Using a band saw in his Battle Ground workshop, luthier Mark Moreland cuts shapely sound holes (“F-holes”) into the front panel of an expensive cello he is building. (Photos by Amanda Cowan/The Columbian)Photo Gallery
BATTLE GROUND — One day in December 2016, during a rail journey into same northern Italian countryside where the legendary luthier Antonio Stradivari made his stringed masterpieces, Mark and Sharon Moreland found themselves deep inside a gray, soupy fog.
They realized it was just like the weather back in Battle Ground, which is also equidistant to both mountains and ocean and enjoys a similar mix of rain and wind, humidity and sunshine. Mark Moreland (the son of a geography professor) even checked the coordinates and confirmed that Cremona, Italy, and Battle Ground, Washington, are both slightly north of the 45th parallel — the latitude line that marks the halfway point between equator and north pole.
“By my calculations, I’m half a mile south of Stradivari’s workshop,” said Moreland, 68, who has been building violins, violas and cellos since he was a teen in the 1970s.
He and Sharon, his wife, business partner and accountant, settled down in a combined home-and-workshop on the east side of Battle Ground in 2010.
Combine the moist, temperate local climate, the European forest woods that Moreland hand-picks (from Italy, Germany, Austria, Croatia and Romania), and his own half-century of study and practice as a luthier, and what you get is uniquely exquisite sound.
“Power. Color. Spectrum. Warmth. Projection,” is how Moreland described the sound of his violins. “It’s the ability to create an instrument that doesn’t need amplification to cut into a hall of three or four thousand people. I select materials very carefully for that.”
Moreland has worked with woods from all over the globe, and his analyses of their subtly different sounds may surprise you. Violins made from Pacific Northwest spruce tend to sound a little nasal to his ear, he said, while spruce from his favorite European forests convey power, focus and brightness. The rich, warm, dark sound of European bigleaf maples is ideal for cellos and violas, he said.
Ultimately, Moreland loves sourcing materials from the very same forests as his historical heroes, he said.
“I use the same woods that Stradivari used,” Moreland said. “If it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.”
Music plus carpentry
Moreland grew up in Wichita, Kan., where his mother played the piano and his father shared and encouraged his love of music.
“My father, bless his soul,” Moreland said. “He was a poverty-stricken guy growing up in Chicago, but the Chicago Symphony Orchestra came into the slums and gave out free tickets each week.”
Moreland said his father didn’t have much but thanks to those giveaways he was able to sample great concerts and develop a passion for classical music.
Moreland was 5 years old when he started playing the piano, and 8 when he started the violin. He always loved working with his hands, so he also developed carpentry skills and built furniture. By his late teens, all those skills and passions came together as he started making stringed instruments.
While he attended Wichita State University on a full violin performance scholarship, and went on to perform with orchestras in Europe and the U.S., his passion for building instruments eventually outweighed his interest in playing them, he said.
Moreland worked at Portland’s Schuback Violin Shop for 24 years, refining his knowhow as a luthier while also developing business and customer-service skills.
“I was a very good player but I got very interested in making instruments, and I also got good at running the business,” Moreland said.
He and Sharon moved around the country and worked together at violin shops everywhere from Washington, D.C., to Albuquerque, N.M. (The instrument-building climate in that Southwestern state is really challenging, he said.) The couple returned to Sharon’s native Portland area again, eventually landing in nearby Battle Ground, where their shop is tucked away and easy to miss on Grace Avenue.
Did you know?
A luthier is a maker of stringed instruments.
Antonio Stradivari (circa 1644-1737), was a legendary luthier. An instrument made by him is called a Stradivarius. According to the Smithsonian Institution, Antonio Stradivari produced more than 1,100 instruments — violins and violas as well as cellos, guitars and harps — of which 650 may survive today.
Earlier this month, an anonymous buyer at a Sotheby’s auction paid $11.25 million for a Stradivarius violin. The record amount ever paid at auction for a Stradivarius violin is $15.9 million.
“There’s no way anybody would know what was going on here,” Moreland said of his first few years in Battle Ground. “But people in the know were busting the doors down.”
Carved, not sanded
Luthiers look to historical precedent not just for their materials but even for the shapes and outlines of their instruments, with templates for violins, violas and cellos handed all the way down to today from legendary makers like Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù.
Moreland said he builds instruments for “lay people” like serious students and aspiring professionals, he said.
“My instruments go to conservatory students. I’m not looking to make a cello for Yo-Yo Ma,” he said. But many of those conservatory students have risen to become orchestra professionals and members of top-level touring groups in all genres.
“I’ve made instruments that have gone on to become very famous,” he said.
They include ones played by noted Portland composer Kenji Bunch and Oregon Symphony violinist (and 45th Parallel music series founder) Gregory Ewer.
Prices on Moreland’s instruments reach into the tens of thousands of dollars. When The Columbian recently stopped by his Battle Ground workshop, Moreland was working on a cello requested by a shop called Rare Violins of New York, where it will go on sale for $60,000.
Moreland fired up an electric saw and slowly cut graceful, curving F-holes into the cello’s arched front face (called the soundboard). When the F-holes were finished, he set the soundboard in a special cradle and shaved away at the soundboard’s rough inside with small smoothing-plane tool, a laborious process that takes muscle and time — days or even weeks, he said.
“Everything is scraped and carved, not sanded,” Moreland said. “Sanding mashes the grain.”
Moreland said it takes him at least 110 hours to make a violin, and double that to build a cello. There’s no shortage of assembly-line-style makers who won’t even spend half that much time on an instrument, he said. With those, he said, you never do know what you’re going to get.
Winter is the best time for cello building in Battle Ground, he added, because all that carving, planing, scraping and shaping — not to mention bending wood over steaming-hot water — is hot, sweaty work. (Cello-building is also an excellent reason to see the chiropractor, he said.)
Moreland said he’s built 90 instruments so far in his career.
At age 68, Moreland said he’s slowing down. He used to work 75 hours in a week but these days it’s more like 25 hours, he said.
Sadly, Moreland said, the luthier business is also slowing down, with fewer people taking up classical music than used to. (Classical is where Moreland’s heart lives, he confirmed, with perhaps a side helping of classical-electronic “crossover.” But no jazz, please: “Jazz makes me crazy,” he said.)
But business keeps finding him — by appointment only — thanks to his reputation and ongoing connections with a couple of different organizations. The Violin Society of America is a nonprofit that’s open to anyone who wants to pay the membership fee, Moreland said.
By contrast, the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers is an exclusive group of professionals with tough membership criteria, including at least nine years of professional experience and three recommendations from current Federation members. The group hosts a meeting every two years, and periodically enjoys special access to some of the finest historical violins in the world, Moreland said.
Moreland once attended a Federation meeting in Washington, D.C., where the Smithsonian Museum of American History closed to the public its musical instrument exhibition, but threw open those glass cases to Federation experts and invited them to get their (gloved) hands all over everything. Not in order to play the instruments — that was forbidden — but to study the hidden secrets of their creation, he said.
“They supplied us with gloves and cloth-covered tables,” he said. “We were able to take measurements and pictures. We did research and checked them all over and took notes. It was fascinating.”
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