This article is about a very special person who is a good friend of mine
and lives just down the road, David Wiebe of David City Nebraska.  
"This ones for you David!!"

Under the skilled hands of David Wiebe, Oregon
spruce and maple become prized instruments - 
violins, violas, cellos, basses - 
played by leading musicians throughout the country.

"I really do believe it's an art, but sometimes I spend too much time thinking that, and I have to get back to thinking it's a craft, and that the art will happen occasionally - when everything works together:  the chemistry of how I'm feeling, how the wood is working, how everything falls into place - maybe it will be art.  I feel instinctively that it is more than just craft, but it has to be craft, too.  History will decide, I suppose."

When David Wiebe gives his work to history to judge, he subjects himself to a rigorous standard - names such as Nicolo Amati and Antonio Stradivari the 17th and 18th century Italian master violin makers rise to the minds of even those with only a passing familiarity with stringed instruments, even if David himself is much to modest, too realistic, to make the comparison himself.

But when you watch him meticulously draw a fair-thin curl of spruce from the delicate arch of a viola top with a brass finger plane or, carve the baroque scroll of a violin, you see his craftsmanship.  And, handling a finished instrument, buoyant, delicately curved, gleaming under its hand-rubbed varnish, and tingling with the stored tension of its taut strings, you are in awe of the art.

No, he would never put himself in that august company.  But he knows his work is good, and so do musicians all across America.  David Wiebe's name is certainly now better known nationally among the top ranks of professional musicians that it is in - perhaps even more than it is in David City, where he works in a clean, airy shop a few blocks from courthouse square.  But musicians know.  Musicians such as Leonard Rose, Yehudi Menuhin, Donald McInnis, Paul Tobias, and Claude Kenneson, all own Wiebe instruments.

"People sometimes tell me about instruments they own made by famous makers - sometimes they say 'Well, I'd like to own a second instrument.'  I don't get steamed by that, but I think, 'Fine.  Maybe one day the instrument you own now will be the second one.'   And let's face it: with due respect to the great masters, there will never be any more of those, and there will be plenty of mine, as long as I'm alive.  And those instruments - by the great masters - weren't necessarily considered high art at the time they were made.  They were wonderful specimens of this craft."

The work, art or craft, is exacting, laborious, and demanding, and filled with intangibles which depend not simply on mechanical skills, but on the eye, the ear, the indefinable "sixth sense" of the maker who understands his work and his materials.  "As you work with the wood," he says, "it becomes apparent that it is alive.  It has resonance.  Tap it - it rings.  As you work with it, it moves - it's not inert."

The wood, spruce and maple, comes from western Oregon where the trees mature slowly but produce strong, flexible fibers.  There, David's major supplier, Ed Tepper and his son John, select tall, perfect trees, the spruce limbless to 70 feet.  They cut only a few trees a year, and for up to 10 years after it is cut, the wood seasons; drying in an open-walled shed; spruce for the tops, maple for the back, sides, and necks of violins, violas cellos and basses.  It is shipped to David, and seasons in his storage racks perhaps for another several years, adjusting to a new climate.

Then, wedges are glued edge-to-edge to form the rough shape of the arched tops and backs, and under the patient, steady gouge, the familiar violin shape appears.  Finger planes remove the gouge marks, and scrapers hone the surface, measured to hundredths of an inch by a micrometer.  Nothing is sanded because the dust will clog the pores in the wood, reducing the brilliance of the grain under the varnish.

The edges are grooved, and a dark inlay - purfling - set in, following the outline of the top.  The inside is hollowed, again monitored by micrometer.  The sound holes - graceful "f" shapes - are cut, their shape and placement, like the neck scroll, interpreted individually by each maker - his signature.  The bass bar, a spruce "spring" beneath the point where the bridge will stand, is fit.

"A lot of the process is just labor - bending the ribs and so forth - kind of the 'cabinet making' part of the instrument.  First you have to put together this solid box.  The joints have to fit perfectly; it has to be straight and square.  Then comes the shaping of the arch.  That's the part that's really intriguing.  There are endless, infinite possibilities for how it can be shaped and it has a direct effect on the sound."

"At last comes "closing the corpus" - the final assembly - and varnishing: eight to ten coats, finally hand rubbed and polished.  "That's where you see it really come to life."

How much time does it take?  "I suppose I spend about 120 hours on a violin and about 200 hours on a cello.  In the past I've experimented with trying to work as quickly as possible, and I was able to turn out an instrument in pretty short order - but it just wore me out.   I decided I didn't want to be worn out all the time.  It wasn't worth it."

He makes only some 12 to 15 instruments a year; his goal is not quantity but "as high a level of quality as I'm capable of.  If that hurts quantity, so be it.  Pure quantity doesn't really amount to much."

Even a finished violin, however, is not really finished.  David compares a new instrument to new wine:  "You could drink it, but it improves with age.  A violin has to sound good right away, but 'good' in its early life is sometimes rough-edged - kind of like a rambunctious young stallion.  Not settled down.  Some days it will be excellent, some days disappointing.  Unpredictable."

But in six months, it usually settles down.  The first two years, he says are the period in which it goes through its most dramatic changes.  "But they are mostly due to how well the instrument is regulated and what kind of a player owns it, and how well it is played.

"A good player opens an instrument up and makes it do more than it was doing originally.  A bad player won't even disturb the potential; he'll just play on the surface, make it choke up, or sound vulgar.  Then it starts to sound that way all the time."

So, the most rewarding moment for David, as a violin maker, is not hearing the first note of a new instrument:  "I guess the real rush for me comes when someone who is really an expert musician picks up the instrument after it has gotten to where it is doing what it is supposed to, and really tears loose on it.  That's a real thrill."

But how does a young man from Beatrice become a nationally recognized violin maker?  David says his interest was present when he was in high school, but by his college days it had been set aside in favor of performing or teaching music.  "I was enjoying college, but it really didn't seem to be taking me anywhere.  Then an advisor suggested this, not knowing it had been on my mind earlier.  I took the idea off the shelf, dusted it off, and it sounded good."

He applied to the Staatliche Fachschule fur Geigenbau in Mittenwald, Germany, was accepted, spent a year polishing his German, and went.  Mittenwald, in Bavaria near the Austrian border, has been a traditional violin making area for centuries, and the school, staffed by various violin makers from the region, is well known:  "The whole world was knocking at their door to get the training."

David studied there for a little more than two year, then returned to Beatrice.  "I had intended to go to work at one of the shops in a metropolitan area and get training as a repair or restoration person.  I went to Chicago and did some interviews, and then, perhaps naively, thought I could do better on my own.  So, I just tried to scrape out a living for myself from a walk-in shop in Beatrice.  It was really hand-to-mouth."

Scraping out a living means becoming recognized, and "that was tricky.  I made my first instrument and took it to the University of Missouri where I had gone to school - to one of the teachers there, and she was very encouraging.  In fact, one of her students bought that first instrument.  She asked me to make another one for her.  Well, as it turned out, she didn't get right away.  The one she has is number 30."

"She kept encouraging me.  I'd made five violas and was about to make the sixth one, and she said, 'You should enter this contest in Michigan.'  I made the viola and entered it - it was finished the day before it had to be sent off, untried and unproven.  I just slapped it in a case and sent it out.  To my surprise and amazement, it took first prize.  There were a lot of musicians there, and that got me going."

Since then, he has completed more than 80 instruments, mostly violas, probably because that prize-winner was a viola.  "Some people have even referred to a me as a viola maker.  I was interested in all the instruments, but I guess, I was grateful to have my inroad be the viola.  The viola seems to me to be the least problematic because it has less tension for its size."

"Then I made my first cello, and Leonard Rose (cellist and faculty member at the Julliard School of Music in New York City) saw it, and right now I have more cello orders than anything else.   But, I'd like to have more violin orders at this point.  I guess the secret is not to show people cellos - not that I can be that picky yet."

"The violin is the most difficult of the three for me to make.  The tolerances are so close; the tension is higher proportionally, and the potential for the instrument to sound vulgar, or not to sound at all, is much greater.  The cellos comes next.  I guess it was good I got started on something a little more forgiving."

Most of his business comes from other parts of the country - closer to the professional world in music - but up to this time, at least, he has found good reasons to stay in Nebraska.  "I've enjoyed being here for this time in my career.  It has provided me a secure kind of protective environment that has allowed me to develop.  I wanted to be someplace where I could do something kind of different, and not just be run over by the steam roller of a frenetic pace.  I think Nebraska has nurtured that - allowed me to develop something that otherwise might have succumbed to the hardships, the financial demands, of a harder place to live."

And, he says, he needs the solitude to work without interruption.  His original walk-in shop in Beatrice didn't work - too many people walked in.  People, understandably, want to see him work, to talk - and sometimes to ask him to evaluate their "attic Strads" - the old, cheap, poorly made violins that often carry a counterfeit Stradivari signature.  "I appreciate the interest people show," he says, "but I just have to turn them away.  I can't answer questions and explain the process, and still maintain the concentration I must have to make good instruments."

So, for now at least, he works with his Swiss associate - Christoph Zurschmiede, whom he met in Mittenwald - in David City, a farm-country county seat where in summer the heat shimmers over the rich, black soil in fields that almost encroach upon the town itself.  It is one of those places where the old folk-saying seems true:  It does almost seem sometimes that you can hear the corn growing.  Around the courthouse square you'll see more Key overalls than neckties, and in the speech of many of the old men in the snack shop you hear the unmistakable accents of their central-European forebears.  When you think of David City, you probable think of farms, of corn.

But David City produces another crop; one you are not likely to see piled high and golden in patient trucks waiting at the elevator, but which, if you are lucky, you may see gleaming in the spotlights of a concert stage, and hear, clear and sonorous, filling a concert hall with Bach or Beethoven.

This Article and others are available in the
NEBRASKAland
Published by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission
Vol. 62 / No. 2 / March 1984
Photos and Text by Don Cunningham