The Wood

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 4: The Wood

The spruce comes from the mountains. Giovanni said this on the second morning, standing at his workbench with a cup of espresso in one hand and a plank of wood in the other, and the sentence was not a fact delivered for Nadia's education but a declaration, a statement of origin that carried the weight of a lineage, because the mountains he meant were the Alps, and the Alps he meant were the Dolomites, and the Dolomites he meant were the valleys on the southern side where the Italian Alps slope toward the Veneto and the Trentino, and the valley he meant in particular was the Val di Fiemme, the valley that supplied Stradivari and Guarneri and the Amati dynasty before them and that still supplies the luthiers of Cremona with the spruce they use for the most critical component of the violin, the top plate, the soundboard, the thin carved piece of wood that vibrates when the bow draws across the strings and that produces, through its vibration, the voice of the instrument.

The spruce comes from the mountains and the mountains are cold. The cold matters. Giovanni set the espresso on the bench, freeing his hand to gesture, and the gesture encompassed the plank and the workshop and the invisible mountains to the north, and the gesture was a pedagogy, the teaching of the hands that supplements the teaching of the words and that in Giovanni's case often replaced the words entirely, because his English was limited and Nadia's Italian was new and the language they were building between them was a third language, a workshop language composed of gestures and demonstrations and the occasional Italian word that Nadia wrote in a notebook she kept in the pocket of the apron Lucia had given her, a canvas apron identical to Marco's, stiff and clean, not yet stained with varnish or marked with glue, not yet made into a working garment, still a costume, and the distance between costume and garment was the distance of the apprenticeship.

The cold makes the trees grow slowly. Giovanni said this and then he showed her. He held the plank so that the end grain was visible, the cross-section of the tree's growth, and in the cross-section the rings were visible, the annual rings that record each year of the tree's life in a line of cellulose, and the rings were close together, so close that Nadia had to lean in to distinguish one from another, and the closeness was the point, the closeness was the cold's signature written in the wood, because a tree that grows slowly in a cold mountain valley produces narrow rings, and narrow rings mean high density, and high density means that the wood is stiff relative to its weight, and stiffness relative to weight is the single most important acoustic property of a violin's top plate, the property that determines how efficiently the plate converts the energy of the vibrating string into the movement of air that the ear perceives as sound.

Stiffness relative to weight. The phrase was technical, the vocabulary of acoustics and materials science, but Giovanni did not use the phrase. Giovanni said the wood must be strong and light, and the strong and light was the same thing as stiffness relative to weight, the same knowledge expressed in the language of the workshop rather than the language of the laboratory, and the two languages were saying the same thing, had always been saying the same thing, the luthiers knowing empirically what the scientists would later confirm mathematically, the hands knowing what the instruments would later measure, and the knowing of the hands was older and, Giovanni implied without saying, more reliable, because the hands hold the wood and the instruments measure the wood and the holding is more intimate than the measuring, and intimacy is a form of knowledge that measurement cannot replace.

He led her to the stairs. The stairs were at the back of the workshop, narrow, wooden, worn at the center of each tread by the feet that had climbed them for a century, the wear creating a shallow concavity in each step that was the architectural equivalent of the worn handles on Giovanni's tools, the shape of use, the record of human bodies moving through space over time, the record that wood keeps better than any other material because wood wears, wood yields, wood remembers the touch, and the remembering is visible, and the visibility is the beauty, and the beauty is unintentional, which is the best kind of beauty, the kind that arises not from design but from use.

The attic. The space was long and low, running the full length of the building, the ceiling following the slope of the roof, the light entering through small windows at each end, the air warm and dry, drier than the workshop below, drier than the street outside, dry with the deliberate, maintained dryness that the wood requires, the dryness that Giovanni monitored with a hygrometer mounted on the wall near the door, a simple instrument, a dial with a needle, the needle pointing to forty percent, which was the humidity that Giovanni maintained in the attic through the year, forty percent in the summer when the Lombard air was thick with moisture, forty percent in the winter when the heated air dried and the danger was over-drying, forty percent always, because the wood must dry evenly, must lose its moisture gradually, must transition from the living state of the tree to the working state of the instrument in a slow, controlled process that cannot be rushed, that resists rushing, that punishes rushing with cracking and warping and the ruination of acoustic properties that took a century of mountain growth to develop.

The planks. They were stacked on racks, horizontal wooden frames that held the planks separated from each other by thin spacers, allowing air to circulate around each plank, touching every surface, carrying away the moisture molecule by molecule, the drying happening at the pace of diffusion, which is the pace of patience, which is the pace of the craft. Each plank was labeled. Giovanni had written the labels himself, in pencil, on the end grain of each plank: the year of acquisition, the source, the species. Nadia read the labels as Giovanni led her along the racks, and the labels were a chronology, a history of the workshop's supply, and the chronology went back decades.

2015, Val di Fiemme, abete rosso. This was the spruce for the last violin. Giovanni placed his hand on the plank and the gesture was the same gesture he had made the day before at the workbench, the hand on the wood, the touch that was assessment and greeting and commitment, the touch that said: I know this wood, I have known it for seven years, I have visited it here in the attic and touched it and listened to it and waited for it, and now it is ready.

She asked how he knew it was ready. She asked in Italian, slowly, finding the words in the notebook in her mind, the notebook where she stored the Italian she was learning, and the asking was clumsy but the clumsiness was honest, and Giovanni responded to honesty more than to fluency.

He knocked on the plank. He knocked with his knuckle, the knuckle of his right index finger, a light tap, and the plank rang. It rang with a clear, bright, sustained tone that Nadia heard not as a pitch exactly but as a quality, a character, a timbre that her musician's ear classified immediately and instinctively as good, as right, as the sound of wood that had reached its optimal state, though she could not have articulated what optimal meant in this context, could not have defined the parameters, could not have explained why this particular ringing was the ringing of readiness while a different ringing would have been the ringing of not yet, but she knew, and the knowing was her musician's training translating itself into a new domain, the trained ear serving a new purpose, the ear that had spent twenty-two years listening to violins now listening to the wood that violins are made from, and the listening was the same listening, and the sameness was a bridge, a connection between the old life and the new one.

Giovanni said: the wood knows what it will become. He said it in Italian, and Nadia understood most of the words and guessed the rest from the tone and the context and the look on his face, which was the look of a man stating something he believes to be literally true, not metaphorically true, not poetically true, but true in the way that a measurement is true, in the way that a pitch is true when it matches the tuning fork. The wood knows what it will become. We do not tell the wood. We listen.

She would hear him say this many times over the year, the same sentence or variations of it, and each time the sentence would mean something slightly different because she would be slightly different, her understanding deeper, her hands more experienced, her ear more attuned to the language of the workshop, and the slight difference accumulated over the months would amount to a transformation, not a sudden transformation but a gradual one, the kind of transformation that wood undergoes in the attic, the slow becoming that is not dramatic but is fundamental, the change that changes everything by changing nothing visible, the internal rearrangement that manifests not as a new shape but as a new sound.

Maple. The back and sides of the violin are made from maple, and the maple Giovanni used came from Bosnia, from the forests of the Dinaric Alps, the mountain range that runs along the Adriatic coast of the Balkans, and when Giovanni told Nadia this she felt something move in her chest, because the Dinaric Alps are the mountains of Croatia, the mountains her father had grown up beneath in the city of Split, the mountains she had seen as a child on visits to her grandparents, the mountains that were part of her own geography, her own lineage, and the coincidence was not a coincidence but a convergence, the convergence of the instrument and the person and the place, the wood from her father's mountains becoming the back of the violin she was learning to build.

The maple was different from the spruce. Where the spruce was light and straight-grained and pale, the maple was heavier, denser, figured with the wavy pattern called flame or tiger stripe that is visible as a shifting, iridescent pattern in the finished instrument, a pattern that catches the light and seems to move, seems to flow, seems alive, and the aliveness is a property of the grain, the grain that results from the wavy growth of the wood fibers in certain maple trees, a genetic trait, not all maples have it, not all maples produce the flame figure that luthiers prize, and the ones that do are selected for that figure, selected for the beauty of the pattern, because the beauty of the back plate is one of the violin's aesthetic elements, one of the visible glories, the flame of the maple glowing beneath the varnish like fire beneath amber.

But the maple's purpose is not beauty. The maple's purpose is acoustic. The back plate reflects the sound that the top plate produces, reflects it and shapes it and directs it through the f-holes into the room, and the reflection requires a wood that is dense and hard and stiff in the lateral direction, a wood that does not absorb the sound but bounces it back, and maple has these properties, maple is the mirror to the spruce's voice, and the mirror is as important as the voice, because a voice without a mirror is a voice that dissipates, a voice that scatters, a voice that does not project.

Giovanni showed her the maple planks. They were darker than the spruce, the wood a warm gold, the flame figure visible even in the rough-sawn surface, visible as a pattern of rippling that seemed to change as she moved her head, as the angle of the light shifted, as the relationship between her eye and the wood's grain altered, and the alteration was the flame, the optical illusion produced by the wavy grain, the illusion that was not deception but revelation, the wood revealing its internal structure through the play of light.

The maple from Bosnia had been in the attic for nine years. Longer than the spruce. Giovanni explained that maple dries more slowly than spruce because it is denser, because the water molecules are trapped more tightly in the denser wood fibers, and the trapping requires more time to overcome, more seasons of dry attic air, more patience. Nine years. Nadia calculated: the maple had been placed in this attic in 2013. In 2013 she was twenty years old, a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, studying with Professor Aaronson, practicing the Sibelius Violin Concerto, her left hand working perfectly, the fourth finger and the fifth finger moving with the speed and precision that she took for granted because she did not yet know that the taking-for-granted was finite, that the perfection had an expiration, that the hand would betray her, that the betrayal was already being prepared in the neural pathways that were being shaped by the very practice that she believed was strengthening them. In 2013 the maple was placed in the attic and the future was set, not determined but prepared, the wood drying and the hand practicing and neither knowing what the other was doing and both arriving here, in this year, in this attic, ready.

Ebony. The fingerboard is made from ebony, and the ebony comes from Africa, from the tropical forests of Madagascar and Cameroon and Mozambique, and the ebony is black, solid black, the blackest wood in the world, dense and hard and smooth, so smooth that the violinist's fingers slide on it without resistance, the smoothness essential for the rapid shifts and slides that violin technique requires, the left hand moving up and down the fingerboard at speeds that require a surface of minimal friction, and the surface is ebony, and ebony is the surface, and the connection between the player's fingers and the instrument's voice passes through the ebony, and the ebony is the threshold, the boundary between the human and the wooden, the living and the made.

Giovanni did not have ebony in the attic. Ebony does not need the same drying time as spruce and maple. Ebony comes to the luthier already dried, already processed, already black and dense and ready. Giovanni bought his ebony from a supplier in Germany, a firm that had been supplying luthiers for decades, and the ebony arrived in small blocks, each block sufficient for a fingerboard, and the blocks were stored in a cabinet in the workshop, not in the attic, because the ebony was already what it needed to be, already transformed, already the thing.

Three woods. Three continents. Three forests. The spruce from the Italian Alps, the maple from the Balkan mountains, the ebony from the African tropics. The violin is an instrument of convergence, an object that brings together materials from distant places and joins them with glue and skill and knowledge into a single thing, a thing that is greater than the sum of its materials, a thing that produces a sound that none of the materials could produce alone, a sound that is the product of their collaboration, their joining, their becoming-one, and the becoming-one is the craft, and the craft is what Giovanni was teaching Nadia, one wood at a time, one lesson at a time, one morning at a time.

They descended from the attic. The stairs creaked under their weight, the worn treads giving slightly, the wood of the stairs remembering their passage the way the wood of the planks above remembered the air. In the workshop, Marco was already at his bench, working on a piece of maple, carving the arching of a back plate for the viola he was building, his own instrument, his first full-sized instrument, and the carving was steady and sure and silent, the gouge moving through the maple with the controlled force of a hand that has learned its tool, and the learning was six years of daily practice, six years of cutting and shaping and making mistakes and correcting them and making better mistakes and correcting those too, the iterative process that is the only process, the process that takes the beginner and makes the maker and that cannot be shortened or skipped or replaced with theory.

Nadia stood at her section of the bench and she looked at the piece of spruce that Giovanni had placed there for her. It was a small piece, an offcut, a leftover from a previous project, not the tonewood from the attic but a piece for practice, a piece for learning, a piece she could cut and plane and ruin without loss, because the learning required ruining, the learning was made of ruining, the first cuts always wrong, the first planes always uneven, the first attempts always failures, and the failures were the material of education, the necessary precursors to competence, the steps that could not be skipped.

She picked up the piece. She held it in her left hand. The hand held the wood. The hand that could not play held the wood from which violins are played. The irony was there, visible, obvious, and she did not dwell on it because dwelling was not useful and the workshop was a place of use, a place where the hands did things rather than symbolized things, and the doing was the antidote to the dwelling, and the antidote was available, and she took it, and she held the wood, and the holding was the beginning.

Giovanni showed her how to hold the plane. The thumb plane, a small tool, brass and steel, the blade adjusted to remove a shaving of wood so thin that light passed through it, and the thinness was the skill, the ability to remove exactly the right amount of wood, no more, no less, the plane set to a depth measured in hundredths of a millimeter, the depth that separates the surface that is too rough from the surface that is right, and the right surface is the surface that the hand knows, the hand that has planed ten thousand surfaces and that recognizes the right one by feel, by the resistance of the wood against the blade, by the sound of the blade through the wood, by the curl of the shaving as it lifts from the surface, and the curl is the evidence, the visible proof of invisible skill.

She planed. The first stroke removed too much wood. The shaving was thick, opaque, the curl tight and heavy. Giovanni adjusted the blade. The second stroke was better. The shaving was thinner, translucent, the curl loose and light, and the light passed through it, and the passing of the light was the measure, the standard against which every subsequent stroke would be judged.

She planed and the workshop was quiet around her and the quiet was not silence but concentration, the particular quality of sound that a working space produces when the people in it are absorbed in their tasks, the sound of tools on wood, the sound of breathing, the sound of the building existing around them, holding them, providing the light and the warmth and the shelter that the work requires, and the work continued, and the wood yielded, and the yielding was the lesson, and the lesson was the day, and the day was the apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship was the life she had chosen after the life she had lost, and the choosing was not finished, the choosing was ongoing, the choosing happened with every stroke of the plane, every curl of the shaving, every piece of wood she held in the hand that could no longer play but that could hold, and the holding was enough, and the enough was the beginning of the enough, and the beginning was the thing.

In the evening she walked through Cremona. The streets were quiet in the way that Italian streets are quiet in September, the summer tourists gone, the autumn routines not yet fully established, the city settling into itself the way a violin settles into its case, the fit precise, the belonging evident. She walked past the Museo del Violino, its modern glass facade reflecting the old buildings across the Piazza Marconi, and through the glass she could see the display cases, the instruments by Stradivari and Guarneri lit from within, glowing in their cases like relics, which they were, the relics of a tradition that had produced the highest expression of the luthier's art and that the city was still practicing, still transmitting, still teaching to apprentices like her who arrived from distant places with damaged hands and uncertain futures and the particular, desperate, half-acknowledged hope that the craft might provide what the performance could not, which was a way to remain inside the music, a way to stay in the sound, a way to continue the relationship with the violin that the injury had not ended but transformed, the way the drying transforms the wood, the way the carving transforms the plank, the way the varnish transforms the surface, the way the years transform the sound.

She stood at the window of the museum and she looked at the instruments and the instruments glowed and the glowing was the varnish and the varnish was the light and the light was the evening and the evening was September and September was Cremona and Cremona was the beginning.

And the beginning was the wood.