Local Colour
This article originally appeared in the November 2005 issue of The Strad magazine.
by Colin Eatock
About 200 kilometres northwest of Toronto lies Owen Sound, nestled round a natural harbour on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. It’s a quiet, pretty town of 30,000 people, located far enough from big cities to be of no interest to commuters, that acts as a service community for the outlying counties of Grey and Bruce. Owen Sound is popular with boaters in the summer and skiers in the winter, and was once known for shipbuilding. Today, however, among knowledgeable musicians the town is known for its luthiers.
There’s certainly no lack of luthiers in Canada, and there are instrument builders of every kind from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Ontario-based Raymond Schryer rose to international fame when one of his cellos won the gold medal at the Cremona Triennale; and when, in 1995, bass virtuoso Gary Karr was looking for a replacement for his Italian bass, he commissioned James Ham, a luthier in Victoria, British Columbia, to build him a new instrument. Then there’s Chris Sandvoss in Calgary, Quentin Playfair in Toronto and Denis Cormier in Montreal; while Joseph Curtin, based across the border in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is also a Canadian.
Although there is still no formal instrument building course in Canada, the construction of stringed instruments in the country dates back to the 18th century. Today’s Canadian luthiers enjoy several advantages: plenty of good wood; a growing acceptance among Canadian players; proximity to the vast US market; and a beneficial exchange rate with the American dollar. Luthiers can live just about anywhere they want, setting up shop in big cities, small towns and the countryside. Nevertheless, the presence of half a dozen luthiers in the Owen Sound area – far removed from any concentration of professional musicians – is remarkable.
It’s worth referring to it as “the Owen Sound area,” as only two makers live in Owen Sound itself: Lou Currah lives on the eastern edge of the town and produces instruments for a diverse local market; Edouard Bartlett, a retired school teacher who’s been building student instruments for half a century, works in a small studio behind a used-appliance shop in the centre of town.
Bartlett believes the area has become popular with luthiers because of its affordability. “You can have a house, or a farm, and make a few violins and live at a reasonable cost,” he explains. “Gradually a group of young men who were making violins came up here, when they realized what a nice place it was to live.”
The younger luthiers began to settle there in the late 1980s and they have brought international attention to the area. The first to arrive, in 1987, were Greg Walke and Sybille Ruppert. He was from Toronto, she was from Germany, and they had met seven years earlier at the school for makers in Abertridwr, Wales, where they studied with Malcolm Siddall. After spending several years working in shops in Wiesbaden and Stuttgart, they chose to leave Europe.
“Sybille wanted to come to Canada,” explains Walke, “and I missed certain aspects of life in Canada: the outdoors and the sparser population. We wouldn’t have been able to start our own business in Germany so easily, because of its guild system. We had friends in the Owen Sound area, so that’s why we came here.”
After one year on a farm, the couple moved to the village of Paisley, in nearby Bruce County, where they bought an old house and built a shared studio at the bottom of the garden. Walke is exclusively a luthier, while Ruppert divides her time between building and repairing instruments. They make violins and violas, but they both have a special interest in cellos.
“It was difficult getting started,” recalls Walke. “We were so far from any musical centre that it was a problem becoming known. We found that we had to do a lot of travelling.” Today they sell their violins and violas on consignment through shops in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, but they often sell their cellos directly – Walke’s for $20,000, and Ruppert’s for $12,000. As for where the instruments end up, Walke believes he currently has some in the orchestras of Toronto and Quebec City, but says he doesn’t really keep track of these things.
Walke and Ruppert are both candid about their influences: he uses the “Davidoff” Strad as a model and she prefers a Rugeri cello. “But our instruments aren’t really copies,” Walke says, pointing out that they don’t use moulds. “Rather, they’re inspired by these particular instruments.” Similarly, they make no secret of their fondness for power tools, especially a die grinder that’s good for roughing out cello plates. “It saves about five hours, and a lot of blisters,” laughs Ruppert.
Walke often uses European woods, but Ruppert favours North American varieties (and the irony in this is not lost upon them). They both darken their wood, but balk at elaborate antiquing procedures. They also have a chemical-vapour system for “settling” their instruments, using potassium carbonate to extract moisture and potassium nitrate to increase it. And they like to experiment – Ruppert is working on a set of four violins that will differ only in their final treatments: the first will be boiled, the second will be treated with borax, the third with Magister varnish products, and the fourth will be left untreated. One thing that they don’t do, however, is collaborate. “We work differently,” says Walke, “and I was never interested in making things with other people.” Ruppert agrees. Between them they produce about 16 instruments a year.
The next maker to move to the area was David Prentice, who arrived in 1988. Essentially self-taught, he set up in the village of Flesherton, choosing an old tailor’s shop on the high street as his studio. (He lives with his family in the house attached to it.) His reputation has gradually grown and today his instruments are owned by players in the Toronto and Montreal symphony orchestras, the Dutch Radio Orchestra, the Irish National Orchestra and the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
“I have a lot of machines,” Prentice admits, pointing to his router, sander and band saw. “In my opinion the work’s hard enough without wasting time on things that aren’t going to make any acoustical difference. At one time, the junior man would have done the roughing out, but now he’s a machine. I still end up doing many things by hand, however.”
Prentice makes about ten violins and violas per year. He uses North American woods – Engelman spruce for tops and maple for backs – but favours tried-and-tested European models, patterning his work on Guarneri “del Gesù” and Montagnana designs. Like Walke and Ruppert he is quick to point out that his instruments are not direct copies, but are “based on their sizes and dimensions.” He admires “the patina of warmth that’s associated with old instruments,” and darkens his wood using ultraviolet light and the volcanic stone pozzolano.
His may be a traditional approach to the craft, but Prentice is not adverse to innovation when circumstances require it. “I do about half of my work to order,” he says, “and when I’m making violas, players give me their ideas. I’ve done cut-aways. I just made an instrument for a player who didn’t want a cut-away, but did want an instrument that would allow her to shift more easily. So I made her a viola with a shoulder that was sloped. She was quite happy with that.”
The year after Prentice had arrived, John Newton moved to the Owen Sound area. “The Toronto housing market was at its peak in 1989,” Newton recalls, “and I wanted to be far enough away from the city that real estate prices would be low. I knew that Greg and David had already moved up here, so it seemed like something was happening.” Today he lives with his family in a renovated one-room schoolhouse in the rolling farmland of Grey County. He has set up his shop in the attic, where he works alone, or sometimes with an apprentice, turning out violins, violas and the occasional cello. He produces about a dozen instruments a year.
Newton is best known for his violas and has a penchant for the unconventional. “Violin making is so formal,” he says, “and you do the same thing over and over again. It’s fun to give an instrument a more personal character and you can do that with a viola.” He’s made a number of cut-aways, both symmetrical and asymmetrical, and a few cornerless instruments. He also once built a strange viola that looks like it was designed by Salvador Dalí, just to see how it would sound; but he’s never sold it.
“I like to change instruments by changing parts,” explains Newton. “I don’t like to abandon an instrument if it’s not sounding right. Sometimes you have a suspicion that the instrument isn’t working because the back isn’t quite right and sometimes you can fix that with a new back. That’s the only way to learn – the rest is all supposition.” He constantly tries out new varnishes, giving his instruments what he calls a “moderate antique” finish.
Like the other luthiers in the area, Newton has no qualms about using power tools for the rough work. He also uses North American woods – Engelman spruce, Douglas fir and maples – although here his views tend to be a little more conservative. “It’s nice to have super curly, beautiful wood,” he acknowledges, “but I’d rather use material of known acoustical value. A piece of maple can be curly, but I would prefer one with more reflective flashing.”
These days Newton is asking $10,000 for his violins and a little more for violas. He either works to order or sells through dealers in Canada and the US. “My client list is bereft of big-name players,” he explains modestly, “and I don’t pursue those people. But a good example of my work is the viola played by Leslie Robertson of the St Lawrence Quartet. I approached her and said I’d like to make a viola for her on spec and was overjoyed when she liked it.” Almost as an afterthought, he mentions instruments of his in the symphony orchestras in Boston, Cleveland, Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton.
The group’s instruments have acquired a reputation right across Canada. Gerald Stanick, a well-known violist and instrument dealer in Vancouver, knows the work of Newton, Prentice, Walke and Ruppert. “They’re probably under-appreciated in North America,” he says. “But whenever their instruments are played, they’re hailed as excellent.” And could this group of luthiers – all around the age of 50, all living in the same area – be said to constitute a school? The short answer is “No”: they’re simply too independent to be accurately described as such. But the long answer is a little more complicated and must take into account several undeniable similarities.
The makers all like to work alone, although they’re collegial and often in contact with each other. They’re not inclined towards extensive advertising or self-promotion, preferring to let their instruments speak for themselves; if they don’t win competitions then it’s probably because they don’t enter them. And while they’re pragmatic about power tools, they’re painstaking and methodical with every instrument they build, eschewing mass production. Above all, they’re traditionalists who refuse to merely copy, and they’re always interested in new approaches to old problems.
All the makers except for Ruppert were connected with the late Otto Erdesz, who set up shop in Toronto in 1975 and taught Curtin before his move to Michigan. Newton knew him best and, of the group, he’s the closest to an Erdesz student; but Walke and Prentice were also well-acquainted with the Hungarian-born luthier and his work.
“Otto didn’t use jigs, moulds or forms at all,” recalls Newton with admiration. “He preferred to constantly change the details. He had confidence in his ability to draw a nice curve or cut a nice f-hole. His instruments have an almost over-the-top roughness about them, but he had a sophisticated eye. He looked at my first violin and said, 'This is so bad that I can’t let you go on doing it this way!’”
Finally, the luthiers of Owen Sound share an optimistic outlook: a belief that their own work is improving all the time and also that the craft itself is advancing. “Instrument making is more transparent than it used to be,” says Prentice. “Everything used to be so guarded, but now people are more open. Things like measurements, wood and varnish are now openly talked about. And that’s why there’s been such an improvement in the quality of modern instruments. A breath of fresh air has gone through the whole business.”
© Copyright Colin Eatock 2005
by Colin Eatock
About 200 kilometres northwest of Toronto lies Owen Sound, nestled round a natural harbour on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. It’s a quiet, pretty town of 30,000 people, located far enough from big cities to be of no interest to commuters, that acts as a service community for the outlying counties of Grey and Bruce. Owen Sound is popular with boaters in the summer and skiers in the winter, and was once known for shipbuilding. Today, however, among knowledgeable musicians the town is known for its luthiers.
There’s certainly no lack of luthiers in Canada, and there are instrument builders of every kind from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Ontario-based Raymond Schryer rose to international fame when one of his cellos won the gold medal at the Cremona Triennale; and when, in 1995, bass virtuoso Gary Karr was looking for a replacement for his Italian bass, he commissioned James Ham, a luthier in Victoria, British Columbia, to build him a new instrument. Then there’s Chris Sandvoss in Calgary, Quentin Playfair in Toronto and Denis Cormier in Montreal; while Joseph Curtin, based across the border in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is also a Canadian.
Although there is still no formal instrument building course in Canada, the construction of stringed instruments in the country dates back to the 18th century. Today’s Canadian luthiers enjoy several advantages: plenty of good wood; a growing acceptance among Canadian players; proximity to the vast US market; and a beneficial exchange rate with the American dollar. Luthiers can live just about anywhere they want, setting up shop in big cities, small towns and the countryside. Nevertheless, the presence of half a dozen luthiers in the Owen Sound area – far removed from any concentration of professional musicians – is remarkable.
It’s worth referring to it as “the Owen Sound area,” as only two makers live in Owen Sound itself: Lou Currah lives on the eastern edge of the town and produces instruments for a diverse local market; Edouard Bartlett, a retired school teacher who’s been building student instruments for half a century, works in a small studio behind a used-appliance shop in the centre of town.
Bartlett believes the area has become popular with luthiers because of its affordability. “You can have a house, or a farm, and make a few violins and live at a reasonable cost,” he explains. “Gradually a group of young men who were making violins came up here, when they realized what a nice place it was to live.”
The younger luthiers began to settle there in the late 1980s and they have brought international attention to the area. The first to arrive, in 1987, were Greg Walke and Sybille Ruppert. He was from Toronto, she was from Germany, and they had met seven years earlier at the school for makers in Abertridwr, Wales, where they studied with Malcolm Siddall. After spending several years working in shops in Wiesbaden and Stuttgart, they chose to leave Europe.
“Sybille wanted to come to Canada,” explains Walke, “and I missed certain aspects of life in Canada: the outdoors and the sparser population. We wouldn’t have been able to start our own business in Germany so easily, because of its guild system. We had friends in the Owen Sound area, so that’s why we came here.”
After one year on a farm, the couple moved to the village of Paisley, in nearby Bruce County, where they bought an old house and built a shared studio at the bottom of the garden. Walke is exclusively a luthier, while Ruppert divides her time between building and repairing instruments. They make violins and violas, but they both have a special interest in cellos.
“It was difficult getting started,” recalls Walke. “We were so far from any musical centre that it was a problem becoming known. We found that we had to do a lot of travelling.” Today they sell their violins and violas on consignment through shops in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, but they often sell their cellos directly – Walke’s for $20,000, and Ruppert’s for $12,000. As for where the instruments end up, Walke believes he currently has some in the orchestras of Toronto and Quebec City, but says he doesn’t really keep track of these things.
Walke and Ruppert are both candid about their influences: he uses the “Davidoff” Strad as a model and she prefers a Rugeri cello. “But our instruments aren’t really copies,” Walke says, pointing out that they don’t use moulds. “Rather, they’re inspired by these particular instruments.” Similarly, they make no secret of their fondness for power tools, especially a die grinder that’s good for roughing out cello plates. “It saves about five hours, and a lot of blisters,” laughs Ruppert.
Walke often uses European woods, but Ruppert favours North American varieties (and the irony in this is not lost upon them). They both darken their wood, but balk at elaborate antiquing procedures. They also have a chemical-vapour system for “settling” their instruments, using potassium carbonate to extract moisture and potassium nitrate to increase it. And they like to experiment – Ruppert is working on a set of four violins that will differ only in their final treatments: the first will be boiled, the second will be treated with borax, the third with Magister varnish products, and the fourth will be left untreated. One thing that they don’t do, however, is collaborate. “We work differently,” says Walke, “and I was never interested in making things with other people.” Ruppert agrees. Between them they produce about 16 instruments a year.
The next maker to move to the area was David Prentice, who arrived in 1988. Essentially self-taught, he set up in the village of Flesherton, choosing an old tailor’s shop on the high street as his studio. (He lives with his family in the house attached to it.) His reputation has gradually grown and today his instruments are owned by players in the Toronto and Montreal symphony orchestras, the Dutch Radio Orchestra, the Irish National Orchestra and the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
“I have a lot of machines,” Prentice admits, pointing to his router, sander and band saw. “In my opinion the work’s hard enough without wasting time on things that aren’t going to make any acoustical difference. At one time, the junior man would have done the roughing out, but now he’s a machine. I still end up doing many things by hand, however.”
Prentice makes about ten violins and violas per year. He uses North American woods – Engelman spruce for tops and maple for backs – but favours tried-and-tested European models, patterning his work on Guarneri “del Gesù” and Montagnana designs. Like Walke and Ruppert he is quick to point out that his instruments are not direct copies, but are “based on their sizes and dimensions.” He admires “the patina of warmth that’s associated with old instruments,” and darkens his wood using ultraviolet light and the volcanic stone pozzolano.
His may be a traditional approach to the craft, but Prentice is not adverse to innovation when circumstances require it. “I do about half of my work to order,” he says, “and when I’m making violas, players give me their ideas. I’ve done cut-aways. I just made an instrument for a player who didn’t want a cut-away, but did want an instrument that would allow her to shift more easily. So I made her a viola with a shoulder that was sloped. She was quite happy with that.”
The year after Prentice had arrived, John Newton moved to the Owen Sound area. “The Toronto housing market was at its peak in 1989,” Newton recalls, “and I wanted to be far enough away from the city that real estate prices would be low. I knew that Greg and David had already moved up here, so it seemed like something was happening.” Today he lives with his family in a renovated one-room schoolhouse in the rolling farmland of Grey County. He has set up his shop in the attic, where he works alone, or sometimes with an apprentice, turning out violins, violas and the occasional cello. He produces about a dozen instruments a year.
Newton is best known for his violas and has a penchant for the unconventional. “Violin making is so formal,” he says, “and you do the same thing over and over again. It’s fun to give an instrument a more personal character and you can do that with a viola.” He’s made a number of cut-aways, both symmetrical and asymmetrical, and a few cornerless instruments. He also once built a strange viola that looks like it was designed by Salvador Dalí, just to see how it would sound; but he’s never sold it.
“I like to change instruments by changing parts,” explains Newton. “I don’t like to abandon an instrument if it’s not sounding right. Sometimes you have a suspicion that the instrument isn’t working because the back isn’t quite right and sometimes you can fix that with a new back. That’s the only way to learn – the rest is all supposition.” He constantly tries out new varnishes, giving his instruments what he calls a “moderate antique” finish.
Like the other luthiers in the area, Newton has no qualms about using power tools for the rough work. He also uses North American woods – Engelman spruce, Douglas fir and maples – although here his views tend to be a little more conservative. “It’s nice to have super curly, beautiful wood,” he acknowledges, “but I’d rather use material of known acoustical value. A piece of maple can be curly, but I would prefer one with more reflective flashing.”
These days Newton is asking $10,000 for his violins and a little more for violas. He either works to order or sells through dealers in Canada and the US. “My client list is bereft of big-name players,” he explains modestly, “and I don’t pursue those people. But a good example of my work is the viola played by Leslie Robertson of the St Lawrence Quartet. I approached her and said I’d like to make a viola for her on spec and was overjoyed when she liked it.” Almost as an afterthought, he mentions instruments of his in the symphony orchestras in Boston, Cleveland, Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton.
The group’s instruments have acquired a reputation right across Canada. Gerald Stanick, a well-known violist and instrument dealer in Vancouver, knows the work of Newton, Prentice, Walke and Ruppert. “They’re probably under-appreciated in North America,” he says. “But whenever their instruments are played, they’re hailed as excellent.” And could this group of luthiers – all around the age of 50, all living in the same area – be said to constitute a school? The short answer is “No”: they’re simply too independent to be accurately described as such. But the long answer is a little more complicated and must take into account several undeniable similarities.
The makers all like to work alone, although they’re collegial and often in contact with each other. They’re not inclined towards extensive advertising or self-promotion, preferring to let their instruments speak for themselves; if they don’t win competitions then it’s probably because they don’t enter them. And while they’re pragmatic about power tools, they’re painstaking and methodical with every instrument they build, eschewing mass production. Above all, they’re traditionalists who refuse to merely copy, and they’re always interested in new approaches to old problems.
All the makers except for Ruppert were connected with the late Otto Erdesz, who set up shop in Toronto in 1975 and taught Curtin before his move to Michigan. Newton knew him best and, of the group, he’s the closest to an Erdesz student; but Walke and Prentice were also well-acquainted with the Hungarian-born luthier and his work.
“Otto didn’t use jigs, moulds or forms at all,” recalls Newton with admiration. “He preferred to constantly change the details. He had confidence in his ability to draw a nice curve or cut a nice f-hole. His instruments have an almost over-the-top roughness about them, but he had a sophisticated eye. He looked at my first violin and said, 'This is so bad that I can’t let you go on doing it this way!’”
Finally, the luthiers of Owen Sound share an optimistic outlook: a belief that their own work is improving all the time and also that the craft itself is advancing. “Instrument making is more transparent than it used to be,” says Prentice. “Everything used to be so guarded, but now people are more open. Things like measurements, wood and varnish are now openly talked about. And that’s why there’s been such an improvement in the quality of modern instruments. A breath of fresh air has gone through the whole business.”
© Copyright Colin Eatock 2005
