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Restoring instruments: A lesson in patience and passion
Posted July 8, 2009 at 15:03 in clips
I wrote this for a feature writing class during the spring semester. It was pretty amazing getting to watch them restore string instruments. What patience these people have!
His fingers slid up the black fingerboard of the viola, seeking out notes as he climbed the scale. He adjusted the strings and tried again, this time, his scales switching to a melodic Bach suite. Scattered pieces of string instruments and old tools lay on his work table. To the right of him, a row of dormant, sleek wooden cellos waited to be fully restored to the instruments they had once been.
In the workshop, Daniel Muni placed the viola on the table, and he rifled through assorted bows, glues and pencils on his desk. Muni runs Gainesville Violins, a business found in the wilderness at the end of a winding, dipping dirt road shrouded by flourishing green trees.
Years before, he had walked into the strings shop to buy a metronome, and he began apprenticing shortly after at 11 years old. As an apprentice, he cleaned up the shop before learning how to repair and restore string instruments. Now, at 23, he is in charge of the business, and he can make a perfect violin bridge, the wooden piece of the violin that holds up the strings, in 30 minutes.
“I’ve set up thousands of violins now,” Muni said. “Last year, I did at least 700.”
He frequently runs into repair challenges and restoration problems, and he said he gets frustrated with a project every day. His latest problem was removing a viola’s wolf tone, which occurs when the played note matches the resonating frequency of the instrument and creates a howling sound.
“You can’t see the problem,” Muni pointed out. “It’s all ratios and sound waves.”
While answering questions, Muni sat comfortably in the dining room. His business is part of a secluded house on the outskirts of Gainesville, and the comforts of home are located right next to the workshop.
He rested his hands on top of the dining room table, where a brown-and-white teapot sat in front of him. Tiny silver spoons for sugar and cream lay against the saucers on the tan, animal-print tablecloth. Soft, lilting classical music composed by Antonin Dvořák played in the background.
In the living room, a limber, wooden giraffe sculpture stands next to the couch. On top of a dresser, there is a vase full of exotic brown, black and gray feathers. Next to the feathers, scattered rocks create a tribal display. A painting of a solemn zebra hangs next to the dresser. African knick-knacks, ones that suggest the origins of Muni’s teachers, fill the living room.
His teachers, Jan and Anna Van Rooyen, originally grew up in South Africa. Jan discovered the violin in 1948 when he heard “Humoreske” by Antonin Dvořák played over a crackly radio.
“This swept me off my feet, hearing this in 1948, and it eventually changed my life,” Jan exclaimed in a melodic accent while looking through his round glasses.
Jan, Anna and Muni sat at the dining room table together as Jan explained that his father had been in the furniture business, so he had grown up around “wood and glues and smells.” However, Jan did not want to work for his father.
Music became his passion, and Jan decided to open up his own strings business. Jan and Anna had owned a shop in South Africa that faced a wildlife park, and they thought they would eventually retire there.
However, the Van Rooyens made their permanent move to the U.S. in 1997 and opened up their shop a year later.
“Anna still kisses the ground,” Jan noted.
Anna smiled from where she sat next to him at the dining room table. “It was the best decision we ever made,” she agreed.
“It’s freedom,” Jan added. “That’s what America means.”
Coming to America had been a spontaneous move, and Anna said she would have never anticipated moving to Gainesville.
“It’s strange where life brings you,” Anna said. “I never thought in my wildest dreams that we would end up here in Gainesville, amongst these trees and doing what we’re doing.”
Musicians, friends and strangers always filter in and out of their shop. The day that Muni waltzed in for a metronome and asked to watch Jan restore a violin was one that Jan will never forget.
“I just couldn’t get rid of him,” Jan joked.
Jan eventually consented to letting him become an apprentice, and Muni began by cleaning up the shop.
“It was very grunt-work-type stuff,” Muni said. “I loved it.”
Once he started restoring and repairing instruments, Muni said he would learn through watching the Van Rooyens work. He called it “osmosis.”
“By watching, you pick up a lot,” he said.
After the interview in the dining room, Muni went back to the workshop to examine a dark-brown cello lying on top of a table and took out what looked like a pair of curved pliers. He stuck them inside the cello’s f-hole and began rooting around for the sound post inside. The post had to be set up in the ideal spot to achieve the clearest sound.
He is used to different clefs and a variety of tones. Muni knows how to play cello, violin and viola, and he first laid his hands on a string instrument when he was 9. His sister played, and he had found an old violin in the closet.
“It happened to be my size,” he recalled. “I practiced five, six hours a day. My mom had to tell me to go to bed and stop playing.”
“I told my mom this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” he said.
Across from his work station, violins hung like opaque sun-catchers against the big picture windows overlooking the flowering backyard. Another apprentice sat across from him, sanding a peg with unbroken concentration. University of Florida music education major Amelyse Arroyo’s first repair was her own violin. Her father had run it over in his car and broken it into about 20 pieces.
“It’s fully restored now and I play it in the (university) orchestra,” Arroyo said.
As her instrument-repair skills grow, she is currently learning how to make the bridge.
“If one angle is wrong, it can mess up everything,” she said.
She has been an apprentice since 2003, when she was a homeschooled student who decided to help the Van Rooyens in the shop.
“It’s learning something new about the instruments every time I work on one,” Arroyo said.
The Van Rooyens, Arroyo and Muni serve everyone from low-income families to multimillionaires. Muni particularly enjoys helping children with their instruments.
“You show them the violin, their face lights up. They’re shy when they come in,” he said.
Muni also always gets to hear about competitions, lessons and family stories from his clients.
“It’s still an inanimate object,” he explained. “It needs the people to give them life.”
As the manager of Gainesville Violins and owner of Gainesville Bow Works, a business that focuses solely on bow repair, Muni said his long-term goals are to eventually end up in the Winter Park area and sell more high-end instruments. However, Muni is continuing to serve the musical community he has come to know and love.
“We get to deal with the best people in the world,” he said.
