While our craftsmanship eventually reaches its peak, our concept gains consistency and depth over time.The acoustic properties become more refined with increasing experience, and the result more exclusive – the instrument becomes “valuable” in a broader sense.
私たちの職人としての技能はいつしか頂点に達しますが、その一方で、私たちのコンセプトは時間の経過とともに一貫性と深みを増していきます。
経験を重ねるにつれて音響特性はより洗練され、その結果はより高級なものとなり、楽器は広い意味で「価値のある」ものとなっていきます。
MY RANCH
BALANCE
I AM HERE, 3:30 a.m. I am sitting in the open doorway of my ranch in southern Mexico, there is a rustling in the undergrowth. Forest spirits or some other creatures.
I think about the balance of a baroque violin for a top musician...
The balance varies imperceptibly for each musician. Wood density, fingerboard, curvature - but this “almost nothing” makes all the difference. It's not about “either/or,” not about a “happy medium,” and not about certainty beyond doubt... it's about “balance.”
Footsteps on the stony dirt road. A healer who wants to gather herbs at dawn, or riffraff going to steal avocados... I don't know. The dogs are barking, coyotes are howling in the distance.
I AM HERE.
For 28 years.
I traded a life in Europe for it. A debatable decision that was made when my first son was born here, his mother Mexican, an eternal love!
This is where I built my first violin 18 years ago, and this is where I will build my last.
I am far away, but I bring the instruments to your home. To Europe or to Japan....
The musician will surely write to me soon... as soon as she is ready. Then we will talk... not about balance, but about what she needs.
It would be my first job for next year. The first of two jobs I take on per year. No more than that. I need time.
UNFORGETTABLE
In the early 1980s, when Italy was still Italy, I attended a chamber concert at the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona.
The violinist was perhaps in her mid-thirties, blonde, from a country of the North.
Her violin was her voice, the measures of music her words, the composition her life.
I was captivated, enchanted.
A defining moment.
Years later, the concert remained vivid in my memory, but the program was lost, the quartet's name forgotten. I called the theater, could name the month and year, but time had swallowed everything, as it often does. There had never been such a concert in that theater, they said.
I was in my early twenties then, studying for becoming cabinet maker. But that evening, I believe, a seed fell into my subconscious—to one day build a violin, this instrument that can become the voice of a human being.
Today, in my workshop in Mexico, "The Guarneri Baroque Violin" has become reality,
40 years after that unforgettable concert in Verona.