This week I finished a viola pictured below for the assistant principal violist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada.  Often I am copying a particular old instrument or at least using one as an inspiration.  The musician who commissioned this viola had his own particular ideas in mind. So the design is a mix of traditional 17th Century Italian elements combined with the requirements of an individual modern musician.

Before I began carving, the violist David Goldblatt and I discussed previous violas he had played and worked out a design to suit him. The main issues to cover were the size of the instrument, length of strings,  dimensions of the neck and the sound. Click here for a previous blog post on the design work. Fortunately he had played previous violas I had made. So we had a good idea regarding the kind of sound he was looking for. Once I starting work on the viola, David visited my workshop to follow the progress which was nice to share.

Above: the raw materials – spruce and maple. Below are a few of the photos we both took of the viola.

David Goldblatt – Assistant principal violist of the

National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada.