Violin Shop Melbourne

FOR THE LOVE OF THE VIOLIN

To get out of two physical education classes in high school, I took up learning the violin. The teacher was a little old man called Mr Hubscher who would meet with my three renegade friends and me, under the school stage, in a small dressing room. We rasped and scraped the rosinned bows across the strings. One friend refused to ever play the ‘E’string and none of us in three years could play one tune, despite a change by the school authorities to a younger and more qualified violin teacher.

We loved Mr Hubscher. When he lifted his honey-gold ancient instrument to his chin, his bow would transcend us into gypsy fields and the room would fill with a plaintive voice that called my soul into life. Four sets of teenage eyes were fixed but unseeing, as the music first tore us with exquisite pain then lifted us into laughter and set us free from our earlier melancholy. I fell in love with this siren, this instrument that could so accurately steal my heart.

Though I never learned to play, I forgot the original motivation for learning and would proudly bear my violin case to and from the working-class school, where it marked me as a school regulation, beret-wearing, outcast.

Sport was the hallowed arena of acceptance, so to my mind, I was secretly a ‘rebel with a case’. And inside the case was this magical musical violin, with the rich history of the instrument and if I could unlock its power I could escape the boredom of suburban school life.

A SHOP OF VIOLIN TREASURES

It is a reverence for the violin and anyone who can master it that can turn my head. So to discover on Bridge Road in Melbourne Australia, a small shop window with a row of violins hanging like geese in a Chinese roasting shop intrigued me. Then to spot a man underneath them with white Santa-like beard, delicately wiping the finish on yet another cherished violin, lured me in for a second look.

Brenton Fyfield owns the store, which has been in Bridge Road for three years. Before this he was in Camberwell for fifteen years, making and mending violins and violas. His devotion to the violin began at the age of nine

when he persuaded his father to buy him one. His favourite expression is in chamber music.

The shop has violins and violas and their accessories. Richard Cox whose preferred playing instrument is the cello, was busy, carefully planing the neck of a damaged violin. Customers know this shop from all across Australia, from Adelaide, Perth, Canberra and even as far as Darwin.

I looked with my infant admiration at the bows lining part of the wall.

“I did at least learn how to look after the bow!” I offer my small connection to their expert understanding.

CAT GUT

Brenton explained that the violin continues without change, the bows are still made of horsehair. You would think in this age that someone would make a synthetic bowstring that self tightens at need with digital techniques. But, it is somehow comforting to realise that some things in life are sacred. Electrified violins we may accept.

At A$20,000 for a quality new violin, perhaps it is best that someone has to select hairs from a horse. There should be some unique quality and a cost by some innocent animal. But, no longer does the plaintive deathly cry from the strings come from the sacrifice of some poor cat. Some would say it never did and that sheep guts were always used, as they were the right length, rather than the meager offerings from the cat. Now the strings are steel, nylon, silk or perlon with some still containing animal gut wrapped in aluminium or silver and in more rare cases, gold.

THE ANCIENT VIOLIN

It is agreed, that Andrea Amati made the first violins in Italy around the mid to late 1500’s. He is said to have been the teacher of perhaps the most famous violinmaker of all, Antonio Stradivari. To find a Stradivarius violin, even in the Violineri would be like finding my violin skills in demand at the Sydney Opera house. But I had to ask, if just maybe they had ever had one.

The Violineri did sell their oldest acquired violin a little while ago. It was made in 1787 in France right at the start of the French revolution. Maybe it played tunes to fire the hearts of the struggling poor upon its strings? Or perhaps it played elegant symphonies to entertain Marie Antoinette before her demise? It sold for A$25,000.

When you are in Bridge Road, take time to see this interesting studio that bends no bow to a whim of fashion, but holds its tune in a cacophony of ever changing clamour, just up the road in the fashion outlets that line this busy area of Melbourne, Australia.