Entering the IU School of Music’s violin shop for the first time is like stepping into a scene from a Harry Potter book. Up the stairs of the Music Addition, a world away from the brightly lit classrooms and practice rooms downstairs, Room 453 is a magical musician’s workshop. In the sawdusty, windowless studio, violins line the walls over the work stations of a dozen students deeply intent on instruments in various stages of development. The new students are crafting their first sound posts, the small, cylindrical pieces of wood that allow the violins to be tuned. Others are sanding, gluing, or sawing. There’s a fragrance in the air reminiscent of a warm forest, pungent resin, and your grandfather’s cherry pipe tobacco.
In the center of the activity, holding court amid a small group of captivated students, is Tom Sparks, professor of string instrument technology and director of the shop. Sparks has a down-to-earth demeanor, and an obvious camaraderie with his students. As he wraps up his story to appreciative hoots of laughter, everyone disperses and returns to the work stations that they occupy three hours a day, five days a week, for a total of four semesters—or until their first violin is completed.
The violin shop, the only such accredited university program in the world—renowned among string musicians internationally for the quality of its students’ work—is one of IU’s great treasures. In the world of instrument making, graduates of the program are almost guaranteed a successful future.
“Every violin shop in the world is overworked and they don’t have enough trained help,” Sparks says.
“A student graduating from here can pretty much go anywhere in the world and find work. Believe it or not, since the day the program started, 95 percent of graduating students have gotten jobs and are still working. Sometimes they’re actually hired before they graduate.”
Fiddle-off
The violin shop became an accredited program in 1978, five years after world-famous artist-faculty members Janos Starker and Joseph Gingold started petitioning the State Board of Education. Starker said the idea for the violin shop was inspired by a 1960s visit from Kenneth Warren Sr., a violin maker from Chicago, who came to Bloomington to look over IU’s instrument collection. Warren was accompanied by Ole Dahl, a violin maker who later moved to Bloomington and taught an off-campus string instrument repair course that was a precursor to the violin shop.
“His disciple, Mr. Sparks, took over the course and expanded it to building instruments as well. He is doing a superb job in guiding students,” Starker says. “Today we have an international renaissance of instrument building, and IU is taking an important role in this adventure.”
According to Starker, the benefits of the program include serving repair needs, being able to take care of IU’s increasing instrument collection internally, and allowing graduates who end up in all parts of the world to be self-sufficient. “More and more students are creating quality instruments in a world where prices put out of reach old instruments. I, myself, own an instrument by Mr. Sparks. IU should be proud of having such a trendsetting department.”
Sparks initially learned to work on violins as a 14-year-old string player who “couldn’t afford to have the work done.” An accomplished violinist himself, he was a student at the IU violin shop the first year the class opened, was the United States Irish Fiddle Champion from 1980 to 1982, and studied visual art. He worked as a violin maker and repairer at Esty Violins, and has been a recording artist with Rounder Records. Sparks’ career as a musician ended in 1982, though, when he broke his hand sailing.
“I probably play better now than I did then, I just can’t play as long,” says Sparks, as he examines a student’s work. “I couldn’t go out and do two 45-minute sets. But I could outplay anybody in a five minute, flat-out . . .”
“Fiddle-off?” calls out a student.
“Yeah, a fiddle-off.”
The Zen of Violin Maintenance
The Zen-like focus students cultivate through making and repairing instruments, the obvious importance of preserving a cultural and musical heritage, and the acquisition of a highly marketable skill: these are just a few of the qualities that make the IU violin shop important and valuable. But part of the appeal of Sparks’ workshop is also that he makes crafting violins fun. Students chat,call out jokes and comments, and get feedback on their work from Sparks and his associate instructor, Koy Depompeo.
“I like the artistic aspect of it,” Depompeo says. He came to the program trained in instrument repair, but is currently making his first violin. Creating a violin is, he says,as artistic as painting a picture or writing a sonnet. “The classic Italian makers were very artistic. They tried to capture the human spirit in the instrument. A violin isn’t just a piece of wood; it almost has a human voice, the way it sounds—it even has a certain smell.”
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Some tools of the violin-maker’s trade |
The varnish that’s painted on the violin can contain everything from amber to lavender, at the violin maker’s discretion. Early British violin makers used tea, giving the violins a yellowish cast. No one has been able to definitively establish the secret ingredient used in Stradivarius violins; the first violin masters guarded their art with their lives.
“Tom’s secret ingredient is tobacco,” joked student Paul Martens, a jibe at Tom’s cigarette habit. Martens and Depompeo like to discuss the mystery surrounding early violin makers’ techniques, the lengths to which they went to guard their secret formulas. “Secret societies, traditions handed down through oral tradition—it’s like The Da Vinci Code,” says Martens. “Dan Brown should write about that. But then none of us would have jobs.”
Students in the violin shop are so protective of their class that they convinced Sparks to let them interview prospective students. “We had a couple who didn’t work out,” Sparks admits.
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Andy Strain, JoAnna Schöen, and James Chin with their violins. Andy, injured in 1990, says this studio, and Tom Sparks, are the best therapy. This is JoAnna’s sixth year in the studio. She had a “varnish problem” with her first violin that turned it hot pink. She since reworked it, and is now making a second one.
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Most of the students come in with some musical background, but the majority don’t have prior experience with building or repairing instruments. The first semester in the violin shop is spent learning to use tools, learning to work with very small pieces of wood, and taking apart an instrument. Some students try to hurry through learning repairs so they can make their first violin. Sparks said he had one student build his first violin in one semester: “It was horrible!”
Sparks calls out to a student who’s already finished his first violin and is still in the shop. “How long did it take you to finish your violin?” he asks. The student thinks about it. “Four years,” he says. “Four years? Man! And I gave you a good grade?”
There are hands-on encounters with world-class instruments, as well. This particular week, not one, but two Stradivarius violins have been brought to the shop by Professor Miriam Fried and renowned violinist Corey Cerovsek for repairs. “Just seeing one is pretty amazing,” said Sarah Bresnahan.
Bresnahan recently finished a master’s degree in clarinet and is studying for her performer’s diploma. She sees the violin shop as a way to retreat from the intensity of practice and performance. “You have all the practicing that goes on downstairs, and there’s just no end to it. You come up here, and there are answers—29 millimeters is 29 millimeters. This is hard, but for me it’s very relaxing.”
Throughout the class, Sparks checks work, fields phone calls, goes outside for a smoke break, and finally settles into a chair. Students approach every few minutes to show him their work.
“It’s very nice—except you’re smaller here than you are in the middle,” he tells an anxious-looking student, inspecting her sound posts. “You need to go again, you need toget some control of the plane—plus you’re a little oblong. Your 6.5 is really, really good—though it seems like you rounded it off in sanding. But you’re doing real well. Make me another one. One more and I think we’ll be fine.”
Golden Section
The instrument-making process is painstaking and precise: If even one tiny element of the instrument isn’t perfect, the sound will be off. Each step of the way, pieces are checked and rechecked for perfection.
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James Chin is working on a well-made European instrument |
The violins are crafted from Bosnian maple wood and Swiss spruce. A few years ago, after a storm hit a maple tree across from the School of Music, the class split up the wood and waxed it to use for violins.
“We’re living in the day and age of McDonald’s, and they’re learning an art form that really takes a lot of patience—two years to finish a single project,” says Sparks. “If you fail anywhere along the line, it’s devastating.” He encourages students with humor and tries to keep them relaxed. “I think I’m friends with all of my students. Just trying to keep them on track and sane is difficult in the arts. So I tell them stories. I juggle. Do card tricks for them. Keep them sane.”
During one class, Sparks announces he’s going to give a brief lesson on how sound travels. Even those who’ve seen it demonstrated many times leave their work stations and crowd around. He brandishes a metal ruler and proceeds to illustrate that there is one point on its length that yields a particular chord, and that the same principles govern how sound comes out of a violin. “The reason you have to be precise in setting up those blocks in the nodal area is so that the plates free the note,” he says. “On the violin, the sound post sits at ‘golden section,’ which is at the rise between the greatest points of amplitude, and then you’re getting a minor third two octaves above the primary tone of D.
“Have you heard this yet?” he asks a new student.
“I’ve read about it.”
“It’s stimulating. Hey, listen to this. Ready?” He thwacks the ruler and gets a loud, clear, bell tone.
“Oooh, awesome,” says the student.
Sparks laughs heartily. “Nowhere else on that ruler! That’s what’s cranking this into motion. So what you do is build a wooden section around a column of air, trying to set the column of air in motion. It’s all this big Pythagorian nightmare.”
Having Their Cake
Each time a violin is completed, the class throws a birthday party. Some students keep their first violin. Sparks said those who sell their first violin get between $3,500 and $6,000. “We had one student here sell his first violin for $10,000—that was a first,” he says.
Former violin shop student Tao Shawn Gobin spent four and a half years studying with Sparks while he worked on his associate’s degree in the violin shop and studied gospel music at the School of Music. He has since married and is working at The Old Violin Shop of Carmel in Carmel, Indiana. Even without having yet officially been awarded his degrees, Gobin had two job offers within months of starting his job search. “I learned a lot about music there,” he says. “It’s prestigious to even get accepted to the class.” When he went to his interview in Carmel, the violin he’d made in the class was his resume.
Sparks did more than teach Gobin to make instruments and rehair bows. “He’s one of those rare teachers you find who’s not just doing his job—he wants to help young students,” he says. “One student a couple of years ago dropped a really expensive neck on a cello—it was probably a $10,000 piece of wood. She went to tears and started running for the door. But he didn’t make her feel bad about it. He told her ‘it’s just a piece of wood.’ He has a passion for the student that’s rare.”
Sparks finds it amusing that people come to the violin shop from everywhere, including such far-flung locales as Korea and Germany, but that not many locals seem to know about it. “It’s never advertised, but it’s always been full of students from around the world. You tell someone in Bloomington that there’s a violin-making program in Bloomington, and they’re totally unaware of it and pretty surprised that it’s even here.”
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Andrew Henry's soundposts |
Andrew Henry, a junior viola performance major, is new to the class this semester. Henry envisions a future that includes instrument making (guitars or pre-Civil War banjo replicas) and repair. Provided he can get that first sound post just right, that is. It’s the first week of classes, and so far, Henry has made lots and lots of sound posts. He holds up two fistfuls of the small pieces of wood. “I’ve started 25 or so, probably finished about 12, and of those 12, none of them have been good.” But already, Henry sees beyond the monotony to the higher purpose of the exercise. “It’s to see how patient and meticulous you are. If you blow up after two or three days, obviously you’re not meant to stay because you won’t last.”
“I’m a fairly patient guy, but making sound post after sound post and not getting it right—I can only do so much, and then Tom sits down and makes one in five minutes,” Henry says. Does he have the patience for it? “I think so. It’s going to be a long two years, though.”
