'Violin Maker': A string-along look at the craft

'Violin Maker': A string-along look at the craft

The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop
By John Marchese
HarperCollins, 215 pp., $24.95By Ron Schoolmeester, Special for USA TODAY

The secret of how a simple chunk of wood can be carved into an instrument that evokes what many music lovers consider the most emotive of sounds endures as one of life's great mysteries.

To unravel the secret, John Marchese, a trained trumpeter and skilled writer, spent countless hours in the Brooklyn workshop of Sam Zygmuntowicz, the son of Holocaust survivors who is now one of the world's premier luthiers (violin makers).

What emerges is a deeply descriptive and appreciative look at a slow, exacting craft that has changed hardly at all over the past several hundred years — but Maker yields little in solving how that near-magical sound was or is created.

Zygmuntowicz likens the process to that old joke about how Michelangelo sculpted David: He just took a hunk of marble and carved away everything that didn't look like David.

Ah, were it so easy.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: David | Holocaust survivors | Antonio Stradivari | Emerson String Quartet

Marchese tries to build tension into his story by following Zygmuntowicz's creation of a violin for Eugene Drucker of the internationally acclaimed Emerson String Quartet.

Drucker already owns a 300-year-old instrument that was made by Antonio Stradivari, the most accomplished luthier of all time.

But for those who wouldn't know a Stradivari from a Guarneri from a Zygmuntowicz (and aren't curious enough to explore the difference), this is probably not a must-read.