Of course I am biased, but I know you are out there -- you, with the burning desire to make your own instrument.  Who wouldn't want to be surrounded by the smell of shavings, peel out an arching from a solid hunk of wood, or see a scroll gradually take shape? And then brag to your musician friends that you MADE THIS YOURSELF?
  If this sounds exciting to you, please know that, given enough interest, I will be offering a weekly evening class starting this fall.  More information will be posted under the "Classes" tab soon.  If you are interested in taking the class, please contact me to get on the list!
  

About a week or so ago, I received a phone call from a bubbly young woman who works for KSTP, one of the local TV stations.  They were hoping to interview a Twin Cities artistic type for their morning show.  
 Just between you and me, I don't watch TV, and especially not in the mornings.  So I didn't know who or what I was going to deal with. But I hardly ever say no to an adventure, whatever its shape or size.  Of course, the hosts Megan Newquist and Chris Egert were perfectly professional, as was everyone else involved. A fun experience!
 Some footage was shot in our new workshop, some in an Uptown breakfast restaurant (which I will try out next week).  
  If you are so inclined, you can watch the segment here: kstp.com/special-coverage/minnesota-live/minnesotas-creative-corner-ute-zahn/.

   Well, of course my intention was to blog at least once a month, but life has a way of getting busy.
  Last summer at the Oberlin Violin Makers' workshop, an idea was born for a special kind of group project, which we called "Violinabox".  This involves ten luthiers from all over the world working together (sequentially) to make a violin.  Each maker was tasked with sourcing the materials locally, and cooperating with other local craftspeople in the process of making their part.
  This project was the brainchild of Andrew Carruthers from Santa Rosa, CA.  He spent part of the pandemic making a violin from local materials and enlisting a slew of craftspeople to help him with materials and techniques most of us have lost touch with.  You can find his exploits here youtu.be/yhbjHFC14-M. 
  Our violin started its journey in Canberra, Australia, where the rib structure was born, and a very special (and very sturdy) box made to keep it safe on its travels.  Minneapolis was the next stop.
  I wasn't sure what to expect, never having made a sequential violin before.  What would the ribs be made of? What was hidden in the secret compartment? 
 It was my job to make the back for the violin.  I enrolled several luthier friends -- violin maker Steve Rossow (www.steverossow.com) and archetier Lee Guthrie (www.guthriebows.com); to find some horsetail and a suitable piece of wood, respectively.  I also roped in my friend Chris Parker to film and edit my exploits. 
If you would like to find out more about this, please follow the violin's journey at 
instagram.com/violinabox?igshid=Zjc2ZTc4Nzk=  
  
  

 A few months into the pandemic, I decided to make a cello.  I had not made one for a few years -- cellos represent a sizable outlay in capital and time, especially if there is no down payment to sweeten the deal.  But as a pandemic project for a housebound person, making a cello really couldn't be beat.
 I selected the wood:  A gorgeous one-piece back with matching ribs and neck, which I had bought ten years prior, and a lovely piece of spruce from way back in the 1980s.
  The first problem I ran into was heat.  The back was huge, and although I had already sawn large chunks off each side, as well as the top and bottom part, there was a lot of carving left to do.  I picked away at it as I could stand it, taking long breaks and large gulps of water as I went.
  Then, for a couple of months, I got busy with other things.  When I returned to the cello, I made good progress, I thought -- until it came time to glue the body together the following spring.  Over the winter months, the back had shrunk.  It had shrunk so much it was now overhanging the ribs.
  Panicked, I called my friend Bill Scott.  We talked it over and came to the conclusion that I would have to re-size (shrink) the ribs to fit the back, and make a new belly.  I went about my tailoring work, trying to think upbeat thoughts like "just think, I will have a quarter of the next cello already made by the time this one is finished!" and "after this, making a violin/viola will be a piece of cake!"
  I went through the process of making a new top, glued the body together, and parked it in my UV cabinet.
  Carving the scroll was a lot of fun, except when I slipped with the gouge and carved my hand instead, which slowed me down a bit again. Still, once the cut was somewhat healed, and the scroll finished, I varnished everything and was very pleased with the effect of my home-cooked varnish combined with a pigment I had made.
  I happily anticipated finishing the instrument by the end of the year and was looking forward to getting a couple of months to play it in before taking it to Georgia for the "Celebrating Women Luthiers" exhibition, when I dropped the cello on the concrete floor in my basement on the way into the UV cabinet one day.  All in all, I got off lightly:  The back sprung loose from the ribs most of the way around, and one of the edges was a bit scraped up.  I only cried a little.
 As I was shaping the neck, I felt stunned when I encountered a large crack in the neckroot.  I called my friend Bill, and he suggested trying to fill it by inlaying a piece of wood.  I spent a day fitting a sliver of maple to the crack, but really had no way of clamping it.  After I glued it, I found that not only did the crack now look considerably worse, but it had perversely grown longer.
  I gritted my teeth and sent an email to my colleagues in town, asking if anyone had a pre-cut cello neck graft.
One person did, but when I planed the piece of wood he sold me, I found a knot right in the neckroot area.  So I sacrificed a full cello neck block which I had been saving for a special instrument. I was now about three weeks away from my date of departure for Georgia.
  Dismantling the cello was not much fun, especially as I had fitted the original neck with a carbon fiber reinforcement rod. But I got it done, all the way wondering if maybe the universe was trying to send me a message.  Was it telling me to give up? Was I tilting at windmills?  Or was my resolve being tested?
  I fitted the neck graft, glued on the fingerboard, shaped the neck and set it, and reshaped the neckroot.  I parked the cello in the UV cabinet again, to let the neckroot build a tan.  Next time I looked at the cello, the varnish was covered in deep craquelure.  
  A strong urge to burn the cello made itself felt at this point. I resisted the urge,and decided that maybe antiquing the damn thing was the way to go.  
 With just about a week left and the varnish nowhere near settled, I began the process of setting up the instrument for playing, agonizing all the way over whether or not to even bother taking it to Georgia.  The flights were booked, for both the cello and myself, but I suspected taking it in all its ugliness would be rather shooting myself in the foot.
​ I called my friend Bill.  He swung by and looked over my mess.  "I feel I would be crazy to take this," I confided.  Bill was blunt: "I think you would be crazy not to!" 
  The cello made one last attempt at bucking me -- fitting the endpin, which is normally a very straightforward process, went horribly wrong.  The second endpin was still not straight, but at this point, there was no time left to fix it.
The first time I pulled a bow across the cello's strings was disappointing.  Its timbre was thin and brash and the D-String sounded like cardboard. After experimenting with four, five, six, seven, eight strings, the ninth finally made it so I could stand the sound of what I now thought of as "the thing".
  Arriving at the Huthmaker shop, I removed the cello from its case, shame-faced and cringing.  "Looks kinda cool!", said one colleague; "wow! amazing craquelure!" said another.  One person told me the cello's sound was reminiscent of a spring day, clear and sunny.  Another said "it sounds so f***ing beautiful!"
  There are moments in life that are deeply humbling. This is one of them. I am a luthier and a cellist, but somehow completely missed the character of the thing I made.  The cello will not be coming home.  I feel sad that I didn't get to spend more time with it -- time I would have spent trying to improve something that was clearly good enough, if not better. 
  The moral of the story: I don't know what the moral of the story is.  Perseverance? 
Or maybe that favourite bumper sticker of mine: Don't believe everything you think?

I just returned home from Suwanee, Georgia, where a truly groundbreaking event kicked off this last weekend: the first ever international exhibition of female luthiers' work.  Some thirty women contributed their violins, violas, cellos and bows.  The first host shop -- Huthmaker Violins -- pulled out all the stops both to make us makers welcome, and to showcase our work, skill, experience and personal (often quirky) take on the field of lutherie, with a "Meet the Makers" reception, a panel discussion, and an instrument "taste test" in the beautiful Suwanee City Hall.  The Huthmaker family and their staff worked incredibly hard to give a wide audience access to our work -- I cannot adequately express my gratitude to all of them!
  The exhibit will be open at Huthmaker Violins through this week and then travel on to Alexandria, VA (April 1st through 16th) and S. Burlington, VT (April 25th through May 7th).  For more information, and to find a list of participants and their bios, visit
 www.celebratingwomenluthiers.com.

This is a video I made for the virtual Festival of the Viola a couple of months or so ago -- I have finally remembered/worked out how, to post it! 

The Huthmaker Violin Shop in Suwanee, GA has been sponsoring a series of talks aimed at all musicians who are currently stuck at home and would like to deepen their conncetion to music-making and the instruments they love.  I was honoured to present a talk on violin making last week.  No "secrets of Stradivari" or magical silver bullets here -- but if you would like an overview, click below to check out the video!
​Class for the Curious Musician- A Night with a Violin Maker, Ute Zahn - Bing video

Due to the Corona-situation, I moved operations back to my home workshop a couple of months ago.  I expected to be in the studio all the time, cranking out instruments, but this turned out to be harder than expected.  Nature abhors a vacuum, the home studio is now filled with donations for LSF, and in order to have space to work, I must first make space to work.
  I have not, however, totally succumbed to quarantine-induced inertia, but got stuck in with my cello practice in order to present some concerts from my porch, for neighbours, friends and passers-by.  One of my musician neighbours came up with the idea of a neighbourhood concert porch crawl, which is planned for the last weekend of May.  I love being part of artists' fruitful interactions at work!

   One aspect of violin making I butt heads with is the obsession with having to match what those Italian guys  did three or four centuries ago.  Even though there are a number of makers of different time periods with divergent styles to base one's work on, the boundaries of what constitutes acceptable styling and execution in lutherie are pretty narrowly defined,  and while I often yearn for more artistic freedom of expression, it was with some trepidation that I started entertaining the idea of a non-traditional inlay pattern. 
Brescian-style instruments lend themselves to a freer style -- they are not subject to the same strict geometric and taste requirements as Cremonese models.  Still, I wondered "am I too personal? rebellious? will this be considered too flashy? trashy?"
  In the end, I arrived at something that I thought to be elegantly stylized and, for students of Eastern Philosophies like myself, somewhat evocative of their recurring themes; visible above: the evolution of an invisible idea  into a two-dimensional template into a three-dimensional channel, coming to full fruition (excuse the pun) in the finished design. 
  

  While attempting to cook some varnish the other day, I dropped my thermometer onto the patio, where it shattered into two big and countless tiny pieces. 
  I was very attached to my thermometer -- it was the old-fashioned kind, a hollow glass column containing a bead of mercury, a hand-and-mouth-made precision lab instrument which I had purchased for a song thirty years ago at "China Products".  China Products is where Hong Kongers went if they needed to buy something functional, rather than stylish.  It was a little piece of mainland China right in Hong Kong -- a place to buy sensible clothing and kitchenware.  Browsing was not encouraged. On entering the store, an attendant would greet you with aggressive cheer to ask you what you were looking for, then follow you around until you had paid for your purchases.  
  Back to the varnish cooking.  I was at that most delicate stage of having to add the turpentine, where obtaining accurate temperature measurements is vital, and I had a patio full of mercury.  Thank God for google!  It reassured me about the dangers of mercury on the loose (not as bad as I thought it was) and told me how to safely collect it.  I got to work with shaving foam and a little brush, patiently picking up ever-smaller droplets of mercury, wiping them off on a damp paper towel, sealing everything inside many plastic bags.  But then google directed me to check with the local fire department about where to dispose of the lot.
  I figured the local fire department might have an interest in someone cooking varnish on their patio, but my conscience won out, so I made my way over there.  It was evening and all was dark, but when I rang the doorbell, a young firefighter came out.  I told her I had been cooking … something … on the patio, and had broken my thermometer, and google had directed me to her.  She scratched her head and invited me inside, where she called the captain.  "Captain, there is a citizen here who broke her thermometer when she was grilling …"
  When I told the Captain that the government website had referred me to the fire department, he quipped "Well, I would just refer you to the nearest trash can!"  Then  apologized a thousand times, saying "we didn't get any training on mercury."
  In the end, he gave me a couple of suggestions for where to ispose of my "hazmats".  It made my job sound so high-stakes and adventurous.