Music Maker

Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus had never sounded so awful.

Again, I drew my bow across the violin’s strings and made a rasping squeak. My wife winced as she passed the room. What had made me think I could learn to play violin at age sixty-nine?

From the time I was a boy I’d loved the instrument. Some people imagine angels strumming harps—for me it was always violins.

While my friends rocked to the Stones, I listened to Isaac Stern. I dreamed of playing like him, of feeling the magic he coaxed from those strings. But growing up in rural Minnesota, violin teachers were hard to find.

Instead, I found myself drawn to the precision of physics. I spent a career developing optics with Boeing. I learned to tackle life systematically, mastering details down to microscopic levels. To some people this kind of technology was mysterious—almost magical. But not to me. Not once I saw how it worked.

A violin—that was real magic. After I retired I met a champion fiddler at a local arts festival. Watching him play rekindled my youthful dreams. And now I had the time to make them come true.

I paid a small fortune for a violin and found a teacher willing to instruct a white-haired novice. I tried the Mozart piece again. When I drew the bow across the strings—screech! My wife moaned in the other room.

If only I’d started out younger, I thought, loosening my bow and putting it back in the case.

At my weekly Thursday lesson, I unloaded my frustration. “You’ve played for seventeen years,” I told my teacher. “I’ll be eighty-six before I can play as well as you.”

“The violin is hard to learn,” she said, “but you’re improving.”

At home that evening I examined  my violin inch by inch, like a scientist. What’s your secret? I wondered. As a physicist I’d always figured out how things worked by studying them closely. Could I find the magic of the violin the same way?

The next day I went to an instrument repair shop. “Do you have an old violin?” I asked. “I’d like to take one apart and put it back together.”

“Got a piece of junk in the back,” he said. I didn’t know the first thing about taking a violin apart. I ordered some how-to books online.

When the books arrived, I took the violin upstairs to my workshop. “First, place a thin knife between the joints of the violin,” the book read. “This will pop the glue holding the back.” It came off easily. A tag dropped out: 1860. The violin was nearly 150 years old!