The violin was not David Morse’s first calling. Between 1978 and 1993, he made fine guitars for clients worldwide at the rate of two to three per year. His foray into the world of violins began in 1984 when he collected damaged and discarded instruments from public schools in Tucson and reconditioned them for students and amateur players at The Soundpost, his shop in Santa Cruz. He began building his own violins around 1986, closed The Soundpost in 1991, and has produced fine instruments from his Soquel workshop ever since.
Like the names he gives them—Spirito, Davenport, Magister, Nimbus—each of his violins comes with its own individual qualities; they have been seen and heard in orchestras throughout the Bay Area, in the Boston Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle in Leipzig and in the Jupiter String Quartet. (San Francisco Symphony laureate conductor Herbert Blomstedt owns one.)
Since becoming a violinmaker, Morse has never accepted anybody else’s opinion on how to practice his craft. He has put every theory through his own rigorous testing and experimentation. He started by measuring the density of the woods he used, and explains, “I did this following an experiment where I made four violins out of as different quality woods as possible, played and evaluated the sound, then switched the tops to see where the different tone qualities went.” This insatiable need to perfect his craft has taken him to the mountains of Serbia in search of (expensive) maple for the neck, back and sides of the instruments. In Italy, he buys whole logs of spruce, cuts them into blanks for violin tops, lets them dry there for a year, then has them shipped to his atelier in Soquel where they dry for several more years. And his rigor had paid off. Clients who own legendary instruments from Cremonese masters Guarneri and Stradivari have paid Morse to release the true voice of their promise, sometimes including taking them apart, repairing the interior plates, and gluing them back together.
But unlocking the mystery of the old Italian masters’ varnish has proved to be a stubborn challenge. Perhaps for the first time in Morse’s career, the ultimate solution didn’t reveal itself to him through- the applied sciences that had served him so well for so long. There is literally no end of varnish formulas promoted within the violin-making community and, he says, “There hasn’t been a one of them I haven’t tried to reproduce in a beaker on my electric burner.” Under ideal circumstances, the varnish has a neutral effect on the sound of the instrument. “It can beneficially focus the sound,” he adds, “but when badly formulated it can put a rubbery blanket over the tone, or impart a brittle tin can effect to it.” In the late 1990s, Morse had success with a “very good” formula of his own that employed propolis, a crumbly material made by bees that breaks down the blanketing film of oil-based varnish. The result was a hardness that protected the instruments from dings and scratches, but remained flexible enough to allow it to breathe. The problem was that it took a long time to apply, some 30 hours per instrument, and years to fully dry. This past spring, infuriated by the daunting task of not knowing which materials did what, and knowing he would have to wait 10 years to find out what the varnish would “sound” like, he said to himself “I give up!”
Sweet Inspiration
Like any commitment to high quality in a competitive world, making fine violins requires plenty of ambition and, to no small degree, the confidence outsiders often see as an abundance of ego. Moreover, the luthier, like the fine artist, does everything by hand and in isolation. Sometimes such conditions can take the maker to highs of exhilaration or magnify personal demons.
Morse’s recent breakthrough followed two years of concentrated study and experimentation when he poured more than half his bench time into unlocking the secret of the ideal varnish. During these same last two years, Morse has been on a personal pilgrimage to confront his “old stuff,” with the help of a teacher—a guru. This quest actually began for him decades earlier, but surfaced again almost as if the varnish question had been emblematic of unresolved personal issues.
The word “spiritual” makes some people uneasy, perhaps because it is so personal as to resist mutually reliable understanding. Yet it also speaks with authority of the impulse that makes people do creative things. For Morse, “giving up” opened a door to a kind of spiritual energy that transcended his intellectual and emotional resources. His epiphany “came out of left field,” he says. The key was sugar. Burnt sugar, to be exact, in place of propolis. “It didn’t seem to make any logical or chemical sense,” he recalls. “All I know is that it works.”
As Morse explains it, dissolving the sugar and pigment in water, then combining it with the oil varnish base, results in everything the varnish is supposed to do, including: flows on easily, breaks down the oily film to let the instrument start breathing right away and reduces the application time to thirty minutes. Morse’s varnish is now “fully transparent to both sight and sound.” As he reflects on the new formula and deep personal passage of the last two years, he adds, “We hold our secrets thinking that by doing so gives us an edge. Now I can put them into the light.”
