ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702100090
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-21 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: JUDY SCHWAB SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
New River Valley instrument makers follow different roads to success in their craft
A winter weekend finds Daniel Foster in the shop connected to his house advising a client on how to improve a low-end Chinese cello she bought. Drawing a bow across its strings, Foster makes the instrument say "aaaahhh" and then suggests a prescription for strings. The sun bounces off a row of cellos hanging by their necks from the shop ceiling.
China and other countries with cheap labor are the strongest competition for American handbuilt fretted instruments. Some instrument parts can be manufactured in countries like Germany. Other parts, like the tops of violins, must be hand carved, and they are done cheaply in China. The result is a shiny new instrument at a fraction of the cost it takes to make one here.
While local instrument-maker Olen Gardner found time to make his guitars and such around regular jobs, Foster has taken the other path. He has been building cellos, viola de gambas and violins for 23 years, nineteen of those in Blacksburg. Like Gardner he started working with wood as a child - building bird houses when he was 4.
Unlike Gardner, his interest did not spring from a family tradition but rather his education. Foster has a bachelor's degree in music but was also inclined toward engineering. Now he feels like he is an acoustical engineer. "There's a lot of engineering and a lot of intuition," Foster said of his work.
It all started in Iowa when he began making Renaissance instruments. He had tried teaching music but soon discovered that "teaching has little to do with music." He went to a workshop one summer for vacation and learned to make a bass viola de gamba, "an aristocratic cousin of the cello." It's a six-stringed instrument and was developed as a solo instrument used in small ensembles. It was "what the gentility did before television with gambas and flutes and recorders, all those gentle Renaissance instruments," Foster explained.
Although the workshop teacher didn't encourage him, he worked hard and nearly completed an instrument in a week. Then he went home and built a couple more. Then he went to a national conference and sold one of the instruments. Soon after, he sold another.
This began to look easy. It might have been easy if sales came with health insurance attached, and instruments didn't go in and out of fashion. When that happened to his gambas, he decided, "I'll just learn to make violins."
He drove from Blacksburg to a workshop in New Jersey for a string of weekends to learn to make them. Beginning his third decade as an instrument builder, despite lean times, he believes he is still learning and cannot bring himself to release substandard work.
"The old masters of the 17th and 18th centuries pushed the violin as far as it would go," Foster said of the design.
In addition to the carved neck, the curves that spread across the whole front of the violin are carved into the wood. Foster begins with a three-quarter-inch-thick piece of spruce for a violin and carves the curves into the violin's shape with thumb planes and scraping tools he makes. If the sound is not good, the whole front comes off, and he carves a new one. The spruce in violins is usually Sitka or Engelman from the West Coast. The supply is being depleted by the housing industry.
The theory is the best wood comes from high on the mountain so it's slow growing and some say it should even come from a certain height on the tree. It's good to start with old wood. "Spruce cut 50 years ago is ready to use."
True to handcrafting tradition, Foster makes his own varnish. He also makes his own beer, perhaps a habit inspired by working at home.
Although there is no health insurance, no retirement, and sometimes no income built into this lifestyle, it can be ideal. So ideal it has made the Foster kids unrealistic. Oh, they are responsible and hold jobs but they can't help wishing they could show up for work when they're good and ready instead of when the boss says.
If it's a nice day and the family wants to go for a hike they can go. If not, Foster can work on instruments and strategize how to fight the cheap imports and the current penchant for old instruments. Like his coffee cup says, "Stradivari made new violins also."
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Gene Dalton. 1. Instrument-maker Dan Foster works on aby CNBnearby finished cello in his Blacksburg shop (ran on NRV-1). 2. With
cellos he's made as a backdrop, Blacksburg instrument-maker Dan
Foster (above) holds one of his custom made violins. Olen Gardner
(above right) plays one of the banjos he's made in his Riner shop.
It's a far cry from the first one he made from a cigar box. color.