Art's Cello Quotes

“Walking along the tables, my spirits sank even lower. Almost all the better fiddles, the ones made by professionals, were antiqued copies. Even the winning violin was a fake. I walked to the end of the room, where the cellos were lined up. They, too, were all antiqued, except for mine. With its orange-red varnish and crisp, unworn edges, it stood out like a Girl Scout at the Adult Film Awards. What had happened? Gone was any originality, any sense of style. The fluorescent lighting cast a harsh, cold glare, making the sad attempts at artificial aging look even more lifeless. I felt sick at heart. Thirty years ago, when the school opened, we had viewed copying with a visceral contempt—the great Babylonian captivity of violin making. We were the young Americans, the first of a new school of making in the New World, and we saw it as our mission to restore our craft to its former glory, when the idea of copying didn’t even exist.”
― James N McKean, Art's Cello

“like us, he was only as good as his last instrument.”
― James N. McKean, Art's Cello

“Violin makers live for a long time, but that’s only because they can’t afford to die.”
― James N McKean, Art's Cello

“When you’re working with wood, every stroke of the tool dulls the edge just a little. Once, in my last year at the violin-making school, I had been passing through the workshop when I overheard one of the younger students ask the instructor how it was that his tools stayed sharp so much longer than ours. “I use them less,” he said, looking out the window, which was where he addressed his replies to obvious questions. It took him two cuts to get where we took fifty. Art didn’t need to cut a hundred times to get where he wanted to be. He lived the life he wanted to live the first time around.”
― James N McKean, Art's Cello