the Toronto Star
May 14, 2005. 08:25 AM
>From tree to timbre
Canadian among select few who make their living through aural alchemy,
turning wood into song
Armenian maple helps make violins sing but magic behind the shine is
top secret, writes Oakland Ross
OAKLAND ROSS
FEATURE WRITER
This is the story of one man, one tree, and nearly 400 violins.
The man’s name is Hratch Armenious Tchalkouchian, and his birth
certificate will tell you that he was born on May 1, 1944, but this
detail of fate is merely a footnote to the true chronology of his
life.
Reckoned by the measure of time that matters to him most – in other
words, violin time – the Armenian native effectively entered this
world late on the first day of winter in the year 1967.
On a moonless December night, Tchalkouchian and five helpers climbed
up into the Caucasus Mountains above the Black Sea, somewhere north of
the Armenian capital of Yerevan.
At the time, Tchalkouchian was in search of a tree, and not just any
tree, but a perfectly configured maple.
At a height of 1,300 metres above sea level, the young man found what
he was seeking and pulled out an axe. He and his comrades spent the
next four days lugging the timber down the mountainside, piece by
piece – and Tchalkouchian’s life, in violin time, had begun.
“Some people talk about the discovery of the wheel,” he says. “I
prefer to talk about the discovery of the violin.”
Almost four decades have elapsed since that winter night, and
Tchalkouchian lives in a different country now.
He is a resident of Willowdale in the north end of Toronto, where he
dwells along with his wife, Goar, on a wide street of stolid bungalows
near a huge brace of hydroelectric towers. He is the father of two,
the grandfather of three.
“I am Canadian now,” he says. “Canada is my country.”
But violins are his life.
Sixty years old, with just a few stubborn flecks of black in his
pewter-grey hair, Tchalkouchian continues to ply an age-old craft.
He is a violin-maker – a luthier – one of only a handful of people in
Canada who make their living by a kind of aural alchemy, turning wood
into song.
In Tchalkouchian’s case, he owes nearly a lifetime’s worth of fine
musical instruments to the fibre of just one tree, the same majestic
European maple that he cut down on that moonless night above the Black
Sea some 400 violins ago. “Until this day,” he says in his energetic
if somewhat laboured English, “I am using only that wood.”
Tchalkouchian arrived in Canada in 1995, along with his wife, a son,
and a daughter – and that wasn’t all.
In addition to his family and his precious supply of European maple,
he also brought with him certain other materials that figure in the
painstaking and somewhat arcane craft of fashioning beautiful handmade
violins – crushed carmine beetles, dark tree roots, dried apricots,
and other commodities the luthier won’t even name.
But it is the wood that matters most – and, oh, how Hratch Armenious
Tchalkouchian cherishes his timber.
To ensure that an accident or a fire won’t destroy his entire stock,
he keeps his store of maple in five caches scattered around Toronto,
all stacked in neat piles of small, blond planks.
You might suppose, in this country of all countries, that
Tchalkouchian would deign to avail himself of the local lumber supply,
especially the portion of it known as Acer saccharum, or sugar
maple. But no.
“When I think of Canada, I think of maple,” he says. “It is our
emblem. But I haven’t found good maple here. It’s a little bit heavy.”
And so Tchalkouchian conjures his finely tempered violins from the
flesh of a single European tree.
“I never tire of violins,” he says. “When I go to bed, I am thinking
about the violin I will be working on tomorrow. Every violin-maker is
like that.”
Nowadays, Tchalkouchian uses his middle name to identify his
handiwork, and an Armenious violin compares favourably with some of
the best instruments being fashioned anywhere in the world.
If you were thinking of purchasing a new Armenious, you had better be
prepared to absorb an additional dent of between $12,000 and $15,000
on your next bank statement.
This may seem like a lot of money – and it is – but handmade violins
built by masters of the craft are not pennywhistles.
The most coveted violins can be stunningly expensive, particularly
antique instruments fashioned in France, Germany or Italy by
illustrious luthiers of centuries past.
The most revered of the species undoubtedly are Stradivarius violins,
made by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, Italy, who lived from 1644 to
1737.
When a Strad finds its way to auction these days, it might well fetch
a price of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars. But
Stradivarius violins are rarely offered for sale.
A more modest yet worthy instrument – say, a good French violin from
the late 19th century – might change hands for $50,000 or more. This
is the sort of investment a hard-working professional violinist pretty
much takes for granted, generally accompanied by a second mortgage on
the family home.
Still, as newly constructed instruments go, Armenious violins are well
respected and command impressive prices.
“My violins now are all over the world,” Tchalkouchian says. “Every
continent has my violins. A lot of Canadians are playing my violins.”
Other musicians are playing instruments fashioned by Tchalkouchian’s
son, Artak, who is 29 and plans on making a living as a luthier, too,
even if he does have a university degree in computer science. “I think
about it every day,” says Artak. “It is waiting to blossom.”
Already, Artak has sold many of his own violins, albeit at more
restrained prices than those paid for the violins crafted by his
mentor and parent.
The older man says he became a luthier by degrees.
In his late teens, Hratch Tchalkouchian was playing violin in a
student chamber orchestra in Yerevan. One day, the bridge broke – that
is, the slender wooden device that raises the strings above the
fingerboard.
“I made a new bridge,” he says. “I thought, okay. Next, I read a
little about violin making. I thought, okay.”
Later, he had to fashion a new chin rest for his violin, and his life
has unfolded from there.
Initially, Tchalkouchian served as his own teacher and copied
techniques used in the French school of violin making, one of three
broad tendencies in the luthier’s art. The others are the German
school and the Italian or Cremonese school.
“When I learned the Italian technique,” says Tchalkouchian, “I never,
ever turned back.”
He continues to adhere to the Cremonese style now and eagerly explains
some of its principle features. They are mostly technical and complex,
but it’s apparent that Tchalkouchian has few compunctions about
sharing his secrets. In fact, he insists that there aren’t any.
“It’s just, you have to have the skill, the knowledge, and the heart,”
he says. “It’s just, you have to make a good violin.”
Tchalkouchian says it takes him about a month of labour to fashion a
single instrument.
Each step in the process poses its own challenges and imparts its
particular pleasures, but there is something especially mysterious
about the final stages, when the luthier treats a newly created
instrument with varnish and pigment.
In his case, Tchalkouchian applies some 60 coats of varnish to each
violin, as well as numerous treatments of a special liquid formulation
of his own devising that has a deep burgundy colour and gives his
instruments their dark mellow hue.
Stored in old gin or vodka bottles, the pigment is composed primarily
of the aforementioned carmine beetles, tree roots and dried
apricots. Tchalkouchian identifies the ingredients without hesitation.
Inquire about his varnish, however, and he suddenly turns coy. “I can
tell you about everything except the varnish,” he says. “Every
violin-maker has his own varnish. I never tell.”
Never mind. It’s the music that matters, and just now there is music
to be heard.
Although Tchalkouchian insists that he himself is an indifferent
violinist, the same cannot be said of his daughter-in-law.
She is Gayane Bareghamyan, a musician to be reckoned with. She teaches
the instrument and also plays first violin in the North York Symphony.
A striking, dark-haired woman, dressed now in a blouse and blue jeans,
she takes up a position in her father-in-law’s office and showroom,
the walls decked with Armenious violins.
She settles one of these fine instruments between her chin and the
blade of her left shoulder. She raises her bow.
“Bach Sonata Number 1,” she says. “First movement. Adagio.”
The ensuing minutes stream past in pure violin time, and they are
heaven.
It is fair to say that no European maple, thrumming in an autumn wind
high in the Caucasus Mountains above the Black Sea, ever dreamed of
someday sounding like this.
“There is no limit to a violin’s beauty,” says Tchalkouchian, who
sways in his chair, a violin balanced in his lap, his eyes closed, a
blissful expression on his face. He may not play his violins much, but
he surely knows how to build them. “I am going to die,” he vows, “with
a chisel and a gouge in my hands.”