GREGG ALF LIKES TO COOK, and often uses it as a metaphor for teaching violin making, especially varnish. Like the cook, the violin maker must learn to work with the ingredients at hand—how they work together, how to assess their condition, and how to accommodate their variable natures, adjusting seasoning and technique accordingly. In cooking varnish, no two oils are exactly the same.

His studio occupies a contemporary building on a quiet side street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The entire house is given over to violin making, from the attic where wood is stored, to the ground-floor kitchen; Alf reportedly likes to cook a meal with someone he’s considering as an apprentice, to get an idea how the person works. There’s a grand piano on the main floor, and couches, a comfortable space for music making and trying out instruments.

Alf works mostly on commission and finds that knowing the player, watching how he makes his sound, adds a whole stream of information to the conversation of violin making.

An upstairs room contains scientific tools for studying the nature of wood, while the varnish desk is crowded with small jars and bottles of liquids, powders, and paintbrushes. The second-floor workshop room, where most of the woodworking is done, is light-filled, spacious, and uncluttered, reflecting Alf’s preference for simplicity. Though he works at simple benches with traditional tools, and a Guarneri del Gesù violin stands on its side awaiting his attention, Alf’s thoughts are occupied with the future of violin making.

LEARNING FROM THE OLD MASTERS
Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Alf made his first violin in 1975 with Willis Gault in Washington, DC. Gault was a prolific maker who started manystudents on the path to their careers. “We sat in a circle working off the knee, Appalachian style,” Alf recalls. He credits Gault with imparting his passion for the trade. “I learned to love it first,” he says. “Craftsmanship came later.”

At age 19, Alf moved to Cremona, Italy, where he graduated from violin-making school and continued working until returning to the United States in 1984 with his friend and colleague Joseph Curtin. Together, Curtin and Alf earned a reputation for exacting replicas of historic violins and for their intense interest in wood and acoustical analysis.

Replication is good training, Alf says, “It’s the master imposing his will on you.” But Alf also sees replication as hopeless.

“It was useful but . . . all the creativity in replicas is in designing the process,” he laments. “It seems like a dangerous thing to base my legacy on being as good as Strad at Strad copies.”

Alf found he had to make a real effort to open his mind after violin-making school. “We’re trained like that,” he says, “microtuned-in to Strad.”

The challenge, he says, is to “wipe the slate clean and yet not forget who you are.”

Alf acknowledges his Cremonese training as the basis for his taste, even as his attention has turned toward awakening the trade from its fixation on the past. “The maker has to become an artist and the violin will be art,” says Alf, pointing out that del Gesù’s work was all over the map, but he kept achieving the same results.

At the time of our interview, Alf had just returned from the Violin Society of America’s summer workshops in Oberlin, Ohio, where he was able to indulge both his scientific and traditional sides. In one room, he recounts, the VSA acoustics workshop was taking a scientific approach to violin setup. Meanwhile, René Morel was teaching the setup workshop, guided by centuries of tradition and decades of experience.

The results achieved by tradition and scientific analysis were remarkably similar.