Violin maker builds toward a virtuoso performance

It's a workshop much like the one Stradivari himself, the great Italian violin maker of the Renaissance, might have labored in: carving tools and paint brushes strewn across a desk, hundreds of violins hang ing from ceiling hooks, awaiting repair.

One instrument is set apart from all the others, lying like a rare jewel on a red patch of carpet. It is Jesse Daniel Maschmeyer's opus: a violin crafted over three months especially for the Violin Society of America's national competition, which draws to a close today in Baltimore.

Twenty-nine-year-old Jesse Daniele -- like rock stars, violin makers often adopt professional names -- has worked as a violin restorer for Reuning & Son Violins in the South End for the past two years. During this time he has built five violins, three of which he's sold for around $10,000 each , the average rate for beginners to the craft.

From August to October, Daniele labored on his masterpiece after-hours, slipping into the shop on Saturday mornings and working till dusk carving, sanding, and filing. In the end, Daniele estimates, he spent more than 100 hours and $1,500 in wood and supplies on his labor of love.

Why go through so much effort for a contest?

Sweet rewards. Defeating the 500 other entrants would increase the demand for his instruments: An instrument bearing his trademark "Jesse Daniel e " label could then sell for up to $20,000.

"At the competition the violin is played by a quartet and wins an award for workmanship and acoustics , " Daniele says. "Musicians attend. . . . If I win, someone could very well want to buy my violin right there."

Daniele's appreciation for woodworking is deeply rooted in his DNA, spanning back to the years his family spent in Monterey, Calif.

His father, Dave Maschmeyer, worked as an arborist in nearby Carmel-by-the-Sea , and when Daniele was a boy of 8, he began helping him clear trees on weekends.

"He'd come in my room at 8 and say, 'All right, big boy, get dressed, you're going to work with me!' " Daniele remembers. "I didn't like it too much, dragging branches," because they "cut your hands, and the sap stains."

Around the same time, Daniele began taking violin lessons with Mildred Kline, a music instructor who taught out of her Carmel home.

"Jesse was a musical boy, very serious about playing," remembers Kline, now 87 and still teaching the instrument. "He showed me things he'd made out of scraps of wood from his father. Jesse had an affinity for the wood. He related to it."

After a year of lessons, Daniele was forced to stop due to difficulties commuting to Carmel. But student and teacher continued to keep in touch, and at 15 , Daniele visited his old instructor and expressed his desire to learn violin-making.

Kline referred him to a woodcarving friend, William Stanley, a retired biochemist who had learned to work with wood growing up with missionary parents in China.

"First, before making a violin, I had to learn woodcarving for six months," Daniele recalls. Stanley, he said "was an amateur maker. He has palsy, and his instruments are not like Stradivari, but he was plenty good to get me started."

Daniele's first violin, created at 16, was given away to family friends. That same year, with Kline's guidance, Daniele decided to further his violin-making studies in Italy. He enrolled in La Scuola Internaz ionale di Liuteria di Parma, a Renaissance-style school where students apprenticed under one teacher, Renato Scrollavezza . Then 70, Scrollavezza had a silvery beard and more than 40 years' experience crafting violins. "Maestro," as his 12 students called him, had many eccentric habits, including naming all his own handmade violins like children, scrawling on their inside labels names like Aphrodite and Giordano Bruno. (Now, there's a name: Bruno, a 16th-century philosopher, was burned at the stake during the Inquisition.) Scrollavezza also had a temper as hot and unpredictable as Vesuvius, Daniele says.

"He wanted you to work quietly and not make any noises with your tools," Daniele recalls. "If you filed against the grain of the wood, it would whistle and squeak. That was not allowed." Scrollavezza "would scream and pound on the desk."

One time, Daniele says, Maestro broke a previous student's poorly crafted violin with his bare hands to illustrate a point. "It was so ugly he didn't want it to be a violin , " Daniele says, smiling at the memory. "He called it 'un bastardino,' a little bastard."

Sc rollavezza's was an authoritarian teaching style, Daniele says. It was the sort of apprenticeship "where you don't get praised, you get yelled at, but you really learn." During his two years in Parma , Daniele studied subjects such as music theory, mechanical drawing, even dendrochronology, the comparative study of growth rings in trees and aged wood. He took field trips to the Alps where wood cutters taught him how to find the best wood for violin making. ( Spruce is the most resonant, he learned, and therefore makes the best violins.)

As an artist, Daniele learned to hone his own violin-making style, combining modern touches with classic 16th-century violin-making techniques. The ancient trick most prized by Daniele is that of utilizing fruit and vegetable pigments to achieve a deep cherry-colored varnish, a technique used by Renaissance painters.

After graduating from Scrollavezza's academy, Daniele worked for four years as a restorer at Metzler Violins in his native California. In 2004 he came to Boston's Reuning and Son.

"Jesse's violins," says shop owner Chris Reuning, "have improved stylistically and in execution from being exposed to the different instruments that come through the shop. He has access to great old violins that you'd have to go to museums to find."

When asked how his violin stands out from the others entered in the competition, Daniele answers unhesitatingly. "My varnish is made with Baltic amber, so when it dries it's very transparent and has unique depth.

"Also, I've been studying how to reproduce violins Stradivari created in 1709 during his golden period."

In hopes, Daniele admits, that it will lead to a golden period of his own.

Kristin D'Agostino can be reached at ciweek@globe.com