Community Arts & Traditional Arts

	Jonathan Cooper At His Workbench.

Jonathan Cooper: Tinkering with the violin maker’s recipe

When Jonathan Cooper picks up a violin he has made with his own hands and plays an old tune, there is a blend of harmony that comes from both the soul of a musician and the soul of an instrument maker. That’s because Cooper is both a craftsman and a musician.

Jonathan Cooper came to the art of violin making from the perspective of a musician. In the 1960s, he formed a band and switched from playing the guitar to playing the fiddle. That gave him the opportunity to travel at a time when it was still easy to find old fiddles in flea markets. He started buying them and fixing them up. Before long, he was thinking about earning his living making violins.

A finished violin can have less than a pound’s worth of materials in it but Cooper says therein lies the challenge.

“It’s small and every choice is critical. You’re always balancing the structural integrity against how well it sounds. No one can sit down and say okay, here’s the mathematical formula for a violin top because there are so many variables. It would be like painting if you said, okay, we’re going to reconstruct a master painting by going pixel by pixel and describing the color in every pixel.”

	Hand Carving The Violin.

Cooper says the real art of crafting a violin has more to do with the soul of the maker than any formula. He says some instruments may not be examples of fine woodworking but sound fantastic, while others are beautifully constructed but sound strangely cold.

By the time Cooper was in his late 20s he realized that he was not going to be on the road playing music for his whole life. He decided to investigate the possibility of becoming a violin maker. The thought of living in Salt Lake City or Chicago where there were violin making schools did not have much appeal. But a trip to Italy would change his life forever. He stopped in Cremona, a city synonymous with great violin makers and the very development of the violin.

“I realized I could live in Cremona and I could be poor and I could learn how to make instruments and it would really be a lot of fun as well as being right at the heart of what I wanted to learn about.”

Cooper returned to Maine to study Italian. He then moved to Cremona where he began a three-year apprenticeship with a professional violin maker.

“Since there were just two of us and he was quite a good maker, we had a lot of work. We were working very hard so my introduction to the violin making business was quite thorough. I was very fortunate to be in a city where many people came from all over the world. Violin makers came to visit to pay homage to the history of it. There was a great museum there with a lot of Stradivarius artifacts and so I was able to just completely live and breathe violins all day long every day with hundreds of people from all over the world. It was really wonderful.”

In 1984, Cooper moved back to Maine, where he started his own business. He says he has been thinking a lot recently about why the violin has such a powerful hold on the human imagination. Part of it, he believes, is the nearly 500 years of history behind the instrument. But he also wonders if it is because the instrument is so simple and universal that it fits into almost any musical genre.

“It’s like the human voice,” Cooper says. “It falls in the same range as the human voice and it is expressive in the same way as the human voice.

	Hand Carving The Violin.

And in violin making there is always more to learn about wood, varnishes and the many choices a craftsman has at the workbench.”

“It’s really a recipe which you make over and over again but you refine each time. But there really aren’t any secrets. I think that it’s like cooking. A cook walks into a market and buys tomatoes and basil and some oil and a few other things and makes pasta sauce. And as we know, you can get it in a can or you can get it made by a chef who has really made something exquisite out of basically the same ingredients.”

Cooper calls himself a traditionalist. While some instrument makers might use electronic equipment to test the properties of the wood they are considering, Cooper chooses the wood by its feel.

“I basically hold a piece of wood in my hand to feel how heavy or light it is. I look at the grain structure and I find that if those things are to my liking, I can generally get them to do whatever I want them to do.”

His hands have also learned to gauge the shape and thickness of the wood.

	Jonathan Cooper Testing The Strings.

“It’s amazing how sensitive our fingers are once you’re used to something. I can pick something up and tell you that’s three millimeters thick or five millimeters thick.”

Meeting and talking with the musician is also one of Cooper’s tools. He listens to the musician playing to get a sense of how the instrument will be used; whether the instrument will blend with other instruments in a group or whether the instrument will match a singer’s voice. He talks with the musicians to find out if they have special requirements such as a fifth string on a fiddle or a certain sound. Cooper says that is what makes the craft so interesting. “It is not rocket science,” he says, but a blend of intuition and experience.

“The basic recipe is not that hard. It requires some control, some imagination, but really we are making the same thing over and over again that’s been made for the last 500 years. It’s simple in a lot of ways, but deceivingly so.”

Photos By Keith Ludden