The Luthier

The Luthier

Ralph “RJ” Storm has always loved wood and music. Thirty years ago, then 9-year-old RJ traded a motorbike for a chain saw and began spending summers trimming trees and cutting lumber around his family farm in Rio, N.Y. He also began plucking his first five-string banjo.

Seven years later, working in a mill making everything from cabinets to a wooden leg, he fashioned his first banjo, cutting the neck from a banister in the Port Jervis, N.Y., post office. “I still remember the smell of that sweet walnut,” Storm says.

He had no idea then that his work someday would find its way into the hands of musicians, from foot-stomping bluegrass bands to the string sections of symphony orchestras. “You never know where life is going to take you,” he says, sitting in the 10-by-25-foot workshop behind his home in Middletown, N.Y., (pop. 24,100) where he practices the art of the luthier, or violinmaker.

Antonio Stradivarius set the standard for violinmakers in Cromona, Italy, 300 years ago. Since then, the ranks of the masters have been from Italian, French, and German schools, creating an instrument unchanged since its invention. It’s only in the last 50 years that American luthiers have come into their own, with training schools in Boston and Salt Lake City. To join the ranks of this little known guild, students study the basics for four years and then, if they’re lucky, are taken on as an apprentice by one of the few working masters.

RJ’s first “school” was in the town of Warwick, N.Y., where he worked in a shop learning to repair violins, violas, cellos, and whatever else came through the door. He made folksinger Pete Seeger’s banjo before setting up his own shop in Middletown. Then, eight years ago, a chance request for an appraisal, and an audacious phone call to a master violinmaker, brought him to a small shop in New York City. There, RJ found his calling. “I wanted desperately to learn to make violins,” he says.

“The Master” had no room for an apprentice and stacks of applications sat on a shelf, gathering dust. By dint of small town grit, perseverance and persistence, RJ simply went to the shop every week and sat on the front steps, until finally, the man pointed at a bench on the other side of the shop and said, “There. Sit.”

Thus began three years of suffering the indignities of the apprentice, while still running his own shop. After a year, he was allowed to sit at the side of his teacher and hand him his clamps. But he learned.

Here, he was exposed to and handled almost priceless instruments of the violinists who can discern a luthier’s work by the instrument’s sound. Violinists tolerate few mistakes. Holding a repair job in his hands, he says, “This is an extension of someone’s soul. They speak with it what they feel, in a way you can never clothe in a garment of words.”

Today, Storm is in his own shop every day, repairing, restoring, and building violins, using gouges, planes—some as small as a joint of his finger—scrapers, and surgical-sharp knives. From a hand-picked 39mm slab of 100-year-old, band-sawed curly maple and rough-cut elm and walnut, he fashions the crepe-thin, curved back and top, cuts the F-holes, bends, curves, and fits the ribs, shapes the neck and carves the scroll—the signature of any violin—and fits them all together. Fingerboard, peg box, and bridge follow, but the true secret of a violin is in what’s not seen—it’s in the sound, and creating the sound revolves around the 2-inch spruce sound post.

Fit in between the top and back behind the bridge, the carving of the sound post can take years to master. “It is the soul of the violin, its heart,” Storm says.

A small businessman/artist, he adds balance to his life by playing in a bluegrass band, and volunteering as the Wednesday and holiday chef at the local homeless shelter, where he met his wife, Diane. Of his shelter work he says, “It is my way of being of service to humanity.”

It can be said that art is created from the mind, eye, and hands of the artist, but the creation has to come from the heart, and Storm has plenty of that.

Writer Warren D. Jorgensen enjoys music from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y

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