In June 2019, violinist and violin maker Dick de Graaff receives an email from a colleague, cellist Susanne Degerfors. In her garden in Amsterdam, an eighty-year-old maple has to be cut down. The roots were fatally damaged by a renovation at the neighbors. Is Dick interested in the wood – and would he perhaps like to make an instrument out of it? Then at least her tree wasn’t felled for nothing.
The request touches him. Dick de Graaff says yes. Fellow violin makers would point to their foreheads. The high moisture content of the wood makes it virtually unusable for instrument making: it would have to dry for at least ten years. Moreover, the maple was felled in the wrong season. This should be done in the winter, preferably in cold weather and at a new moon. “Then the tree is most at rest,” explains De Graaff. “It then has the least juices and is at its driest.”
Dick de Graaff (1966) has only just become a violin maker in 2019. He is a violinist in Holland Symfonia, when that orchestra is almost completely cut back in 2012. De Graaff has lost his job. He does receive money for a retraining programme. Would instrument building be something for him? Then he stays in music. Moreover, he can also practice that profession on Terschelling, where he has had a music school with his wife Daniëlle since 1993, and where he also leads a choir.
He apprenticed with the violin makers Peter Brandt and Bart Straatemeijer in Assen, later at the Dutch Violin Making School in Makkum with Dirk Jacob Hamoen and Rob Stemerding. He has talent for the profession. As early as May 2014, while he is still in training, his old and new selves crossed each other on stage. In The Hague he will perform the first performance of the symphony orchestra of the Royal Conservatoire on self-built instruments ‘September Movements’ for violin, viola and orchestra, the bachelor’s final piece of his eldest son Jan-Peter – now a prominent young Dutch composer.
Five years later, there is the boom. While De Graaff is tuning a piano at the Oerol festival – he is also a piano tuner – a message arrives from Susanne. The tree is going down, does he want to make his wishes known immediately? A piece of trunk about a meter long is set aside for him. They saw that in Amsterdam in four parts of more than two hundred kilos. They will be transported to Terschelling with the mover. There the maple project gets completely out of hand. Dick will not stop at just one instrument. The wood merges into two violins, a viola and a cello, his first.
Because: “I knew that as a cellist Susanne would love to see a cello from that tree. Because I saw how much that tree grieved Susanne, and felt how it would comfort her if he got a second life through me, I had the motivation to try. And I thought: well, a cello is really just a big violin, why not?”
Upon arrival on Terschelling, the wood indeed appears to be soaked. De Graaff comes into contact with Roelof de Jong, a furniture maker, through one of his choir members. It has a drying container, in which wood is dried in three months at temperatures of 20 to 65 degrees that rise in phases. De Graaff takes the gamble. After three months, the moisture content has dropped to a workable 10 to 15 percent. He can start.
Tough job
He explains the progress on the basis of a photo report. “This is the viola, I started with that. Here you see the two violins. And look, there is the cello.” His first cello was a tough job. “Here’s what the wood for the bottom shelf looked like when I started it.” Indeed: as if you were looking at a wildly undulating beach, desecrated by an army of Land Rovers.
Planing takes infinitely more time than with a violin. But De Graaff understands that his first cello must become both an instrument and a symbol of survival. In the resonance box he leaves a fitting sign of life, the inscription The tree of Amsterdam is singing and singing again. In the other instruments he leaves variations on that motto. The four instruments will be finished in April 2022.
And now? De Graaff did not build on commission, but out of pure enthusiasm. He realizes that his family will probably fall apart if sold. “Or a string quartet has to report that wants to play on it.” Then a new string quartet should actually be written for it. Did he talk about it with son Jan-Peter, “but he is so busy with his work that I don’t see it happening right away”.
He lets me see and hear the violins. Explain their historical sources of inspiration, the famous Italian violin makers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “One is more in the line of a Stradivari, the other is more towards the Guarneri violins. They both have their own character. Stradivari models have quite a lot of reverberation. As soon as you tap a tone you hear tooooiiiiiiiiiiinggggg, then it sounds like a kind of gong. If you are going to play scales, then every tone has the same gong effect, so that the tones start to flow through each other. You also have instruments where you hear each note separately, as if you were standing in an acoustically dry room. That means that you can play much faster, but also that it sometimes sounds less smooth than you want as a violinist. I like both. But I noticed that Stradivari models resonate more and Guarneri models less.”
His Guarneri-esque would become second violin in a string quartet. “It’s an autumnal instrument, a bit melancholy. I also built it in the fall. I saw those beautiful autumn leaves and thought: I’m going to see if I can get a drawing like that in the leaf. The other violin just wants summer, that’s more the Stradivari type.” He plays Bach on both and they are indeed completely different. One more pointy and extroverted, the other veiled and romantic. It hits him. “Isn’t it special, and yet the same tree!”
One thing he hopes: that his instruments will inspire their future players to break new ground. “A new instrument lets you discover new things, make new sounds, try new styles. It will grow with the player. Over time it will become more open, gain more volume, and become easier to address.”
Now that he builds his own instruments, De Graaff experiences personally what personal stamp musicians can put on instruments. “I lent an instrument of mine to a first violinist of the Ballet Orchestra. He played it for a while. I got that violin back and heard his way of playing in the instrument. He is a huge virtuoso and the violin is much better suited for fast pieces since him. He pulled it off.”
In the meantime, the cello had returned to Amsterdam, the city of its roots. Susanne Degerfors played her transformed tree and heard it was good.
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