Marty’s blog

I just got the fiddle back from my luthier, Augustino Napoli, a fine Chicago violin maker. The foot of my bridge broke about two weeks ago, so he replaced that and urged me to also replace the sound post a have new tailpiece. He was wise. The improvement is like night and day.

By the way, the fiddle I’m playing on at the moment is modern, from Beijing. It is one of the finest instruments I’ve played on, beautifully hand crafted, very fine workmanship, and a performance quality fiddle. I know, your first reaction is, “???????!”

But you know, there are violins coming out of China today that are absolutely outstanding. In my view, many modern Chinese violins easily rival what is coming out of Italy, Germany, France and the U.S..

Almost everyone views them initially with a lot of prejudice - for various reasons. But if I let someone look at and play the fiddle before I tell them it’s from China, they usually find it
outstanding too.

And for comparison, you can pick up a Chinese fiddle like this - hand made - for between about $1500 and $2500 dollars. A comparable violin by a good European or American maker would cost you between say $25,000 and $60,000. You choose.

I don’t know how these Chinese men and women can live off of what they get paid. After the markup of the importer and the dealer here, they can’t make much on each fiddle. That is a little worrisome to me. My feeling is that once they establish a solid foreign market, their prices will start to rise dramatically. We’ll see.