some ‘apartment-friendly’ machines, and the like.

I worked directly under him for three or so years, taking part in the construction of over one hundred instruments, and I still do some occasional piecework for him, when a bit of carving needs to be done, or some pegs need to be turned.

What language did you and Marco use to communicate?

Marco’s English was already quite good when we met, certainly much better than my Italian – even now! – so it seemed natural to work together in English, if only for safety’s sake. Sometimes matters of language would come up while we were working, like the difference between ‘used to’ and ‘get used to,’ and we might take a short break for a language lesson here and there. And Marco has a great ear for language sounds, so during those three years he adopted a lot of American pronunciations – he ‘flaps’ his t’s like I do, saying ‘ledder’ instead of the British ‘letter.’ It was funny when we were in Greenwich how many people commented on his American accent!

Do you have your own workshop now? And how about tools?

My workshop is currently located in what used to be the living room of our apartment, and during working hours it spreads out onto the terrace a bit. Since we’re up on the top floor of our building, I have a nice view of my neighbours’ terracotta-tiled rooftops, and on a good day the breeze blows so that I get a whiff of pizza or cookies in the oven of the nearby bakery. So each morning I wheel the few machines I have out onto the terrace, do the carpentry I need to do out there, and then bring the prepared pieces in so I can get to work on the actual luthiery. Inside I have my workbench, moulds, and hand tools: planes, chisels, gouges, knives, scrapers and such. Some of these I bought from retailers specialising in woodworking and luthiers’ tools, but with the internet being what it is, I was also able to find a lot of good deals on new and used tools on ebay. I got nearly all of my chisels there. In fact, my father, who’s never been very handy himself, has gotten a kind of vicarious thrill finding tools for me in online auctions. For Christmas this year he bought me more old planes than I could reasonably bring home in my luggage!

Do you have to clear up the workshop so that you can use it as a living room from time to time?

We try not to have guests over during the week so that I don’t have to do a top to bottom cleaning of the workshop at the end of each day. But we do have guests and get-togethers periodically, and I try to put everything up and away to be as inconspicuous as possible – and a lot of things simply have to go out on the terrace. Then I pray it doesn’t rain on us till the party’s over.

Where does your wood come from?

Some of it I can get from shops in Rome dealing in small pieces for hobbyist woodworkers. But for getting large quantities of spruce, maple, poplar and the like, I deal with a wood seller in the north of Italy: Rivolta. They can supply good quality wood by the pallet-load if necessary. In my workshop, I don’t have much space at all for stacking wood. I find that there’s a good amount of room for storage under our bed, though.

Do you play the viol yourself?

I do! But not very well yet, I’m afraid. I take lessons off and on from a neighbour of mine, Sabine Cassola, who lives just a couple of streets over. She’s a fine player and a very helpful teacher. And as my sense of playing the viol develops, my understanding about how the instrument can best work grows and changes, too. You know, I’d go so far as to say that with viols one really needs to be a player, at least on some basic level, to be a good maker. Marco has always explained it to me like this: viols are so much less rigorously ruled by measurement as compared to the violin family; so without all those fixed measurements and standardization to fall back on, you have to really understand how the instrument needs to work. And that’s not just true of viols, but for really all of these early music instruments – particularly when you’re basing a ‘real-world’ instrument on the information you can glean from a period painting, as we often do.

Do you make instruments other than viols?

At the moment it’s just bowed instruments like medieval fiddles and rebecs, but I also learned the basics of making plucked instruments like guitars, lutes, harps, and gitterns while I was an apprentice. As well as this, I’ve been doing some research into the early music of Poland and have gotten interested in bringing a few of their lyra-style instruments back to life. They seem to be direct descendants of the early European fiddles, much like the Calabrian lyra, and could likely get us quite close to an ‘ancient sound.’ I plan on having a go at recreating a particularly attractive one, the suka biłgorajska, sometime this year.

What do you feel about being commissioned to make specific instruments?

Commissioned instruments are both really exciting and stressful to work on. I mean, when I come to an exhibition with instruments I’ve already finished, and when a musician comes to my stand, plays an instrument and likes it, there’s this sort of ‘fortuitous coincidence’ that I happened to build the thing that they were looking for, and we can both be happy with a job well done. But the job is done -the instrument is built. Commissions, on the other hand, require me to get a handle on what the musician is ‘dreaming of,’ which can be hard for them to explain sometimes. There’s a kind of communication gap that we have to try to bridge, and that can be a little scary.

Miscommunication can be frustrating for both parties. But just the communication aspect of it can be really exciting. In the process of the commission I am entering into a kind of dialogue with the musician and we’re both learning something about the work we’re trying to do. The musician is sharing information with me about what she wants from the playing experience, and I am getting to share with her something about how instruments work in the abstract. There’s an opportunity for new ideas and new understandings to come out of that.

How about pricing – how do you price your instruments?

The first guitar I bought cost one hundred dollars and it was a pain to play. But it was a start, and my enthusiasm carried me through. Then the first good guitar I bought was a bit less than one thousand dollars. I look back on that and appreciate the fact that there are companies out there making instruments that make getting started in pursuing a musical interest financially feasible. There needs to be room in the world of viol making for something solidly in between the high-end, wait-six-years-for-it, ‘super viols,’ and the glossy but dodgy cheap junk that you sometimes run across. I’m trying to set prices that make it possible for students and enthusiasts to have a quality beginning for a reasonable price. I’d like for most players to feel free to skip the one-hundred-dollar, ‘testing-the-waters’ level and get acquainted with an instrument that works well and sounds good without the need for a long wait or a bank loan. We’ll see if I can find my niche there…For the time being the prices are quite low because I’m just now striking out on my own and I’m trying to encourage more musicians to try my instruments so that I can get more of my viols and fiddles out there in the world. That being said, my pricing is transparent. I don’t have adjustable scales based on what I think a musician can afford. I list all of my prices for my instruments on my website, along with photos and details of each model.

What qualities do you think are important if someone is to become a good instrument maker?

I’ve thought a lot about what ‘character’ was being built during my apprenticeship. I assume that there was something to do with character going on, as there was some pain involved in the process. The ‘too-long-didn’t-read’ list would be: patience and honesty. Let me explain.
In the course of building so many instruments with Marco, lots of opportunities for making mistakes came up – at the beginning because I didn’t really understand how a certain tool worked, for example. Later though, carelessness would sometimes creep in, especially at those times when the reason for following a certain procedure wasn’t clear to me, or I didn’t understand the exact ‘destination’ I was trying to reach in carving a neck or a soundboard. Then there would come the moment when Marco would give me some feedback on problems with my work. Those moments – and he was typically very diplomatic about it all – could be extremely humbling, sometimes even painful for me. I think all of us have this innate sense of being sufficiently clever and sufficiently competent in general, and it hurts us to be confronted with specific evidence to the contrary. And if you submit to being trained by a master in a skill, you have to face these moments – to speak one-to-one with your master and learn that you’ve done something wrong, that your current level of work is sub-standard. Ouch. In the first year I met a lot of such moments. I found that part of you wants to protect this sense of your competence and deny that there’s anything wrong with your work – and sometimes that part is really strong. But you have to choose between this false sense of competence, or instead submitting yourself to your master, admitting the shortcoming and learning the lesson. I think that most schooling today, at least in the States, has dispensed with this master-pupil relationship. Students assume that since they have ‘paid’ for the lesson, they really ought to have at least a passing mark. If they fail, which is less and less common nowadays, it’s because the teacher is a lunkhead, not because the student himself is incompetent. So, honesty: a luthier has to be honest with himself, admitting when he has made a mistake – not holding that belief in his own competence in higher regard than actually producing good work. That gets even trickier when you don’t have your master with you, keeping you accountable and responsible.

By patience I don’t mean this image that some have of the luthier, slowly and endlessly removing wood molecule by molecule with his file and scraper till he reaches perfection. In my book that’s not exactly luthiery – that’s drudgery. I mean patience with yourself as a craftsperson. Patience with yourself paired with honesty about your work enables you to face instances of failure as instances only, not complete and total failure. Patience gives you the ability to put a mistake aside and start again with new insight. Mistakes can be valuable, you know. It’s like Marco always used to console me, ‘Maybe this piece isn’t good for an instrument, but it’ll be good fuel for grilling sausages.’

The whole lecture is fascinating, but of particular interest to me was a clip from the questions from the [...]]]> Back in 2001 Harvard@Home and the Alumni College asked Prof. Thomas Kelly to speak to the public about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, looking into its historical context and its uniqueness among the great works of western music.

The whole lecture is fascinating, but of particular interest to me was a clip from the questions from the audience–a comparison of ‘period’ versus ‘modern’ instruments. Here Kelly covers the structural metamorphosis of the original Stradivari violin into a Stradivari that fits (and can support) a modern style of playing. Moreover, he makes a good case for why it’s good there are people looking back in search of that ‘original’ sound. According to Kelly, the famous ‘Stradivari sound,’ at least in the historical sense, is an abstraction.

Either view the clip below or download ‘The Transformation of the Violin’ as Quicktime Video (right-click and ‘save target as’). If you’d still like to know more after this short clip, the full lecture can be found here.

This video is the property of Harvard@Home and the Alumni College.