Altus violin maker keeps tradition alive

It’s a personal obligation to celebrate and honor the centuries-long history of the bowed instrument and its developers by keeping the tradition alive.

"I suppose we’re in a world with a lot of disposable things, and I feel like what I do is kind of the extreme opposite,” the 25-year-old Altus resident said.

St. John said she started playing when she was 8 years old, and, as her playing progressed, so, too, progressed a fascination with the instrument’s shape, design and acoustics.

She volunteered as an apprentice for a maker near her home in Wisconsin when she was 15 and remembers spending most of her time in the shop.

The smallest details mean everything to a violin’s sound, and it was working as an apprentice, she said, when she really began to understand the instrument’s intricacies and mystique.

"It just felt like I stepped into another century,” she said.

Later, in Chicago, she enrolled at a three-year professional violin making school, spending her off-hours repairing the bowed instruments for a local shop.

"But, even before school, my vision was to have a shop of my own,” she said.

At her climate-controlled home shop in Altus, where she lives with her husband who is in the Air Force, St. John demonstrated the steps of transforming blocks of seasoned spruce and maple into a violin. The two jobs — making and repairing — are distinctly different, St. John said.

"Making, I start from the inside out,” she said. "With repair, it’s often undoing or redoing what time and wear and tear and sometimes accidents do to instruments.”

Most satisfying of all, she said, is finding a home for an instrument she has created from scratch and putting her own notch into the 500-plus-year tradition that is violins.

"I think, ‘where will my instrument be in 100, 200, 500 years from now?’” she said. "You just kind of send it off into the world and wish it well.”

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