Fiddling while Rome burns
Our fiddler in the South End String Band is a fiddle maker as well, meaning, he builds violins and violas and cellos. You maybe don’t run into luthiers a whole lot in your neighborhood, but down by us, we got folks who build everything from boats to banjos. I suspect there are a lot more of us than you realize, people who find it necessary to create things. I bet you only know a few, but believe me, the woods are full of them.
Our fiddle maker had quit making instruments about 15 years ago, just stopped out of the blue to pursue a career as a fireman, make a steady paycheck and support his family. At the time he had clients waiting, violins going for $10,000 and cellos for $19,000, not bad in our neck of the wilderness, the South End. I didn’t understand it, this dropping a fairly lucrative trade just when his reputation had grown to the point most of us artists would have celebrated, but then I don’t have a family so maybe it seemed strange to give up a creative career for a guaranteed wage.
A few months ago he rented a studio space, lugged in his tools and his 50 year old woods, mostly flame maple for bottoms and sides and the neck and straight grain spruce for the tops. He built a fiddle for working out the kinks after a 15 year hiatus, then he took the best wood he had and built a violin the beauty of which would knock you out same as it did us bandmates. The craftsmanship, the detailing, the wood — Stradivarius himself would have nodded his approval. And the sound, well, I’m no judge of classic instruments, but it does seem amazing. Now he’s building a cello, same exquisite workmanship, just as nice a wood selection.
I like to think there’s an irresistible urge to create in most of us, whether it be a poem or a garden or a badly made banjo, some spark that demands a bursting into flame. I meet folks all the time who say they haven’t got one artistic bone in their invertebrate body, but I don’t believe them. We might not build a Stradivarius or write the great American novel, but we humans, like God Herself, bend the world to our own imaginations and the music we make changes everything.