Tim Barnes, general manager of the Violin Shop and principal
violist with Palm Beach Opera Orchestra, tests the sound of a
violin at the Violin Shop. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Tim Norris
Ivory of wooly mammoth, hair of Mongolian horse, shell of oyster and abalone shine from sticks hung tip-down from pegs along the window of Alejandro Quintero Servin’s work space. A few more of these finely milled implements, clasped in C-clamps, surrounded by saws and sandpaper, punches and chisels and pots of glue and lacquer, await his help.
In trained and talented hands, the wands in Servin’s care work a musical magic. They are bows, companions that conjure sound from stringed instruments.
Here in the Violin Shop in a shopping center along Boca Raton’s U.S. 1, Servin, known to many as Alex, is their caretaker.
The bow in his hands just now needs a hair transplant. Opening it from the dark mahogany “frog,” where the hair is tightened or relaxed, he might find damage or quirks, hidden under a pearly slide.
Alejandro Quintero Servin
Servin himself might seem to hide, too, in a workshop tucked in back of the store. Tim Barnes, the Violin Shop’s general manager and his boss, describes him as shy.
Servin’s work, though, speaks loudly (and across a generous range of volume, tone and timbre), in the voice of stringed instruments.
Bows and their care, Servin and his art suggest, show the value of patience and diligence and the wonder of artisans and materials often overlooked. Hair left taut can ruin a bow’s backbone. Dry, cold air can tighten it near snapping. An outdoor concert on a hot, humid afternoon can stretch it beyond redemption.
In truth, bows are just Servin’s sideline.
He is a luthier, a maker and restorer of stringed instruments, applying skills learned and wisdom earned through five years’ post-high-school study and a decade of practice in his native Mexico and in Florida, including an apprenticeship with W.J. Fleischer, owner of this Violin Shop and two others in Florida and Puerto Rico. Here, Servin repairs and restores violins, violas, cellos and string basses.
Bows bring all of them to life. In the physics of a stringed instrument’s sound, bow-hair provides a key element: friction.
A bow, its round wooden stick on top and flat ribbon of horse-hair underneath, translates weight from a player’s right hand, along with the speed of movement, onto the strings and into the vibrations of sound. Those shimmer across the top of a violin, a kind of sound box, and shoot down sides and through an inner sound post across the bottom, which echoes and amplifies. At play with wood and varnish, the vibrations give the instrument its voice.
A particular kind of hair, from Mongolian horses and covered by microscopic burrs, brings friction its best outlet.
“It could be the hair grows best in cold because there are not so many flies to swat away,” Servin says, and smiles.
The stick that holds it in place, usually of pernambuco wood, comes from tropical Brazil. The tension between them gives string music its energy.
The detail of a frog, used to tighten the horsehair of a bow.
Alejandro Quintero ServinEach bow is made, like nearly all of its companion instruments, by hand, and each presents its own surprises. The one in front of Alex Servin just then, awaiting new hair, revealed a crack invisible to its owner. Servin found it and filled it. Any flaw can hurt the sound.
“Professional players are very fussy about a re-hairing,” says Tim Barnes, for 10 years principal violist with the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra. (Servin, too, has played violin with the Alhambra Orchestra in Coconut Grove).
“It’s incredibly difficult to get the hair totally even and the length you want, the number of turns you want on the screw, the optimum weight on the stick,” Barnes says. “There are a number of ways you can go wrong. It’s a difficult process that Alex does well.”
The bow at hand, a just slightly sway-backed stick of pernambuco, displays the extinct elephant ivory just under its down-bent tip, where white Mongolian horse hair (tied at each end with nylon fishing line) erupts, extending the length and disappearing under the slide and into the frog.
This bow, stamped Hill and from England, carries a silver tip and a price tag of $5,500; the best might run more than $100,000. The better you are, he suggests, the better you want.
The full secret of a bow’s performance, though, hides in its inner workings.
Drawing out the strands of old hair and feeding in the new, Servin pulls the slide off the bottom of the frog to reveal the workings: a knob at a bow’s back end turns a screw that threads through an eyelet and pushes against the back of the frog, pulling the hair tighter. Each end of the hair is anchored with a hand-chiseled wood plug, fitted precisely into a tiny well.
Few listeners or amateur players understand the mechanics. Even fewer recognize the artisan. Rarely, very rarely, Servin says, does he hear praise for repair or re-hairing. “If they are not happy,” he says, “I might hear something.” That’s almost as rare.
What a properly made and well-repaired bow makes possible in performance, he says, are the sounds that matter most.
The bustle of a string player coming through the door and needing help, well, that’s music, too. Ú
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