SALT LAKE CITY — Every weekday, a couple of dozen students hailing from all parts of the world file into a hundred-year-old building in the shadow of skyscrapers and learn how to make violins the way they did in Italy 500 years ago.
You want old-school? This is old-school.
The institution itself isn’t all that ancient. The Violin Making School of America was started on the corner of 200 South and 300 East in downtown Salt Lake City 43 years ago by Peter Paul Prier, who studied under classical instrument-makers in his native Germany before emigrating to the U.S.
In 1965 Prier opened a violin shop in Salt Lake and seven years later, recognizing a need for quality instruments on this side of the Atlantic, started his violin-making school next door. He and his sons still own the shop, but in 2006 Peter retired — he’s now on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and sold the school to Charles Woolf, his woodworking instructor and a star graduate (class of ’91), who carries on the proud tradition to this day.
A step into the school is a step into another world, or at least another dimension in this world. They aren’t low-tech at VMSA; they’re practically no tech. If a computer shows up they use it for a doorstop. Antonio Stradivari would feel right at home. There are no lasers. No 3-D software templates. Just gouges, clamps, awls, chisels, wood, varnish, sandpaper, elbow grease, and lots and lots of patience.
You’re not just learning a skill, you’re learning an art.
Sanghoon Lee, VMSA’s varnish instructor, puts it like this: “When you finish this school you know just a little bit about how to make a violin.”
There’s room for 28 students (24 are currently enrolled). It takes three years to graduate, with time off for summers. Each student is required to make seven violins and one cello as he or she moves through the curriculum.
If it sounds tedious, it isn’t. Not to the students and teachers who choose to be here. On a recent tour of the school — it didn’t take long; there are only two main workrooms and a basement packed with handpicked maple and spruce wood, some of it imported from Europe — the passion of those involved was practically palpable.
Take Mark Weber, for instance.
Mark is 61 years old, from Sandpoint, Idaho, and a graduate of the University of Utah medical school. He spent his professional life working as a radiologist — until he took a detour to learn how to make violins.
“This has been the most exceptional experience of my life,” he said, looking up from the neck of the cello he was carefully cradling.
When he graduates in May he’ll return home not as a radiologist but as a violin maker.
Jia Qi is another example. “Call me J,” she said as she looked up from her workbench. J, 24, is from China. She heard about the violin school from an American who was teaching school in China. Intrigued, she logged onto the website (www.vmsa.net), and the next thing she knew she was on a plane to Salt Lake City. When she returns to China, she said it will be with a unique skill she intends to use all her life.
A couple of steps from J, Julian Cossmann Cooke, 59, was at work on his “graduation” violin. He will have it finished by May, knock on maple wood, and return home to Austin, Texas, where his wife, Heather, is holding down the fort.
Julian had a good job working in health care programs for the state of Texas, but when he and Heather’s only daughter was awarded a full-ride college scholarship, he saw his opening to “do what I always wanted to do” and used his daughter’s college fund for himself.
He keeps a picture of his wife at his workbench to remind him that she’s working full time in Austin so he can go to school full time.
“She said if it makes me happier she’s all for it; maybe I’ll be around longer,” he smiled.
“This is what I love to do. You get immediate satisfaction from what you’re doing; you see results right away. You can make something beautiful that someone else can make something beautiful from.”
He’s already built a showroom in his house in Austin and printed business cards for his new career:
Cossmann Violins, Julian Cossmann Cooke, Violinmaker.
He can’t wait to get started. “There are a lot of fiddlers in Austin,” he said.
The prevailing mood on campus is that no one is interested in doing anything else. That includes the instructors. Sanghoon Lee was a high school English teacher in his native Korea prior to enrolling at VMSA 13 years ago. After graduating, he worked for Peter Prier restoring instruments before returning to the school as varnish instructor in 2009. You couldn’t get him back to Korea teaching English with a blowtorch.
“I love the challenge,” he said. There is always something you have to learn more. Every day is new. You have to have a special zeal to make an instrument.”
Aubbie Alexander, the woodworking instructor, first graduated from “regular” college with an accounting degree. That satisfied her parents. She then satisfied herself by graduating from VMSA and then joining the faculty.
“I love that I can work on my own instruments while I teach others,” she said. “There’s such a great enthusiasm here. Every year when we lose a class we think, 'How can we possibly replace them?' Then we do.”
So goes the beat at the little school in the shadow of skyscrapers. They’ve got a firm grip on the past, and all the tools they need to make it last.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com