Let the images, texts, films and sounds on this website guide you through my studio.
You will learn many secrets about the art of violin making and the exploration of sound.
As a master violin maker, I see the violins, violas and cellos that are made in my workshop as individual sound sculptures. The creative process, from searching for the tonewood in the high altitudes of the northern Italian mountain forests to polishing off the last coat of oil varnish, takes many hundreds of hours. But my work as a master violin maker has only come to fruition when the instrument becomes a human voice.
Even though I have developed my own design language over decades and every instrument bears my artistic signature, the work of art that is created on my workbench is not the obvious sculpture. The work of art is sound, whose power and richness of colour, modulability and emotional authority derives from the resonances of the instrument. The resonance profile is like an acoustic color palette that lets the musician paint tonally.
The small branding and the violin label inside my instruments are signatures of my masterful work. The fact that my initials – like those of the old Italian grandmasters Antonio Stradivari and Joseph Guarneri del Gesu – are “signed under the cross” is significant. It is the notion that was also alive in those role models: music is ultimately prayer poured into sound.
Martin Schleske, master violin maker & Dipl.-Physik-Ing.
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