Mandy Haggith investigates the violin maker’s art on Scoraig

HOW many pieces of wood does a violin contain?

I’M asked this question by violin maker Alan Beavitt when I visit him on his remote croft in Wester Ross. I guess, and I’m wildly wrong. Is your guess any better?

Alan Beavitt made his first violin when he was still at school in South London and now, more than 100 fiddles later, he is one of this country’s most respected violin makers, widely known among big city orchestral string-players but pretty much a secret closer to home. The fact that he lives in a remote corner of the Highlands, a five mile walk from the nearest road end on the peninsula of Scoraig, he says, “adds a little to the mystique”.

Alan Beavitt

Mystique is not something to be taken lightly in the world of stringed-instruments, where it can be worth millions. A Stradivarius violin recently sold for £9.8 million simply because it is part of this antique brand, and the value of such instruments continues to rocket from auction to auction, despite research that shows that, in blind tests, some modern violins sound better than the Cremonan classics.

Alan tells an anecdote about a London dealer. “I needed some money so I took him a violin to see if he would sell it. He said I was one of the best makers in the country and that he would have taken the violin like a shot, if I had been dead!”

He smiles ruefully at the knowledge that his instruments will long outlast him and will probably soar in value once he is no longer around to benefit. It must be the kind of scenario that could persuade someone to fake their own death!

Instead of pursuing his vocation as an instrument maker when he was young, Alan was persuaded to study science. He became a physicist and worked in Australia and England before getting to know someone who lived on Scoraig, visiting them and deciding to give up his career in science for a life of self-sufficiency.

He moved there with his wife and children in 1973 and established himself as a violin maker to supplement their living on the croft.

The view from Alan Beavitt's workshop on Scoraig

Alan is a calm, soft-spoken man, and each of his few words are well-chosen, seeming to result from deep thought. He brings to his work the rare combination of a physicist’s precision with an artist’s flair. In 1984 he won the Facta Britannia (Made in Britain) violin prize, and he remains at the top of his field.

He makes violas as well as violins, and baroque as well as modern instruments, sometimes making what he fancies, other times working to commission. His customers are mostly advanced level students embarking on professional careers, and the only marketing Alan needs to reach them is word of mouth and the recommendation of those who already play his instruments.

They have sold to violinists in Argentina, Australia, Italy, Sweden and Germany, and both classical and folk players seem to like them.

Alan’s workshop is a shed beside a vegetable patch sporting impressive cabbages. Small and orderly, it smells of wood-shavings and is lined with a neat array of tools. In the store-room next door there are stacks of wood blocks, seasoning for several years before being used.

The wood Alan works with is crucial, and when I suggest he must be regularly eyeing up trees as potential raw materials, he gives a wry nod and says, “I’m always on the look out.”

I am surprised to learn that a tree I consider to be a weed is most highly prized: the back and sides of violins are made of sycamore, although not any old tree will do. Around one in a hundred have a particular rippled characteristic in the wood, which polishes up to give a gorgeous pattern of golden stripes. I will never look at a sycamore the same way again!

The front view of one of Alan's violins

The front soundboard is made of European spruce, and Alan says he has enough for the rest of his life, having bought an ideal tree from the Dolomite mountains. He shows me a block of rough, honey-coloured timber and it is hard to credit it can be the source of the delicately curved, shell-thin, lustrous instrument that is his finished product.

On the violin he is currently playing, he has made the chin rest from box wood, the bridge is maple and the finger board and pegs are ebony. When Alan talks about ebony he makes a point of saying that it is a tropical wood that is not in short supply, contrasting it with pernambuco, a tropical hardwood used for bows, which is now rare. These things matter.

Each piece of wood is shaped with utter precision and working to this kind of accuracy with a living material requires a remarkable amount of time. “If someone wanted a violin urgently,” Alan says, “I could make one for them in a couple of months.”

His total production is around 4 instruments per year, although he admits to not working full-time, being diverted by the garden and livestock. “It’s a pretty time-consuming place to live,” he says.

Once the time required to make a fiddle becomes clear, the price tag of £5,000 seems remarkably good value. The sheer work involved in constructing a violin is brought home by another anecdote, which is also an instructive story about the relationship between instrument makers and their players.

In 2008, he and eleven other makers were brought together at the RSAMD in Glasgow (now the Conservatoire), and together they made a violin. Working flat out, it took them a full week. They did it in full view in the refectory, as a kind of performance, in order to give the students a chance to see what is involved in making their instruments.

“We did it for our expenses and for the fun of it, and I was surprised to find that I was by far the best player among the makers. Some of them can play a bit, but others not at all.”

It is in fact quite rare for makers to be good players, but for Alan, being able to play his instruments is an important aspect of the process. He plays both folk and classical and has just formed an amateur string quartet with three other Highland players.

So is instrument making an art or craft? “Both,” he says. “And there is science involved as well.” Alan has pioneered understanding of how humidity influences violins and has published the science of ‘humidity cycling’, the result of painstaking research into the range and sequence of moisture levels a new instrument requires to go through in order for the wood to settle into its final state.

So he brings to bear his physicist’s knowledge of acoustics and humidity cycling, with a craftsman’s skill in precision woodwork. “I’m pretty consistent these days,” he says, with typical understatement. “I try to learn something from everything I make. I don’t vary the instrument acoustically, but I do make aesthetic changes with each violin.”

There is more than simple skill involved in making these instruments. A Beavitt violin is an exquisite object to hold: glowing, taut, its burnished curves catching the light and highlighting the grain of the minutely detailed wood. “Making it beautiful is a kind of art, I think,” he says.

By the way, altogether the art of violin-making involves 78 pieces of wood. How close were you?

© Mandy Haggith, 2012

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