Behind every great fiddler ...

Meet Bob Childs, a luthier whose tools are wood, sunlight, and an ear for a language without words.

from the July 26, 2007 edition

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Some fiddlers start as classical musicians; they may keep up the concertos or abandon them for a world of reels, jigs, and airs. It can be a difficult switch: Classical players learn by reading music, but folk players learn by ear. That process is integral to the sense of community many fiddlers love: open your case, pick up your instrument, and jam with whomever's around. To do that, you have to give up the stability of the printed page – and the fear that playing without it can inspire. You have to play, Childs says, from a different place.

"I have a friend ...[whose] conclusion was when you play classical music, because you're reading notes, you're playing from the outside in," he says. "When you're playing fiddle music, you're playing from the inside out."

Childs didn't play until he was 18. "I fell in love with it so much that I almost didn't finish college," he says. He learned by ear and took his fiddle to Maine, where he made furniture after college. When the instrument needed repair, he took it to Ivie Mann, a luthier in his 70s who'd never left the state. Mr. Mann invited Childs to be his first student. Skeptical, Childs took up the study part time, eventually spending 10 years learning the craft. Unlike many modern American makers, who usually study in one of the country's four violinmaking schools, Childs learned the old-fashioned way, as an apprentice in small shops. His training included repair work, which meant he got to disassemble some of the most sought-after violins and make patterns he still uses today.

But the profession's two cruelest characteristics – perfection and isolation – soon bothered him. Though essentially nothing about the way good violins are made has changed since Stradivarius, the craft is exhaustively exacting. Childs wasn't certain he'd reach its standards for perfection. He also wasn't certain that he wanted to: It required toiling in quiet solitude, and he sometimes felt lonely.

So he quit. He started painting classes and began a search for his roots; Childs had been given up for adoption as an infant, shuttled between foster homes, and finally adopted when he was 3. Though he remembers little of that time, the mystery nagged him. In his early 30s, he began a search for his birth mother. During the search, he had a gripping dream that changed everything about violins for him. In the dream, Childs wanted to visit an unknown country, but he was stopped by a border guard who took him into a small room, dark and empty but for a table with a violin. A guard told Childs to pick up the violin; he obeyed. Inlaid into the back, was an image of a small boy crying," he remembers.

For the first time, he realized making violins was more than a living for him: The craft, he says, helped him express experiences "that don't necessarily have language."

After that, his fiddles changed: Their tone was more even, their voice more consistent. Players who bought his early instruments and traded up as he improved didn't feel the need to any longer. And Childs found an answer for the isolation: He got a doctorate, one night class at a time, in psychology, and opened a psychotherapy practice. In some sense it isn't all that different from making violins. He listens for things without language and whittles away until a patient, like an instrument, finds a hidden voice.

"It's a trick for trees to give up their secrets," Childs says. He needs customers to describe "the sound they hear in their head when they're playing." He, in turn, describes how the planks of wood he lays in front of them will sound when fashioned into an instrument. To do this, he pinches a two-foot piece of spruce between his left thumb and fingers and holds another in his right. Gently, he strikes one piece against the other, and the room rings. "We're listening for a bell-like sound, where it doesn't just go 'thud,' " he explains. Each person has to find the right ring. When it works, it's almost magical.

"It's not that it's the perfect fiddle everybody wants to play," says Hanneke Cassel, a folk player. "But it's the right fiddle for me. It made me sound more like what I sound like."

Childs gets it right every time – only one of 140 customers ultimately disliked his new instrument – because he knows violins are best made like music: from the inside out.

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