BOSTON — On a Friday afternoon, you can take the green line of Boston’s subway, the T, to the Haymarket Square stop, where Boston’s oldest open-air discount market is located.  After pushing your way through loud vendors screaming “Buck a box!  Dollar a pound!,” price-savvy shoppers weeding through bins of nearly rotten oranges, and picture-taking tourists trying to document this part of their Boston experience, you’ll find yourself in a modern-day maze consisting of various construction zones of makeshift sidewalks, orange plastic fencing, and yellow and black synthetic strips.

And then you’ll reach Salem Street in Boston’s historic North End. Although only a 10-minute walk from the crazy that is Haymarket, entering a North End neighborhood somehow makes you feel as though you’ve left 2007 on the other side of the crosswalk.  Narrow, winding streets run parallel to rows of red brick apartments and family-owned businesses. Cast iron boxes filled with purple and yellow flowers are perched outside the windows of local candy stores, and Italian families unload boxes of meat and produce as they open the doors of their stores just as they have for three generations.   Nestled among the historic brick buildings and mom-and-pop stores of the North End is the North Bennet Street School.  Upon entering the North Bennet Street School, you’ll find yourself in a bright, narrow hallway flooded with natural light from the picture windows facing Salem Street.  The first thing you’ll see is a blue stand-alone banner with white lettering listing the various trade programs offered: Bookbinding, Cabinet and Furniture Making, Carpentry, Preservation Carpentry, Jewelry Making and Repair, Locksmithing, Piano Technology, and Violin Making and Repair.  The inside of the building smells of wood and fresh paint, and even from the lobby you can hear a cacophony of drills and saws mixed with the chatter of students passing through the lobby to step outside for a smoke break and customers asking questions about furniture preservation in the school’s gallery, which is to the left of the entrance hallway.  To the right of the entrance is the reception area, where Roman Barnas enters wearing jeans and a t-shirt.  He apologizes for being late but after teaching his morning violin-making session he had to talk with an architect about the possibility of expanding the studio, which is currently a one-room workshop on the second floor of the school.

Barnas is a luthier and the program director for the violin making and repair program at the North Bennet Street School.  He was born in Zakopane, Poland, and began making violins at aged 14 while attending  the Secondary School of Fine Arts.  He later studied music and violin making for five years at the Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznan, Poland.  In 1996, Barnas came to the United States to work for Psarianos Violins in Troy, Michigan.  He has been teaching at the North Bennet Street School in Boston for the past four years.  Barnas is one of many instructors who teaches his craft of instrument making and repair to a new generation of luthiers.

The trade of lutherie can be traced back for centuries.  The word  itself comes from the French word luth, meaning lute, a stringed instrument with a pear-shaped body and a fretted fingerboard on the neck.  A luthier builds and repairs various stringed instruments, usually focusing on a specific type, such as those that can be strummed or plucked, including guitars, banjos, and mandolins, and those that are bowed, such as violins, violas, and cellos.  The processes for creating each individual instrument are as varied as the instruments themselves, and individual luthiers who have worked in the field for decades have determined which methods work for them oftentimes on a trial-and-error basis, as most of these luthiers were self-taught or started out as an assistant or apprentice to a more experienced luthier.  Much of what was learned was passed down from person to person, experienced luthier to eager apprentice.  Oddly enough, even in 2007, with the immersion of lutherie programs and trade schools, new technology, and retail giants such as Gibson and Martin, there is still a demand for lutherie in its most basic form.

Although there are various techniques and tools used for violin making and repair, many of which use power tools, students at the North Bennet Street School construct their instruments by hand using a hand plane(variety of hand tools, hand planes, chisels, gouges, scrapers, knives, files, rasps)*.  The process itself begins in a small closet just outside of the classroom where students work on their instruments.  The inside of the closet smells of wood and sawdust, and individual shelves are stacked to the ceiling with wood and raw materials, such as spruce, maple, and ebony.  The woods used for making instruments are called tonewoods, as they have been specially treated for the sole purpose of being used in the construction of musical instruments.  The spruce comes from the Dolomites in northern Italy, and the maple comes from northern Italy and Bosnia.  These tonewoods are used for the body of the instruments.  The fingerboards are made from ebony, which comes from Africa.  A large white bucket in the corner of the closet holds the ebony pieces. At the North Bennet Street School, the supplies are provided by a raw materials distributor in Germany.  In addition to selecting the materials for each instrument, students shape the tonewoods and other materials with a hand plane.  After the instrument has been constructed, a varnish is placed over the wood.  In the beginning, students use an alcohol varnish, but for the last two “graduation instruments,” an oil varnish is used.

On a Friday afternoon at the North Bennet Street School, second-year violin making and repair student Erica Safran sits on a stool at a tall wooden table in the middle of the second-floor workshop.  She is finishing her salad and ravioli, which she has conveniently brought from home in two Tupperware containers, as she only gets a short break between her morning and afternoon sessions.  The violin making and repair program at the North Bennet Street School is very intensive, and students attend classes five days a week from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.  Except for the one day a week that is devoted to lecturing, students spend the rest of their time at individual stations, working on their instruments in some capacity.

Originally from New Jersey, Erica came to the North Bennet Street School in Boston to sharpen her lutherie skills.  Erica already has a bachelor’s degree in music and worked for nine years at the Violin Doctor, Inc., a shop owned by her father, Karl Safran.  Erica began managing her father’s shop in January 2005, and spent the summer of 2005 studying setups, rib repairs, and touch-ups at the University of New Hampshire under master violin maker Horst Kloss.  Erica entered the program at the North Bennet Street School to refine her skills.  “It’s [the program] helped me to learn to be patient, pay attention to detail, and slow down,” she said.  The program itself is challenging and Barnas has lofty goals for his students.  For students like Erica Safran, however, the ends justify the means.

“It’s a comfortable working environment even though he [Barnas] has high expectations.  The most rewarding part of the program is hearing one of my instruments played for the first time,” she said.  “After months of slaving away, I finally get to enjoy it.”

The lutherie program at the North Bennet Street School takes three years to complete. During that time, students build six violins, a viola, and a cello.  The first instrument, a violin, can take up to five months to complete.  Students are allowed to keep all of the instruments they construct in the program.  Only 12 students are allowed in the program at a time, as the workspace is limited, so the class is a mix of first-, second-, and third-year students.  After completing the program, graduates are skilled in instrument making and repair and are ready to move into the professional world of lutherie, ideally working as an apprentice.  An apprenticeship allows a luthier to refine his or her skills or gain additional skills under a luthier who has had experience in the profession.  Barnas himself worked as an apprentice for nine years, and he suggests that graduates work in that capacity for at least two years.  “Even a year as an apprentice isn’t enough to scratch the surface,” he said.

The North Bennet Street School in Boston is one of several schools devoted to training young luthiers.  Roberto-Venn, a guitar making and repair school in Phoenix, Arizona, offers a six-month program in lutherie.  In this particular program, unlike the violin making and repair program at the North Bennet Street School in Boston, the focus is more about gaining full-time employment as a luthier instead of working as an apprentice after graduation.

“Very few of our students go on to apprenticeships,”said Roberto-Venn program director William Eaton.  “Around 70 to 80 percent of our graduates become employed with small and large guitar-making companies, retail music stores, and production companies or bands that need a tech.  Ervin Somogyi, who is quite well-known and an excellent guitar maker, has taken on apprentices.  And almost every one of these apprentices with Ervin has gone on to do great things as custom builders.  Michi Matsuda and Mario Beuregard are a couple of standouts, and there are others.”

Ervin Somogyi has been a luthier for 40 years.  Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1944, Somogyi moved to America when he was 15 years old.  As a child, he recalls being “a puttering, craftsy, and nerdy kind of kid who played with clay and wood and made model airplanes.”  At aged 11, Somogyi built his first guitar out of a cigar box.  He later attended college at the University of California, where he received his degree in English, something, he said, “would seem to be laughably unrelated to lutherie.”  He began making guitars in his mid-twenties, focusing on flamenco guitars, as he had played them for many years.  He found out that the market for flamenco guitars was limited because, as he puts it, “The flamenco community is chronically too broke to support a luthier.”  Somogyi moved on to classical guitars, and later began constructing steel string guitars as well.  His entrance into the world of professional lutherie can be largely attributed to his relationship with the Windham Hill music label in the 1970s and 1980s.

“The phenomenon of the guitar as a musical voice to be taken seriously all by itself, and having something of interest and integrity to offer, only began in the 1950s and 1960s.  The guitar-all-by-itself phenomenon crystallized in the U.S. in the mid-1970s with the emergence of the Windham Hill label, which became the first successful American agent for dissemination of new, complex, melodic, and well-recorded solo guitar, as well as other jazz, experimental, and ‘new age’ music,” Somogyi wrote in an e-mail interview.  “The Windham Hill guitar players became points of musical inspiration and reference for many young guitarists, both compositionally and, for the first time ever, at a level of fidelity of sound that approached the one previously occupied by classical music alone.  A new market had been discovered, and the Windham Hill people were setting a new, high standard for it.”

Musicians desired guitars that had an evenness of tone, a richness of sound, and a dynamic range, but perhaps most importantly they wanted instruments that sounded great in the recording studio.  “Since the steel string guitar had never before been needed to function at this level, guitars which already existed that could do so were few and far between.  The time was right for better guitars to be made,” Somogyi wrote.

“I think that the reasons luthiers make guitars must be almost as varied as the makers themselves.  The satisfactions to be gotten from lutherie derive from traditional values such as being independent, being creative, and doing work that is enjoyable and which actually seems meaningful much of the time,” Somogyi stated.  “Lutherie, at least as I’ve known it, can be a total-immersion pursuit which is really about living a life at least as much as it is about making a living… For those of us who feel more dedicated than the average, I suppose lutherie could be accurately described as a calling — a concept that, if it rarely gets mentioned these days, certainly fits the bill.  In all fairness, but neutrally and also with some humor, I should add that drug or compulsion also fit the bill.  The difference between these possibilities, I think, is metaphysical.  That is, it has to do with what one aims at or how high one aims, or can aim, as a human being.  This includes concern with things such as excellence, living ethically, or participating in a tradition which one can pass on to others,” he said.  Lutherie, unlike many professions that have been influenced and changed by modern efficiencies and cutting-edge technology, is indeed a trade based on tradition that, as Somogyi said, can be passed on to other luthiers, whether in the form of an apprenticeship or through various employment opportunities..

Charlie Sparks began the guitar making and repair program at Roberto-Venn in August.  Charlie, 19, graduated from high school two years ago and started college at Central Michigan University where, as he puts it, “went to a major university to party my ass off and maybe figure out where my life was headed.”  After only one semester, he dropped out and came home to Rochester, Michigan, a suburb just outside of Detroit where he grew up.  “I couldn’t handle the lack of direction or party lifestyle that I had succumbed to in college, so my parents urged me to investigate a different route,” Charlie said.

When he was in high school, Charlie had a classmate who was a lutherie apprentice.  Charlie was always interested in music, so he was intrigued by making guitars for a living.  Although he had mentioned the idea to his parents before he began college at CMU, they considered the idea to be, as Charlie says, “an afterthought.”  But after lasting only a semester in college, Charlie’s parents agreed that if he could find a lutherie school and earned back some of the money he had “partied away” in college, they would talk with a friend of theirs who was a luthier about getting him an apprenticeship.  Charlie agreed, and he was offered an apprenticeship in acoustic guitar building from luthier Mike Franks in Michigan.  Franks had been building guitars for about five years, but he had extensive experience in woodworking.  Charlie worked for Mike Franks for five months for four to five hours a day two days a week building his first guitar.

“I have never been a very avid craftsman, but every time I came home from Mike’s I couldn’t contain my excitement.” Charlie said.  “Anyone within earshot would get a lecture about how back braces are carved or how pearl pieces are cut.”  After working as an apprentice, Charlie was sure he wanted to be a luthier.

“My experience with Mike gave me many things, the biggest being knowledge.  I learned the process of building a guitar and the incredible amount of detail that goes into a hand-crafted instrument.  Another not so obvious thing that I acquired was confirmation,” Charlie said.  “Before I had apprenticed with Mike I wasn’t sure whether lutherie was my dream career.  But any doubt in my mind was erased by the end of the five months.”

Charlie has been a student at Roberto-Venn for two months.  A normal day at the school consists of four to six lectures which include demos of various guitar-making processes, and the remainder of the time is spent working on individual pieces.  The process ranges from glueing and measuring to sanding and shaping of both electric and acoustic guitars.

“It’s funny, actually,” Charlie says about his chosen profession.  “When I graduated high school, my guidance councilors always told me you can go wherever you want and do whatever you want to do.  Back then, I couldn’t see anything but an office job.  But now, the closer I get to graduation, the more possibilities reveal themselves.  I could work for a repair technician in London or I could work for a well-known guitar company as a finish worker or I could start my own line of custom guitars.  Or I could go on the road as a guitar tech for a major band.  The list goes on, and every possibility seems like a dream job.”

At the North Bennet Street School, the future of the program and of the trade itself look promising.  All of the students who graduated from the program last year, and even one who dropped out, were able to find employment in the field of lutherie.  And for this year’s program, which began in September, there was a waiting list of students who were hoping for a spot to open up.  “Violin making is the thing to do now for some people,” Barnas said smiling.