Master Chef
January, 2006

GREGG ALF LIKES TO COOK, and often uses it as a metaphor for teaching violin making, especially varnish. Like the cook, the violin maker must learn to work with the ingredients at hand—how they work together, how to assess their condition, and how to accommodate their variable natures, adjusting seasoning and technique accordingly. In cooking varnish, no two oils are exactly the same.

His studio occupies a contemporary building on a quiet side street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The entire house is given over to violin making, from the attic where wood is stored, to the ground-floor kitchen; Alf reportedly likes to cook a meal with someone he’s considering as an apprentice, to get an idea how the person works. There’s a grand piano on the main floor, and couches, a comfortable space for music making and trying out instruments.

Alf works mostly on commission and finds that knowing the player, watching how he makes his sound, adds a whole stream of information to the conversation of violin making.

An upstairs room contains scientific tools for studying the nature of wood, while the varnish desk is crowded with small jars and bottles of liquids, powders, and paintbrushes. The second-floor workshop room, where most of the woodworking is done, is light-filled, spacious, and uncluttered, reflecting Alf’s preference for simplicity. Though he works at simple benches with traditional tools, and a Guarneri del Gesù violin stands on its side awaiting his attention, Alf’s thoughts are occupied with the future of violin making.

LEARNING FROM THE OLD MASTERS
Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Alf made his first violin in 1975 with Willis Gault in Washington, DC. Gault was a prolific maker who started many students on the path to their careers. “We sat in a circle working off the knee, Appalachian style,” Alf recalls. He credits Gault with imparting his passion for the trade. “I learned to love it first,” he says. “Craftsmanship came later.”

At age 19, Alf moved to Cremona, Italy, where he graduated from violin-making school and continued working until returning to the United States in 1984 with his friend and colleague Joseph Curtin. Together, Curtin and Alf earned a reputation for exacting replicas of historic violins and for their intense interest in wood and acoustical analysis.

Replication is good training, Alf says, “It’s the master imposing his will on you.” But Alf also sees replication as hopeless.

“It was useful but . . . all the creativity in replicas is in designing the process,” he laments. “It seems like a dangerous thing to base my legacy on being as good as Strad at Strad copies.”

Alf found he had to make a real effort to open his mind after violin-making school. “We’re trained like that,” he says, “microtuned-in to Strad.”

The challenge, he says, is to “wipe the slate clean and yet not forget who you are.”

Alf acknowledges his Cremonese training as the basis for his taste, even as his attention has turned toward awakening the trade from its fixation on the past. “The maker has to become an artist and the violin will be art,” says Alf, pointing out that del Gesù’s work was all over the map, but he kept achieving the same results.

At the time of our interview, Alf had just returned from the Violin Society of America’s summer workshops in Oberlin, Ohio, where he was able to indulge both his scientific and traditional sides. In one room, he recounts, the VSA acoustics workshop was taking a scientific approach to violin setup. Meanwhile, René Morel was teaching the setup workshop, guided by centuries of tradition and decades of experience.

The results achieved by tradition and scientific analysis were remarkably similar.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Like others of his generation, Alf has turned his attention to the evolution of the violin. “We’re not inventing the wheel,” he says, “we come from somewhere.”

The internal conception of the Cremonese violin was laid out by Andrea Amati 150 years before Stradivari, he explains, and yet the violin as it is does have problems. Alf decided to view the instrument with a fresh perspective. Starting at the top, he looked at every part and aspect of the violin, asking, “Why is it this way?”

Form? Function? Economics? Could it be better? And how?

Alf outlines some of his ideas, starting with the scroll. “It’s a lovely ornament of the time,” he says, but what might be the ornament of our time? The scroll is not only a beautiful form, it has a particular mass that functions acoustically and balances the instrument. But could it function better?

Moving on to the peg box, he says, “The system is not ideal.”

The traditional heart-shaped pegs are expensive because they are difficult to carve. Would musicians prefer not to pay $150 for good pegs? Would they accept a different design?

A wooden shank is not ideal, either. Wood shrinks, expands, and wears. Peg wood is harder than the maple peg box, and can cause the peg box to crack under pressure. “Why accept and reproduce that?” asks Alf, noting the limitations of the design.

As peg and peg box wear each other out they must be adjusted, removing a little of the original material each time. Pegs are replaceable, but when the original hole gets too big it must be drilled out, a spiral of new wood (called a bushing) inserted, and the holes reshaped. Since this process is inevitable, why not put the spiral bushing in the new violin and wear that out instead of taking away original material?

On the topic of tuning, he wonders, what about improving the fine tuner for the E string? Why not use a jewel bearing and titanium, like a watch?

Alf moves on to the fingerboard. Shaping is critical and highly labor intensive. It’s also a tragedy, he says, to make them out of ebony. A $200 fiddle has $20 worth of ebony, an endangered rainforest wood, on the fingerboard. But what else could be used? The fingerboard has a particular strength, flexibility, and mass that contribute to the functioning of the instrument. The replacement must work in context.

Alf picks up a prototype carbon-fiber fingerboard. It will never wear grooves and hollows like ebony, but it has its drawbacks, since it doesn’t absorb sweat, and is dangerous to fingers and hands.

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1221 Prospect Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48104

(734) 665-2012   fax: (734) 665-4623

email: violins@alfstudios.com