F-Holes

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 13: F-Holes

The f-holes are the violin's eyes. Nadia did not think this consciously, did not formulate the comparison in words, but the association was there, was present in her body's response to the openings, the way her gaze was drawn to them whenever she looked at a finished instrument, the way the f-holes returned her gaze with the particular attention of openings that are not merely functional but expressive, the f-holes communicating something about the instrument's character the way eyes communicate something about a person's character, the openings as portraits, as signatures, as the element that distinguishes one maker's work from another's more than any other visible feature.

January. The new year had arrived without ceremony in the workshop, Giovanni working on the second of January with the same focus he had brought to the last day of December, the calendar irrelevant to the work, the work operating on its own calendar, the calendar of construction, the calendar that measured time not in months and weeks but in stages: the wood, the arching, the ribs, and now the f-holes, the stage that would transform the top plate from a carved piece of spruce into a soundboard, from a silent surface into a speaking one, because the f-holes are the openings through which the sound escapes, the portals between the interior acoustic chamber and the exterior world, the openings that let the voice out.

Giovanni held the top plate in his hands. The arching was complete, the graduation was done, the plate was carved to its final thickness and its final curvature, and the surface was smooth, the spruce pale and even, the grain lines running from end to end in their tight, parallel order, the order of the Val di Fiemme, the order of the mountain, the order of the slow growth that had produced this wood. He turned the plate in his hands, examining the surface, looking for the position of the f-holes, the position that he would mark with pencil and then cut with his knife.

The position matters. The f-holes are not decorative. The f-holes are acoustic. Their position on the top plate determines the effective vibrating area of the soundboard, the area of the plate that is free to vibrate when the strings are bowed, and the effective vibrating area determines the volume and the quality of the sound. Too far apart, and the vibrating area is too large, the plate too free, the sound too diffuse. Too close together, and the vibrating area is too small, the plate too constrained, the sound too focused, too tight. The correct position is the position that produces the balance, the balance between freedom and constraint, between diffusion and focus, between too much and too little, and the balance is the craft.

Giovanni placed the plate on the workbench. He picked up a pencil. He looked at the plate for a long time, a minute, two minutes, the looking not a hesitation but a preparation, the eyes measuring what the hands would mark, the eyes finding the positions that the tradition prescribed and the wood demanded, the positions determined by the proportions of the template and the dimensions of the plate and the particular characteristics of this piece of spruce, this grain, this density, this arching, and the determination was the judgment, and the judgment was fifty years of making f-holes.

He drew the first line. The pencil touched the surface and moved, and the line appeared, a smooth, sinuous curve, the upper portion of the left f-hole, the curve that begins at the upper eye — the small circular opening at the top of the f — and descends through the long curve of the wing and into the waist of the f, the narrow middle section, and then expands again into the lower eye, the small circular opening at the bottom. The line was drawn freehand. No template, no ruler, no guide, no stencil. The pencil moved in Giovanni's hand the way a bow moves in a violinist's hand, with the controlled fluidity of a practiced motion, the motion that is not thought but performed, not decided but executed, the execution the product of the thousands of times the motion has been made before.

The line was perfect. Nadia watched the pencil trace the curve and the curve was perfect, was symmetrical, was proportioned, was everything that a freehand line should not be able to be, because freehand lines are supposed to be approximate, are supposed to waver, are supposed to reveal the hand's imprecision, but this line did not waver, this line was sure, was confident, was the line that Giovanni had been drawing for fifty years, and the fifty years were in the line, were the line, the years made visible as a curve on spruce.

She asked how he drew the line so perfectly after seventy years. She asked in Italian that was becoming more natural each week, the question forming in Italian rather than being translated from English, the language shifting, the workshop's language becoming her language.

Giovanni stopped drawing. He held the pencil above the plate and he looked at Nadia and he considered the question with the care that he gave to everything, the care that was his mode of being, the care that was not caution but attention, the attention that the craft required and that the man had become.

He said: I do not draw it perfectly. I draw it the same way each time. The same is not perfect. The same is practiced. Practiced is better than perfect because practiced has memory and perfect does not.

She heard the sentence and the sentence entered her the way certain sentences enter a person, not through the mind but through the body, the sentence bypassing the intellect and arriving in the place where understanding lives, the place that is deeper than thought, the place that the body knows, and the body knew this sentence because the body had experienced it, had lived it, had been the proof of it for twenty-two years of violin practice, the daily practice that was not the pursuit of perfection but the pursuit of consistency, the pursuit of the same, the same bow stroke repeated until the bow stroke was not a decision but a habit, not a choice but a reflex, and the reflex was practiced, and the practiced had memory, and the memory was the skill.

Practiced is better than perfect because practiced has memory and perfect does not. She wrote the sentence in her notebook, wrote it in Italian and then in English, wrote it twice because the writing was the fixing, the pinning of the sentence to the page, the preservation of the words that the workshop had spoken through Giovanni's mouth, the words that were not Giovanni's invention but the tradition's wisdom, the wisdom that the workshop transmitted through the maker to the apprentice, the transmission happening now, in this sentence, in this moment, in this January morning in the workshop on Via Palazzo.

Giovanni drew the second f-hole. The right side, the mirror image of the left, the pencil tracing the same curve reversed, the symmetry of the two f-holes one of the violin's visual signatures, the pair of sinuous openings that are as much a part of the violin's identity as the scroll or the bridge or the waist. The second line matched the first. The matching was the sameness, the practiced sameness, the sameness that has memory.

He set down the pencil. He picked up the knife. The coltello, the small knife with the thin blade and the pear-wood handle, the knife that was Giovanni's most personal tool, the knife that had cut more f-holes than any other tool in the workshop, the knife whose blade had been sharpened so many times that it was a fraction of its original width, the steel consumed by the sharpening the way the wood was consumed by the cutting, the tool diminishing in the service of the work, the diminishment the measure of the work done.

He began to cut. The blade entered the spruce at the upper eye of the left f-hole, the point of the knife piercing the wood with a small pop, the pop the sound of the fibers parting, the fibers that had been continuous for seven years in the attic and for a hundred years in the tree and that were now being separated by the blade, the separation the opening, the opening the portal, the portal the f-hole.

The cutting was slow. The knife followed the pencil line with a precision that was the precision of the hand, the precision of the fifty years, the precision that was not mechanical but human, not exact but consistent, the consistency of practiced, the consistency that has memory. The blade moved through the spruce at the rate of a few millimeters per second, the rate that allowed Giovanni to feel the wood's grain, to adjust the blade's angle to the grain's direction, to follow the grain where it helped and to cut across the grain where it resisted, the following and the crossing both part of the skill, the skill of reading the wood while cutting it, the reading and the cutting simultaneous, the simultaneous the mastery.

Nadia stood close. She stood at Giovanni's left shoulder, close enough to see the blade in the wood, close enough to see the shavings curl from the cut, close enough to smell the fresh-cut spruce, the smell that was released by the cutting, the smell of the wood's interior, the resinous, bright, living smell that was the smell of the tree, the tree that had died years ago but whose wood still smelled alive, still carried the aromatics of its living cells, the aromatics preserved by the drying, the drying that had killed the tree but preserved the tree's chemistry.

The upper eye opened. Giovanni cut a small circle, the circle becoming a hole, the hole becoming an opening, and through the opening Nadia could see the underside of the plate, the interior surface that she and Giovanni had graduated, the surface that would face the interior of the acoustic chamber, and the seeing through was the moment, the moment when the top plate ceased to be a solid object and became a perforated one, the perforation changing everything, changing the acoustics, changing the vibrational behavior, changing the relationship between the plate and the air, the air now able to pass through the plate, the sound now able to escape, the escape the purpose, the purpose the f-hole.

Giovanni cut down from the upper eye, following the pencil line through the long wing of the f, the knife tracing the sinuous curve, the blade angled to produce a clean edge, the edge perpendicular to the surface, the perpendicularity important because the edge of the f-hole affects the airflow and the airflow affects the sound, the angle of the cut another of the invisible variables that determine the voice of the finished instrument.

The cutting took an hour. One hour for two f-holes, the hour filled with the small sounds of the blade in the wood, the quiet, persistent sounds of cutting, the sounds that were the soundtrack of the workshop, the soundtrack that Nadia had been listening to for four months and that had become the background of her days, the background that was not silence and not music but something between, something that had its own rhythm and its own pattern and its own beauty, the beauty of work being done, the beauty of the hands doing the work, the beauty that arises not from the intention to be beautiful but from the intensity of the doing.

The f-holes were cut. Giovanni lifted the plate and held it to the light and the light came through the f-holes and the light was the sound made visible, or the promise of the sound, the light passing through the openings that the sound would pass through, the light and the sound following the same path, the path from inside to outside, from the chamber to the room, from the instrument to the ear.

He turned the plate so that Nadia could see the f-holes from the front. The two openings, sinuous, symmetrical, the curves smooth, the edges clean, the proportions correct, the f-holes the eyes of the violin, the eyes through which the instrument would see the world, the world that was the room, the concert hall, the space in which the instrument would be played, and the playing was the future, and the future was visible in the f-holes, visible as openings, as portals, as the promise of the sound that the instrument would make when the work was done and the strings were strung and the bow was drawn.

Giovanni set the plate on the bench. He cleaned the edges of the f-holes with a small file, the file smoothing the cut surfaces, removing the tiny fibers that the knife had torn rather than cut, the torn fibers that would catch the light and give the edges a fuzzy appearance, the fuzziness unacceptable in a finished instrument, the edges required to be clean and sharp and smooth, the smoothness the final step of the cutting, the step that transforms the rough cut into the finished opening.

He handed the file to Nadia. He pointed to the edges. She filed. The filing was a new skill, the file a new tool, the motion different from planing and gouging and cutting, the motion a drawing rather than a pushing, the file drawn across the edge of the f-hole with a light pressure that removed the torn fibers without rounding the edge, the light pressure the skill, the skill the knowledge of how much force the file required and the knowledge acquired by the filing, the filing teaching the filing.

She filed the edges of the f-holes and the edges became smooth and the smoothness was the completion of the cutting and the completion was Giovanni's work and the filing was her work and the two works were joined in the instrument, the master's cutting and the apprentice's filing, the two hands serving the same opening, the same f-hole, the same portal through which the sound would pass.

The plate lay on the bench. The f-holes were open. The light came through them. The workshop was quiet. Giovanni stood at his bench and Nadia stood at hers and Marco worked at his viola across the room and the three of them were in the workshop and the workshop held them and the light held the workshop and the f-holes held the light, held it in their sinuous openings, held it the way the instrument would hold the sound, held it and let it pass through, the holding and the passing being the same thing, the same act, the same f-hole.

She looked at the f-holes and she thought about practiced. She thought about the fifty years of f-holes that Giovanni had cut, the hundreds of f-holes, two per instrument, three to four instruments per year, six to eight f-holes per year for fifty years, three hundred to four hundred f-holes, each one cut by hand, each one following a freehand pencil line, each one the same and each one different, the sameness being practiced and the difference being the wood, the grain, the specific piece of spruce that each f-hole was cut from, and the practiced accommodating the difference, the practiced adjusting to the wood, the practiced being flexible enough to be the same in different circumstances, and the flexibility was the memory, and the memory was the practiced, and the practiced was better than perfect because practiced has memory and perfect does not.

She thought about her own practicing. The twenty-two years of violin practice. The daily hours. The scales and arpeggios and etudes and concerti. The repetitions. The thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the millions of repetitions that had built the neural pathways that the dystonia had disrupted, and the disruption was a severing of the practiced, a breaking of the memory, and the breaking was the injury, and the injury was the loss, and the loss was specific: the loss not of the hand but of the practiced, not of the ability to move but of the memory of how to move, the memory that the practiced had built and that the dystonia had dissolved.

But the practiced was being rebuilt. In a different domain, with different tools, for a different purpose, but the practiced was being rebuilt. Four months of standing at the bench, four months of planing and gouging and bending and filing, four months of repetition, the repetitions building new neural pathways, new muscle memories, new practiced, the practiced of the luthier rather than the practiced of the violinist, the practiced of the hands that make rather than the hands that play, and the making-practiced and the playing-practiced were different, were fundamentally different, used different muscles and different movements and different parts of the brain, but they shared the essential quality, the quality that Giovanni had named: memory. The practiced has memory. The practiced retains. The practiced accumulates. The practiced builds.

And the building was what she was doing. Standing at the bench, filing the edges of the f-holes, learning the file, learning the pressure, learning the motion, building the practiced that would become, over months and years, the memory that would guide her hands the way Giovanni's memory guided his, not perfectly but consistently, not exactly but practiced, the practiced that is better than perfect.

She set down the file. She looked at the f-holes. The edges were smooth. The work was done. The f-holes were open.

And through the openings, the light.

And through the light, the promise of the sound.

And through the sound, when it came, the memory.

The memory of practiced.

The practiced that is better than perfect.