Behind every great fiddler ...
Meet Bob Childs, a luthier whose tools are wood, sunlight, and an ear for a language without words.
By Jina Moore | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the July 26, 2007 edition
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Cambridge, Mass. - Bob Childs lifts a naked, pale piece of maple wood up to the window. "We're looking for shapes," he says.
Only one shape is obvious to the untrained eye: This skinny slab looks like a violin. There are no strings, no scroll, no body, even – but there is nothing else these plump curves could become.
This, the back of the violin, represents a week's work. With a one-inch brass plane that works like a vegetable peeler, Mr. Childs has scraped away every flat spot on the surface. Each time he carves, he leaves an edge so tiny that he can't see it.
So Childs needs the sun. He tilts the wood toward the window, then away, like he's rocking a small baby with one hand. The light will catch the edges and cast shadows that act like a topographical map, telling Childs where a cut may need to be deepened or an edge softened. When the afternoon light finally falls in the right place, the back of Childs's newest violin looks like a glimmering lake. Sun and shadows dance, and he knows if the sound will be good.
His precise intuition makes him the go-to guy for New England folk-fiddlers and symphony players alike. His reputation allows him a rather unusual business model: Unlike many makers, who often leave their instruments in shops, Childs has never sold a violin on consignment. He crafts each $16,000 instrument with a person in mind – who they are, how they play, what sound they need.
He gets new customers by referrals from old ones. And he's collected the oldest and best of them in a band called Childsplay – 30 players, each a Childs violin owner, who descend on Cambridge, Mass., once a year from around the country and, occasionally, from abroad. They travel less for the chance to perform than to see Childs, reunite with friends for a week of rehearsals and a month of concerts – and to try out one another's fiddles.
In this way, Childs's work is less a business than a musical family, held together by a laid-back patriarch who otherwise labors quietly, far from the limelight – except for the annual Childsplay concert, a folk music love-fest at which Childs is, naturally, the center of attention.
The tradition stretches back to a 1988 night in Childs's living room, where he collected some customers-cum-friends; each played a song. "I loved that concert because it was such a demonstration of Bob's caring for each person that he had built an instrument for," says Mary Lea, Childs's first customer. "[H]e was a mother hen with his chicks."
The group quickly grew into a proper band: Today, it has a website, childsplay.org, and just released its fourth CD. Though the players stay the same from year to year (Childs, who makes five or six fiddles a year, has closed membership in the group), the featured folk tradition changes. In their solo lives, musicians usually specialize in one genre, from old-time Appalachian to Celtic-sounding Cape Breton fiddling, and play center stage.With a grace often missing from family reunions, the Childsplay fiddlers surrender the limelight to a few featured players and focus on what Childs thinks makes his band unique among folk groups – meticulously layered rhythm and harmony, like the great symphonies of the classical world.
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