The First Cut

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 8: The First Cut

The band saw occupied a corner of the workshop that was otherwise devoted to hand tools, and its presence there was an anomaly, a concession, the single mechanical intrusion into a workspace that operated on the principles of the sixteenth century, and the anomaly was acknowledged by Giovanni with the particular combination of resignation and practicality that characterized his relationship to the compromises that age imposed on his craft, the band saw being the tool that his back required even though his hands did not, his back having announced, sometime around his sixty-fifth year, that the frame saw — the two-handled saw that the Cremonese luthiers had used for centuries to make the initial rough cuts, the saw that required the sawyer to stand and pull and push with the full force of the upper body — was no longer an instrument his spine would tolerate, and the announcement had been delivered not in words but in pain, the particular, deep, structural pain that is the body's way of saying: this is finished, find another way.

The band saw was Italian. A Centauro, the brand that Italian woodworkers had used for decades, a machine of green-painted cast iron and tempered steel, its blade a continuous loop of toothed metal that ran around two wheels, the upper wheel adjustable for tension, the lower wheel driven by an electric motor, the motor humming at a pitch that Nadia's musician's ear registered as approximately B-flat, a pitch that was the band saw's voice, its single sustained note, the drone above which the cutting would happen, the cutting that was the purpose, the cutting that was the beginning of the transformation of the plank into the plate, the raw into the shaped, the waiting into the becoming.

Giovanni carried the spruce plank from his workbench to the band saw. He carried it with both hands, the plank held vertically, the way a painter carries a canvas, and the carrying was careful, not because the plank was fragile — it was not, it was strong, it was spruce that had grown for a century in the mountains and dried for seven years in the attic and that had the structural integrity of wood that has been properly aged, which is the integrity of patience made material — but because the carrying was a ritual, the transport of the material from the place of contemplation to the place of action, from the workbench where the plank had been assessed and measured and tapped and listened to, to the saw where the first irreversible change would be made, and the irreversibility was the thing, the thing that made the carrying careful, because before the cut the plank could become anything, any violin, any maker's vision, any template's shape, the plank's potential limited only by its dimensions and its grain and its acoustic properties, and after the cut the plank would become this violin, Giovanni's last, the potential narrowed to the specific, the possibility collapsed to the actual, and the collapsing was the cut, and the cut was coming, and the coming was now.

He placed the plank on the band saw's table, the flat steel surface that supported the wood as it was fed into the blade. He adjusted the blade guide, the small bearing that kept the blade tracking true, and the adjustment was made by feel, Giovanni's fingers turning the knob until the blade ran without vibration, without drift, the blade centered and steady, and the steadiness was the prerequisite for the cut, because a blade that drifts produces a cut that wanders, and a cut that wanders wastes wood, and wasted wood is wasted time, and wasted time in a workshop where the wood has been drying for seven years is a form of disrespect, not moral disrespect but practical disrespect, the disrespect of carelessness applied to a material that has been careful, that has been patient, that has been waiting.

Marco was at his bench, working on his viola, but he stopped when Giovanni carried the plank to the saw. He stopped and he turned and he watched, and the watching was not curiosity but attendance, the presence of the witness, the apprentice observing the master at the moment of commitment, the moment when the work becomes irreversible, and the observation was part of the tradition, part of the transmission, the apprentice watching the master cut so that someday the apprentice will cut and the cutting will carry the memory of the watching, and the memory is the knowledge, and the knowledge is the craft.

Nadia watched. She watched the way she used to watch a conductor, with total attention, with the understanding that the person she was watching had knowledge that could only be transmitted by watching, and the watching was the first stage of learning, the stage that precedes the doing, the stage that the workshop required and that the tradition insisted upon, because in the Cremonese tradition the apprentice watches for months before the apprentice touches the tools, watches for months before the apprentice is permitted to make a cut on a piece of wood that matters, and the months of watching are not wasted time but foundational time, the time during which the eye learns what the hand will later execute, the time during which the mind absorbs the rhythms and the gestures and the speeds and the pressures that the work requires, and the absorbing is unconscious, is involuntary, is the body's way of learning from the body it observes, the mirror neurons firing, the motor cortex mapping the movements it sees onto the movements it will someday make.

Giovanni switched on the saw. The motor hummed. The blade moved, a silver blur, the teeth invisible at speed, the blade becoming a line rather than a loop, a line of cutting potential, a line that would become the cut when the wood met it, and the meeting was the event, the event that the morning had been building toward, the event that the seven years of drying had been building toward, the event that was small — a man feeding a plank of wood into a saw — and large — the first act in the creation of the last violin — and the smallness and the largeness coexisted because the craft is like that, the craft is always both, the daily act and the generational tradition, the individual cut and the five centuries of cutting, the hand and the history, the moment and the eternity.

He fed the plank into the blade. The blade bit. The spruce parted. The cut was straight, following a pencil line that Giovanni had drawn on the plank's surface, a line that divided the plank into two pieces, the division called bookmatching in English, the technique of cutting a plank down the center and opening the two halves like a book, the two halves being mirror images of each other, the grain pattern of the left half reflected in the right half, the reflection producing the symmetrical appearance that is one of the violin's visual hallmarks, the grain lines of the top plate radiating from the center joint like the ribs of a leaf, like the branches of a tree, like the thing the wood was before it became the thing the wood is becoming.

The saw cut through the spruce with a sound that was halfway between a whisper and a scream, the sound of toothed steel meeting aged wood, the sound of the cut, and the sound was information, the sound told Giovanni about the blade's sharpness and the wood's density and the feed rate's correctness, the sound was a monitoring system, a feedback loop, the ear governing the hand that fed the wood into the blade, the ear and the hand in conversation, the conversation that the craft is built upon, the conversation between the senses and the actions, the monitoring and the doing, the listening and the cutting.

The plank divided. Two halves fell apart on the table, the cut surfaces revealed, and the cut surfaces were the inner face of the wood, the face that had been hidden inside the plank for seven years, the face that no light had touched, and the face was beautiful. The grain was tight, straight, even, the lines running from one end to the other with a regularity that was not mechanical but organic, the regularity of a tree that grew in the same conditions year after year, the same cold, the same light, the same soil, the same altitude in the same valley in the same mountains, the constancy of the environment producing the constancy of the grain, and the constancy was the quality, the acoustic quality that Giovanni had been waiting for, the quality that the tapping had predicted and that the cut now confirmed.

Giovanni switched off the saw. The motor wound down, the blade slowed, the hum descended in pitch, a decrescendo, and the workshop returned to its usual quiet, the quiet of hand tools and breathing and the small sounds of the building existing around the work.

He picked up one of the halves. He held it to the light. The light from the north-facing window passed through the wood — not entirely through, the wood was not that thin, not yet, but the light penetrated the surface and illuminated the grain from within, the way sunlight illuminates a hand held up to the sky, the flesh becoming translucent, the structure visible, and the wood's structure was visible, the grain lines glowing, the medullary rays — the tiny channels that run perpendicular to the grain, connecting the tree's inner bark to its heartwood — catching the light and refracting it, producing a subtle shimmer on the surface that woodworkers call silking and that luthiers call the character of the wood.

He handed the half to Nadia. She took it. She held it the way he had held it, to the light, and the light entered the wood and the wood glowed and the glowing was the quality, the quality that made this particular piece of spruce from this particular valley in these particular mountains suitable for the top plate of a violin, the quality that could not be manufactured or simulated or produced by any process other than the slow growth of a tree in a cold climate and the slow drying of the wood in a warm attic and the patience of the maker who waited for both.

The wood was light in her hands. Light in weight, lighter than she expected, the spruce being one of the lightest commercial woods, its density low because the wood fibers are thin and the cells are large and the ratio of structure to space is low, and the lowness is the point, the lowness is the stiffness-to-weight ratio that makes spruce the ideal material for a soundboard, the plate that must vibrate freely, that must convert the energy of the string's vibration into the movement of air with minimal loss, and the minimal loss requires minimal mass, requires lightness, requires the lightness that the spruce provides, the lightness that is not weakness but efficiency, the lightness that is the acoustic property, the property that the tree developed over a century of mountain growth and that the maker will preserve and enhance through the carving, through the graduating, through the shaping that transforms the half-plank into the top plate of the violin.

She handed the wood back to Giovanni. He carried the two halves to his workbench. He placed them side by side, the cut surfaces facing up, the mirror image visible, the bookmatched grain symmetrical across the center line, and the symmetry was the foundation, the visual and structural foundation of the top plate, the foundation upon which the arching and the graduation and the f-holes and the bass bar would be built, layer upon layer of shaping and carving, each layer adding to the acoustic character, each layer bringing the wood closer to the sound it would produce.

He picked up his hand plane. Not the thumb plane, not the small one, but the larger plane, the jointing plane, the plane used for flattening surfaces, for making two surfaces true and straight and flat so that they can be glued together, and the gluing of the two bookmatched halves along the center joint was the next step, the step that would transform two halves into a single plate, and the transformation required flatness, required trueness, required the particular precision that the jointing plane was designed to produce.

He planed. The plane moved over the cut surface of the spruce, and the shavings curled from the mouth of the plane, thin translucent curls of spruce, and the curls were the evidence, the evidence of the blade's sharpness and the surface's flatness and the hand's steadiness, and the evidence accumulated on the bench in a pile of pale shavings that smelled of the forest, the smell of fresh-cut spruce, the resinous, clean, almost astringent smell that is the smell of the tree's interior, the smell that has been sealed inside the wood for seven years and that is released by the cutting and the planing, the smell that fills the workshop and that is the workshop's primary atmosphere, the olfactory background against which all the other smells — the varnish, the glue, the oil on the tools, the espresso from the morning — are foreground.

He planed and the surface became flat. He checked the flatness with a straightedge, a steel ruler that he held against the surface and sighted along, looking for light between the ruler and the wood, light being the indicator of low spots, of hollows, of areas where the plane had not yet reached, and there was no light, and the no-light was the flatness, and the flatness was correct.

He planed the other half. The same process, the same shavings, the same checking, the same flatness. Then he placed the two halves together, the flattened surfaces touching, and he held them up to the window, and the light from the window reached the joint, the line where the two surfaces met, and no light passed through the joint, and the no-light was the fit, and the fit was perfect, meaning that the two surfaces were so flat and so true that they met without gaps, without spaces, without any interruption in the contact, the contact continuous from one end of the joint to the other, and the continuity of the contact was the prerequisite for the gluing, because the hide glue that Giovanni used was strong but thin, and thin glue requires continuous contact, requires surfaces that meet without gaps, requires the flatness that the jointing plane had produced, and the flatness was the craft, the invisible craft, the craft of preparation, the craft that precedes the more visible craft of carving and shaping, the craft that is the foundation, and the foundation must be perfect because everything that follows rests upon it.

He heated the glue. The hide glue came in granules, dry amber pellets that Giovanni kept in a glass jar on a shelf above his bench. He poured the granules into a small pot, added water, and placed the pot on a glue heater, an electric device that maintained the water bath at a constant temperature, the temperature that kept the glue liquid but not too hot, because hide glue that is too hot loses its strength and hide glue that is too cool becomes thick and difficult to spread and produces a joint that is weak, and the weakness of the joint is the weakness of the instrument, because the center joint of the top plate runs the length of the body, runs directly beneath the bridge, runs through the area of maximum vibration, and a weak center joint is a joint that will eventually fail, will eventually open, will eventually produce a buzz or a rattle or a crack, and the buzz or the rattle or the crack is the sound of failure, and the sound of failure is the sound that the craft exists to prevent.

The glue melted. The granules dissolved. The liquid was amber, thin, warm, and Giovanni dipped a brush into it and spread it on both surfaces of the joint, quickly, because hide glue sets fast, the glue cooling and thickening as soon as it leaves the pot, the window of workability measured in minutes, and the minutes were the urgency, the only urgency in the workshop, the only moment in the entire process of building a violin when speed matters more than patience, when the hand must move quickly, when the brush must spread and the surfaces must meet and the clamps must close before the glue cools and the joint is compromised.

Giovanni spread the glue. He pressed the two halves together. He closed the clamps, six small clamps spaced along the length of the joint, each clamp tightened with a quarter-turn, no more, the pressure firm but not excessive, because excessive pressure squeezes out too much glue and a starved joint is as weak as a thick joint, and the balance between too much and too little is the knowledge, the knowledge of the hands that have clamped a thousand joints and that know the right pressure the way a musician knows the right bow pressure, by feel, by the response of the material, by the feedback that the object gives to the hand that holds it.

Glue squeezed from the joint, a thin amber line along the seam, and the line was the evidence, the evidence of sufficient glue, the evidence of correct pressure, the evidence that the joint was right. Giovanni wiped the excess glue with a damp cloth, gently, the wiping removing the visible glue without disturbing the joint, and the gentleness was the care, and the care was the craft.

The clamped plate lay on the workbench. The clamps held the two halves together. The glue was setting, the hide glue molecules cross-linking as the glue cooled, the cross-linking producing the bond that would hold the joint for the life of the instrument, which could be centuries, which had been centuries for the instruments of Stradivari and Guarneri, whose center joints still held, whose glue still bonded, the glue made from the same substance as Giovanni's glue, the same animal collagen, the same chemistry, the same molecular process of cross-linking and curing, the same bond connecting the same wood in the same city for five hundred years.

Nadia stood at the bench and she looked at the clamped plate and she understood that she was looking at the beginning of the violin's voice. The top plate. The soundboard. The component that would vibrate, that would produce the sound, that would be the voice. And the voice began here, in the joint, in the glue, in the flatness of the surfaces, in the straightness of the grain, in the density of the wood, in the century of growth and the seven years of drying and the morning of cutting and planing and gluing, and all of it, all the time and all the patience and all the craft, was in service of the sound, and the sound was the point, and the point was the thing she had lost and the thing she was learning to build, and the loss and the building were not the same but they were connected, connected by the wood, connected by the hands, connected by the instrument that she could no longer play and that she was learning to make.

The plate would dry overnight. The clamps would be removed in the morning. The planing and the shaping and the carving and the graduating would begin. The work would continue.

Giovanni cleaned his tools. He wiped the jointing plane, he washed the glue brush, he covered the glue pot, he swept the shavings into a pile and then into a bin, and the sweeping was the closing, the daily closing, the ritual of the end of the workday that was as important as the ritual of the beginning, because the workshop must be clean for the morning, the bench must be clear, the tools must be in their places, the shavings must be swept, the order must be restored so that the order can be disrupted again by the work, and the disruption and the restoration are the rhythm, the daily rhythm, the rhythm that the craft lives inside, the rhythm of making and cleaning and making and cleaning, the rhythm that is the heartbeat of the workshop, the heartbeat that has been beating on Via Palazzo for more than a century and that would beat, Nadia understood, for as long as someone stood at the bench and picked up the tools and set them to the wood and cut.

She swept. She swept the shavings from her section of the bench, the shavings from the practice cuts she had made that morning on the offcuts Giovanni had given her, the shavings that were the evidence of her learning, the curls of spruce that were too thick or too thin or uneven or rough, the shavings that recorded her hands' education in the language of the plane, and the education was ongoing, and the shavings would improve, would thin, would become more consistent, more translucent, more like Giovanni's shavings, which were the standard, which were the goal, which were the shavings of a man who had been planing spruce for fifty years and whose shavings were so consistent that they could be used as a measure, as a gauge, as the physical embodiment of the skill that Nadia was learning, the skill that was entering her hands one stroke at a time, one day at a time, one shaving at a time.

She swept and the workshop emptied of the day's debris and the emptying was the preparation and the preparation was for tomorrow and tomorrow was the next day of the apprenticeship and the apprenticeship was the life and the life was the work and the work was the wood and the wood was on the bench, clamped and drying, becoming the plate, becoming the voice, becoming the violin that Giovanni would make and that Nadia would help make and that the world would hear and that the hearing would be the sound of everything she had learned in this workshop on Via Palazzo in the city of Cremona in the country of Italy in the autumn of the year she turned twenty-eight, the year the spruce was cut, the year the first cut was made, the year the last violin began.