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By Susan Szeliga
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Sam Zygmuntowicz, 50, the subject of John Marchese's book, "The Violin Maker," lives and works on a quiet street in Brooklyn lined with classic brownstones and townhouses. If you pass through a small front gate and climb a long, narrow flight of stairs, you come face to face with a signed photo of Isaac Stern expressing thanks for the violin Zygmuntowicz made for him (Zygmuntowicz, whose instruments sell for as much as $50,000, has also crafted instruments for Joshua Bell and the entire Emerson Quartet). The hallway opens to a salon with an old velvet settee, a few tables and chairs, dozens of plants and a grand piano with several violins sitting on top. A colorful, energetic marker drawing of a violin is taped to the wall next to French doors that lead to a workroom. Inside those doors, a huge worktable is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with pieces of wood, and if that wood gets to the worktable, chances are it'll become a prized instrument.
Zygmuntowicz spoke to NEWSWEEK's Susan Szeliga about his work and his participation in a recent physics project sponsored by the Violin Society of America that he hopes will help him understand what it is that makes a sound behave the way it does. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: How did you become a violin maker?
Sam Zygmuntowicz: As far as traditional training goes, I'm about as trained as you can get. I've worked with a lot of experienced people for a long time. So the kinds of questions that I started to have were not the questions that were being asked or really answered by traditional craftspeople.
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A lot of violin makers have what you might call an art-history approach: they look at a violin as an object—how is it made, what tools do they use, what pigment do they grind? There's a whole mystique about handwork and all that. That's one viewpoint. Then there's the viewpoint of the world at large: Stradivari [means] long-lost perfection ... unsurpassed. There's a whole mystique about that. People know that these violins are expensive and rare and unsurpassed. But very few people have any real sense of what happens in a violin, of what the violin's really all about. Which is about turning energy from a musician into sound that a listener hears. And that happens in very, very concrete ways, but very hard to see, and hard to pin down and hard to understand.
And a lot of my work is like in that book ["The Violin Maker"]: that story was about me trying to make an instrument for a guy who had a Strad and it's a very specific kind of sound. And a lot of my work is with those kinds of people.
When did you make Eugene Drucker's fiddle? And did it take you a year?
It was 2002—I think it actually took longer than that, I could check. I happen to have it here. Gene dropped it off for an adjustment.
Let's see the stingerette [a result of the unique joinery that creates a distinguishing characteristic of a Stradivari violin].
The main thing Stradivari did was just chop off an Amati corner, because [Nicolo] Amati's violins had long, extended corners that would get caught on things. So it's actually a more practical design to have a shorter corner.
This is a nice little example of an artifact of the design process that's done for a real reason. Like many things on the fiddle, people have looked at that feature a lot, but very few people, even violin makers have any idea why Stradivari bothered to do that. And the reason he bothered to do it was because otherwise you just don't get your purfling [the three- piece wood sandwich that runs along the edge of a violin] to meet up, and you have a stupid-looking clunky thing, so it was actually a very practical, workmanlike adaptation to some design thing that he wanted to do. Pretty much everything on the fiddle has some meaning of that sort.
People look at it retrospectively, from where we are now, and they don't know what thought went into creating it like that. So all you know is that it looks like that and people tell you it's good, so then you just copy it the way it is. And that's about the extent of where violin expertise in the mainstream is at, which is knowing a lot about what it looks like and doing something a lot like that. As opposed to saying, "What is the point of that little corner—why do that? And what's the purpose of the purfling?" Well, it actually reinforces the edge. It turns out that a fiddle, when it vibrates, the whole body is flexing, and so the strength of the edge turns out to be very important. The point is that every aspect of the instrument became this way for some practical, or practical/aesthetic reasons.
Let me show you my fiddles.[One is an old handmade fiddle with some unorthodox purfling and one is a factory-made fiddle.]
Even this [the old fiddle], which is a little bit eccentric, is still, at heart, essentially, except for a few little details, a very traditional violin. It's not a particularly fine violin, but who ever made it put a lot of work into it and it's nicely done so it's a fine piece of craftsmanship. What I'd say about this fiddle, which is cool, is that even something like this, which most people in the violin world would consider really eccentric, is that it's 99 percent indistinguishable from a Strad—in the same sense that they say humans are only indistinguishable from chimpanzees by 1 percent of their DNA. It's violin-shaped, it's violin-sized, it has arching like a violin, it has f-holes, it's got a scroll, it's got corners and it's got bent ribs and all these things mean that this violin could be made to sound very good.
Can you talk about the differences between the Drucker violin and my two models here—is it the sound of the wood, the varnish, the ground, what is it?
There is this idea that the sound is just this one thing and it's just not that simple. It's a system. Just compare it to a person. Is it the nervous system, or your circulation or the muscle tone, or education, or your training? If you want to reduce it to the essence of the violin, the varnish is not what makes the sound, the wood is not what makes the sound. All those things, techniques, preparations—none of those things make any sound—they're inert. What makes the sound is an object [he hits the violin] getting an impulse and releasing that impulse into the air. That's basically what it is. A person is putting a bow on it. Putting a variety of frequencies into the fiddle, and the fiddle, depending on its resonances, is releasing energy in different ways.
I can show you some images of the research project I was involved with last fall. It's a 3-D vibration study with two Strads and a Guarneri. This was with a physics laboratory at East Carolina University. This is sort of a continuation of what we're talking about. What is the aspect of the Strad that people are so interested in? And there is a real phenomenon, that musicians understand, and I understand. There is a certain feel, a certain kind of sound that is real, that exists. What is the nature of this thing that we hear that's so hard to define?
And were you trying to look at it with the 3-D imaging?
Well, that's one thing: what is the sound? And the other thing is, how does it happen? And it happens by response to moving, being displaced and coming back. Picture a drill sergeant going down a line of Marines and shoving them: some big guy barely moves, a little guy's all jangly, a guy with a bad knee would sort of buckle a little bit, a guy goes off to the right because he's a little weaker. There's a bunch of physical things. The way the varnish contributes is by changing the way wood vibrates. The way wood contributes is by vibrating in a certain way, moving in a certain way, a way in which the purfling is assimilated. The glue, the varnish, the stingerettes—it all comes down to this: how does it influence, how does it cause this object to move? And in a hundred different ways that you would never imagine.
Can you actually see it move?
Yeah! Once you see it, all of a sudden this baroque, iconic, clichéd shape, all of a sudden just becomes filled with intent and meaning and purpose in a whole different way. In order to go forward with it, in my view, you have to come to terms with its complexity. To me, it's about understanding something incredibly complex, appreciating the complexity, and then working within that complexity. The parts are all interlocked. What I want to do is shape the sound the way a sculptor shapes clay.
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