Stradivari’s Heirs on Prospect Street

By Tom Rieke

Ann Arbor Observer, July 1989

   “About six weeks ago, “says Joe Curtin, “a friend called from Italy. He said we should call Scotland about a huge old curly maple tree that had fallen in a national park.” Curtin and his violin-making partner, Gregg Alf, wasted no time. They telephoned a man in Scotland, who confirmed that the tree was worth investigating. So Curtin called his travel agent.
   “It was a wonderful trip1” he explains. “This guy in Scotland really knows trees, and he has a great appreciation for what we’re trying to do. He even convinced me that I was wrong. I’ve always thought that beautiful old trees were sacred, that they should be preserved. No, he says, they should be cut down before they get rotten on the inside, and new trees should be planted. He’s right. Otherwise, how will there be any good wood for violin makers two hundred years from now?
   “I can’t tell you his name, or exactly where he is,” Curtin adds, dabbing a delicate drop of varnish onto the back of a reddish-brown violin. “If I did, other makers would find him, and we might lose a great source of beautiful wood.”
   Curtin leans toward the warm spring sunlight streaming through the wide second-story window net tot his workbench, cradling the violin in his left arm. He is applying finishing touches before the instrument leaves for Minneapolis, via Federal Express, later in the day. “This one is going to a young player who just joined the New American Chamber orchestra,” he says, “she’s starting a concert tour with them in two weeks.
   Since they arrived in Ann Arbor in 1985, after studying violin making in Cremona, Italy. Curtin, thirty-six and Alf, thirty-two, have become know as two of the best violin craftsmen in North America. Working in a remolded house on Prospect Street, they produce a mere fifteen violins a year, each meticulously crafted to reproduce the sound and look of great antique instruments. A single Curtin 7 Alf instrument costs $10,000.
   The day before, Curtin says, they shipped two violins to Norway. The two instruments nearing completion on their workbenches, a violin and a viola, were commissioned by members of the Berlin Philharmonic. But today, as loud rock music from a house across the street floats through the open window, Curtin is more excited about Curtin & Alf raw materials than its end product.
   Curtin spent a full week in Scotland, studying the downed tree, supervising the sawmill that cut the lower part of the trunk into sections one meter long, and arranging for the sections to be shipped to Ann Arbor. When the wood arrives, it will be stored and cured in the attic above the Curtin 7 Alf workshop.
   “This was a real find,” Curtin says. “A good piece of wood for a violin back can cost as much as five hundred dollars. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, either, but we got enough wood for fifty backs in Scotland, for bout eight dollars apiece.”
   Slim and soft-spoken, with  unruly brown hair tat sometimes gets in his way as he buffs the new violin in his hands, Curtin seems more like an absent-minded graduate student than a globe-trotting businessman with trade secrets to protect. He wears a gray sweater and jeans and whistles violin-concerto melodies. On the wall behind him is a huge framed poster advertising a festival in Cremona, sponsored by Negroni salami, to observe the 250th anniversary of Antonio Stradivari’s death.
   A few minutes later, Gregg Alf rushes in from a meeting and takes his place at the workbench across the room. He has straight brown hair and a carefully trimmed beard, and in a business suit, he could pass for a young Ann Arbor lawyer. But he wears jeans and an Oxfam T-shirt (“Peace and Development") to work. As he sets up a tool to shave the pegs that old an instrument’s strings taut, he seems impatient, even anxious, about being behind schedule on the viola that is to be sent to Berlin in a few weeks.
   “These pegs,” he says, “were made by a master peg carver in England, probably the best carver in the world. A full set, with all the gold fittings, costs about five hindered dollars in today’s exchange rates. We get them by airmail and fit them to each instrument.’
   Alf plugs the pegs into the tool and turns them slowly by hand against razor-sharp blades. Every few seconds, he checks their fit in the holes drilled for them in the viola’s neck. When the shaving gets tough, he coats the pegs with water.” You know Joe,” he says to Curtin,” water really helps, but it makes the pegs too slippery.”
   Exchanging anecdotes and information, surrounded by the tool of their craft (drawings, sketches, tiny brass planes, scrapers, clamps, brushes, varnishes, and polishes), the two men seem right at home. In fact, they are. In addition to the workshop and wood storage attic, the partners’ completely refurbished old house contains separate bed—m-study suites for each of them, a business office in the first-floor living room, and a large well-equipped kitchen. “We both love to cook,” Alf Says, “mostly Italian food.”
   Every Sunday morning, the two prepare brunch for about eight to ten guests. “There’s a group f regulars-artists, writers and musicians,” Alf says, “and usually a few newcomers or visitors from out of town.” During the concert season, they sometimes entertain much larger groups. The entire 130-member Montreal Symphony Orchestra was invited over a few months ago fro home-cooked food after their performance in Hill Auditorium.
   “It was quite an event,” says Ken Fisher, president of the University Musical Society, which sponsored the concert. “Two huge buses were parked outside Curtin & Alf on Prospect Street, and the musicians were just amazed that someone would entertain all of them at home.”
   For Curtin and Alf, receptions for musicians are a natural part of their marketing strategy. To Fisher, they are another opportunity to “show our visiting artists what a special place Ann Arbor is. We are very fortunate to have such outstanding instrument makers here. They are a great community resource.”
   Though they have been in Ann Arbor for four and a half years, Joe Curtin and Gregg Alf still seem a little surprised to be here. “I never thought I’d end up in a college town in Michigan,” Curtin says, “Paris or New York, maybe, but Ann Arbor?”
   The two partners have remarkably similar pedigrees. When they were teenagers (Curtin in Toronto, Alf in Washington, D.C., suburbs), both were very promising string players. Both studied for music performance degrees in college but also loved to make things, and each realized that he was more interested in building instruments than playing music. So they went to Europe-Alf to Cremona in 1976, to study at the International School for Violin Makers, and Curtin to Paris, in 1979. A few years later, they met at a violin conference. Through conversation and correspondence they learned that their approaches to the craft were complimentary, and before long Curtin joined Alf in Cremona.
   The violin was invented in Cremona, and most music historians believe that it was perfected there by Stradivari and the Amati and Guarneri families 250 to 300 years ago. Players, makers, and connoisseurs agree that the best violins from that era are still superior to any instrument produced since.
   The original Curtin & Alf was “just down the street from Stradivari’s old workshop,” Alf says. There, as part of a  contemporary community of 150 violin makers, the partners studied the masters’ techniques, researched woods and wood treatment methods, and refined their skills. But eventually, Alf says, “there was really nothing more we could learn in Cremona. Our ideas had outgrown what was gong on there, and we knew that the best market for out work was in the United States.”
   In 1984, they bought “fly around America” tickets on republic Airlines and visited several urban cultural centers, including Chicago, where an instrument dealer wanted them to join his business. Then they flew to Detroit. Bob Culver, a U-M music professor, picked them up at metro Airport and gave them tour of Ann Arbor. “They are truly worked-class makers,” says Culver, who had met Alf several years earlier in Italy and taught with him at a workshop in Brussels. “I thought they would be a great addition to Ann Arbor’s music community.”
   Culver was a persuasive recruiter. In January 1985, Curtin and Alf bought the prospect Street house and moved their shop from Italy to Michigan. They were especially impressed, Alf says, with the U-M’s string performance program and the Musical Society’s concert series. “There are more concerts in the large cities,” he says,” but it’s impossible to attend fifty performances every night anyway. You can hear as much fine music here as anywhere.”
   Ann Arbor’s two academic climates is also appealing to the two men, because they see themselves as educators and researchers as well as craftsmen and business managers. They lecture at the U-M School of Music and consult with professors of physics, chemistry, botany, and art. They present preconcert seminars on violin making to Musical Society patrons. They travel throughout the country to appear at meetings of music educators and performers. They have published The Violinmakers Handbook for Musicians. And, in cooperation with the American String Teachers Association, they are producing a videotape on the selection and maintenance of violins, violas, and cellos.
   “They are truly unique in their approach, “Culver says, “because they are removing the mystique that has built up around violin making for three hundred years. It’s a real service to the musical professional.”

   According to legend, the great Cremona violin makers, especially Stradivari and Guarneri, developed secret techniques and finishes that died with them and can never be repeated. Curtin and Alf are not convinced. They don’t claim they can precisely duplicate the sound of the finest classic instruments, but they approach the myth scientifically, using the same kind of wood that the old masters used and relying on chemical and historical analysis to guide their wood preparation, carving, and finishing.
   “There is a lot of lunacy associated with violin making,” Curtin says with a wry smile. “One the other hand, there is also some very good research being done in laboratories around the world. We don’t want out instruments to rely on some secrecy claim. We are always studying, trying to learn more, and we publish what we learn.” One of the no secrets is their use of reed from the banks of the Huron River that, Alf says, “is exactly the same as a reed that grows near Cremona.” When used instead of sandpaper for smoothing wood surfaces, he says, “it gives a beautiful glow and patina to the wood before we varnish.”
   Yet to be published, however, are the details of the partners’ wood preparation techniques, which they describe as a combination of ancient practice and modern technology. “We try to duplicate the effects of wood harvesting the way it was done in seventeenth-century Italy, Alf explains, “When the trees were scored in winter and the logs were floated out of the forests and stored in lagoons. We also use sonar to measure the elasticity of each piece of wood before we carve it.”
   The Curtin & Alf workshop is the exact opposite of an assembly line. The instruments’ backs and fronts are carved with knives, gouges, and chisels. The sides are bent around forms, and the basic structure is put together with hot glue made from animal hides. Scraping, smoothing, and trimming are hand operations. Varnishes made from Florentine linseed oil and Baltic amber (“a fossilized tree resin some 37 million years old,” is how it’s described in the Curtin & Alf brochure) are applied with artists’ brushes, and the finish is given a final polish with cotton rags.

    Almost all of Curtin & Alf’s instruments are commissioned by individual violin, viola and cello players. The process begins with a meeting to discuss the musician’s requirements and playing style. For soloists like Ruggiero Ricci, who was teaching at the U-M when Curtin and Alf began working in Ann Arbor, they design violins with distinctive voices. They copied Ricci’s Guarneri de Gesu. For ensemble players like their clients in the Berlin Philharmonic, they try to match the “signature sound” of the orchestra.
   “Everything we do,” Alf says, “is aimed at copying the visual beauty and the tonal idiosyncrasies of the models we work from.”
   The result,   says Jacob Krachmalnick, who teaches at the U-M music school, is “a superb violin. When Ricci bought his Curtin & Alf, he recommended them to me. I got one of their Guarneri replicas. Three days later I played it at the Kerrytown Concert House. It was beautiful, and the damn thing just keeps getting better all the time.”
   Curtin & Alf, Krachmalnick says, is a valuable resource for graduating students and other young musicians. There are only several hundred great old instruments left in the world, he says, and some of them are in museums. When they change hands, the price is $150,000 and up.” A Curtin & Alf costs only about ten thousand dollars,” he says, “which is not cheap, but young players don’t have to wait in line for a fine violin and then get themselves in hock for the rest of their life when one is available.”
   They also know that they’ve bought what they really pay for, Culver adds. “Unless they really know the business,” he says” it’s easy for young players to get taken for a ride by an unscrupulous dealer.” Most dealers, he says, give purchasers a two-week trial period. Curtin & Alf guarantees satisfaction for a full-year, and promises to buy the instruments back if a client is unhappy with its performance.
   So far, the partners have not had to act on that promise. When asked about the quality of their instruments, Curtin & Alf clients are uniform ally enthusiastic. Boro Martinic-Jercic, associate concertmaster of the Phoenix Symphony, says, for example, that “a comparable fiddle would cost fifty-thousand or more. My Curtin & Alf sounds better, rounder and more open, the more I play it.”
   Dr. William Sloan, an amateur musician in Toledo who has spent years studying the methods of Stradivari and Guarneri, says, “It’s almost mind-boggling how ell Curtin & Alf can reproduce the woody, nasal sound, and the finish, of the old Italian instruments. I have one of their violas, and it’s just wonderful!”
   According to Alf, violin making is “a profession for young people now. It’s not filled with replicas of Pinocchio’s father struggling to make a living. For the best makers, it’s also a booming profession, especially in this country. There are more players all the time, and makers are not providing enough fine instruments to meet the demand.”
   Curtin says the partners have reached “a turning point” in the past year. They would like to expand their annual output to twenty-four instruments, which would mean hiring an apprentice and, “probably, moving the workshop to another location. We’re talking with people in related fields about setting up some kind of shared space, maybe with a small concert hall.”
   Other plans are more far-reaching. Curtin and Alf hope to commission a violin concerto for an instrument made specifically for the concerto’s world premiere. Alf dreams about building a matched set of instruments for a professional string quartet. And he is trying to put together a large fund that would be used to help young players finance their purchases of fine violins, violas, and cellos. The fund would be a good investment, he reasons, “For patrons f the arts who would like to help maintain the quality of the music performance for years to come.”

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