As department head of violin making and repair at North Bennet Street School for traditional crafts and trades, Roman Barnas likens his teaching to training athletes, “because the body position matters,” he said. “This is muscle memory.”
He’s an expert in the craft and history of the instrument. He once collaborated with a team of mechanical engineering scholars from MIT on a paper about the evolution of the violin’s F-shaped sound holes, published in the Royal Society journal in 2015.
Barnas makes a point to carve out time to craft his own instruments. He know it’s important to keep his hand in as a violin maker — and, like an athlete, keep his body attuned to the task.
“If I do my own on the weekends, it’s just like if you try to be a competitive runner for marathon and only train on the weekends,” Barnas said. “It doesn’t work.”
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Where to find him: www.nbss.edu/about/people/roman-barnas/
Age: 54
Originally from: Barnas grew up in small mountain village near Zakopane, Poland, in the Carpathian Mountains on the border of what is now Slovakia.
Lives in: Andover
Workshop: The violin-making workshop at North Bennet Street has worktables to accommodate a dozen or more students who spend three years learning to bend ribs, carve plates, glue fingerboards, and more. “It’s like an obstacle course,” Barnas said. “If you pass one level, the next level comes later.”
How he started: As a boy, Barnas played accordion and trumpet, then bass, viola, and violin, and anticipated attending a conservatory. He discovered violin making while attending a secondary school for fine arts in Zakopane. “It slowly dragged me away from music,” he said.
What he makes: “The violin reflects the maker. It’s like handwriting,” Barnas said. “When we write something by hand, we learn from the same teacher, but two people will have a little different handwriting.”
“The way we see it, the way we feel it, the way we make the smallest decisions,” he added, “it becomes this instrument that’s very personal.”
Each violin is “a little being that takes on its own life. It gets its voice and somebody plays it, takes it home, and gets to perform with this instrument,” he said. “And sometimes it comes back to you for checkups.”
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How he works: “I try to work by hand as much as I can. I stay away from taking shortcuts,” Barnas said. “I could have a router making something for me, but I will miss the experience of being close and making a small change because it will just be better for the instrument at that moment. if I’m present all the time during the process of making, it becomes a better instrument.”
Advice for violin makers: Focus on quality. Factory-made instruments, Barnas said, take a toll on the environment and are often just not as good as ones made by hand.
A single violin might be made with spruce, maple, willow, and ebony. Over a lifetime, “a maker could use a couple trees. That’s not an entire forest,” he said.
“We don’t need to make more violins,” he added. “We need to make very good violins.”
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Instagram @cate.mcquaid.