Musician playing violin. Picture: iStock
Violins are one of the most complex musical instruments yet created and the technology of its song has not changed much in 500 years.
There are less than a handful of violin makers in South Africa. Luthier Albertus Bekker has been building violins since he was 19.
And while it was a hobby during his corporate career, Bekker ditched suits and ties during lockdown to focus all his attention on building violins.
He calls it part art, part craft and lovingly produces the instruments from his workshop at home in Linden, Johannesburg.
When Bekker talks violins and music, his tone softens and his demeanour exudes absolute passion.
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Bekker’s love for violins began by happenstance.
His siblings were all piano trained and, he said, when the time came for him to learn an instrument, he reckoned that his parents must have been tired of hearing piano scales all day.
He was ushered in a stringed direction and fell in love.
His first attempt to builda violin was when he was 19 and arrived home from a European backpacking trip.
It was during this holiday that he visited the German capital of violin-making, Mittenwald, and he was inspired.
Bekker still has the original backing board of his debut attempt, but he said that the instrument was a failure.
He was on a beer budget trying to make champagne with cheap wood.
He said: “When I got home, I just went to a timber store and bought whatever I could afford. It was a start, but not a good one.”
More than 30 years later, Bekker’s violins have performed in the hands of musicians all over the world, including Australia, Germany and the US.
“That is the greatest reward of all, hearing your instrument on stage and listening to the beauty that it produces.”
Bekker said: “The violin is, of all the instruments, closest to the human voice. The human ear is sensitive in a very narrow range of frequencies and, incidentally, it is the same frequency that a baby cries at.
“And if you can make a violin that is strong across those frequencies, it is a lot more powerful. “You try and mimic the human voice. You have full control over the frequencies you produce because it is not fretted like a guitar.
“And you have the whole vibrato thing going, that is like singers, so remarkably like the human voice and very emotive.”
Violins as we know it were created in Italy, around the 16th century, with the oldest instrument still in existence built in 1654, and named after the then king of France, Charles IX.
Since then, not much has changed in howviolins are made.
Maplewood and spruce are the two woods used to construct the instrument. It’s strung with cat gut and horsehair is tensed across the player’s bow.
But cat gut has nothing to do with feline insides.
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“It is dried sheep gut. That is what they used in the old days, too, to string violins. Nowadays, it is synthetic with a metal winding.”
The horsehair is true to this day.
“We use real horsehair to string the bow. There is nothing synthetic that comes close to producing the sound that real horsehair can.
“It is imported from Mongolia or China and Siberia and is expensive.”
Bekker said that he followed the same “recipe” to make his violins that has been around for half a millennia.
“Some of the colour used sometimes comes from stuff called dragon’s blood, which is quite poisonous as well.
And a lot of the ingredients in the varnishes are medieval.”
Bekker estimates that it takes between 50 to 100 hours to take the instrument from lifeless plank to star of the stage.
A finished, handmade Bekker violin can cost upwards of R50,000.
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