Violin Maker and Novelist Michael Kearns on His Influences, His Shop, and His Knack for Following His Nose Through Life

By Megan Westberg | From the January/February 2025 issue of Strings

It exists at a crossroads, violin making. Where living hands take on the work of those who abandoned their tools several centuries before. And from that perspective, it seems fair to say that all violin makers dwell in both the present and the past. That they must, in fact, because Stradivari still firmly guides their movements, peers over their shoulders. Runs a bravura eye over the curves of each instrument to find the harmony in their form. One particularly distinguished Cremonese immortal in the company of several that linger at this crossroads and silently greet those who would wander their way, chisel in hand.

One such traveler is Michael Kearns, a violin maker and restorer based in Oxford, England (a destination with a number of its own immortal influences with which one might cohabitate). His wayfaring isn’t limited, however, to popping in at the intersection of this year and yesteryear, nor to the act of putting one foot in front of the other, though Canadian-born Kearns has covered a number of miles in this way as well. It’s more to be found in his approach to life: one avenue leading to the next, an intriguing side track ever beckoning. And it was in this fashion that he became a violin maker and restorer, then a painter and classic-car enthusiast, and, recently, a published novelist as well.

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But the work to which he’s been longest and most closely tied is this ancient business of making and tending to stringed instruments. And it would seem he does maintain something of a relationship with the old Italian masters that hang about, felt but unseen, in violin shops. “I love the work of Bergonzi, Carlo Bergonzi,” Kearns says. “I’ve always kind of had a thing about him. And he was the last of the classical Italian makers in Cremona. In fact, he probably finished a lot of the Strads when Strad died because you see Stradivari cellos with Bergonzi heads and things. I just love his work. It’s kind of—it’s right out on the edge a little bit of that classical Cremonese form.”

Of Strad, Kearns lives in awe. That classical form combined with the indefinable quality that suggests movement. Suggests life. “I’ve lived with Stradivari now for over 50 years,” he says, “and he just gets better.” Kearns and violinist James Ehnes come from the same Canadian prairie town, and when Ehnes is in the UK, he’ll sometimes bring his Strad—the 1715 “Marsick”—to Kearns’ shop, Oxford Violins. “You take it out,” says Kearns, “and you look at it, and you think, God, [Strad] never fails to amaze you, you know, never fails to amaze you. And I think, obviously, the more you look at him and the more you understand instruments, the better he gets.

“I have made Strad copies before in the past (but not the recent past), and I kind of just feel like, ‘I give!’ You know, ‘I can’t do that! I’m not that good—I give!’ That’s my take on it anyway.” He laughs without chagrin. Evidently, he’s fine leaving Stradivari to exult at the top of the violin making podium. It is, after all, from Strad and his cohorts that Kearns draws his greatest inspiration in his own making.

“I’m looking for that 17th and 18th-century Italian feel,” he says. “I’m not too bothered about craft precision.” He pauses, carefully considering how best to explain what he means, and lands on a trade adage that would no doubt leave a historical maker or two rather indignant. “There’s a very cruel saying that if you’ve seen one French instrument, you’ve seen them all. In other words, they’re very clinical. They were over-awed by Stradivari, and they kind of ‘recipe-ized’ his work. So it’s very clean, good craftsmanship, but it’s not that interesting. Whereas you get even a fourth-rank Italian violin maker, [the work’s] a bit rough; it looks like he probably made it on a table in two days, but it’s got so much character. And you can look at it forever. And it’s so interesting to look at. And the sound’s interesting, and the players love them. Not that I want to be quick and crude, but I think I want to let that freedom happen and try and have some confidence.” 

That confidence comes from experience, especially the experience of taking instruments apart as a restorer, though Kearns admits he finds making instruments a challenge and always has. He makes one or two a year, so perhaps 60 or 70 over the course of his five-decade career. “In some ways, [making instruments] is more difficult than restoration,” he says. “It’s more naked, in a way. Because you’ve got this huge tradition behind you and [the impulse] to capture what the Italian instruments have, which is that ‘still and still moving’ feel, that sculptural form, which personally I think has a lot to do with why they sound so good. And they’re beautiful, obviously, to look at.” 

Tonally, his efforts in finding freedom within the form of the Cremonese masters result in instruments with a warm sound, he thinks. And it seems as though the challenge of instrument making rests lightly on his shoulders. “Accept your experience, and don’t think too much, and just go for it,” he says. “I’m more that way now, and I think it helps in some way. It makes for a freer instrument.” 

Kearns’ favorite instrument at Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum is the 1618 “little Brothers Amati,” (3/4 size) made of pine and maple. “I’ve always loved it,” he says. “There’s just something so endearing about it. It’s like a beautiful apple or something. It’s just so endearing.” The instrument only predates its custodian—also caretaker of the 1715 “Messiah” Stradivari violin—by about 65 years (the Ashmolean, Britain’s very first public museum and the first university museum in the world, opened in 1683). Oxford itself was founded in the year 912, and its famous university existed in some form as early as the 11th century. Which is all to say that Kearns not only plies a trade steeped in history, but he does so within a city positively drenched in it. So how did Kearns make his way from the Canadian prairies to the city of dreaming spires? 

He graduated high school without much of an idea about what he wanted to do and found himself “falling toward university.” But then, he reconsidered. “I thought, I don’t know anything,” he says, “but I think I’d better not do that.” So he decided to make some money instead. He did so by working in a mine in northern Canada, “sticking it out” for seven months before quitting, buying a motorcycle, and traveling throughout western Canada. “September rolls around,” Kearns says, “and I’m none the wiser.”

He had some money left, so he decided to spend the winter in Europe. “I was traveling around, completely lost, but quite enjoying the European culture, which was so strange for this kid from the prairies,” he says. His mode of travel: hitchhiking, which turned out to be fortuitous. For it was on his way from Oxford to London that he was offered a ride by David El Kabir, an Oxford don, with his two children. El Kabir, a violist, was on his way to play at cellist Rohan de Saram’s wedding. 

The two became friends more or less instantly. 

“He said, well, when you’re finished traveling, maybe you should come back and have a look around Oxford. Who knows? You might be ready to have a look. And that’s what I did.” 

When Kearns returned a few months later, El Kabir, a medical tutor at St. Peter’s College (one of Oxford University’s “newer” colleges, established in 1929), got him into lectures and introduced him to classical music. Kearns then discovered the “very fine collection” at the Ashmolean. “I kind of put two and two together and thought, can you still make these? I just got enthralled by it. And I scrounged a ticket to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, read everything I could get my hands on, and the Newark School of Violin Making was just setting up.” He applied, was accepted, and spent three years in Nottinghamshire learning the craft before finding a job with a violin maker near Oxford. After a stint at another firm, he opened a shop with two colleagues, violin maker Bruno Guastalla and bow maker Mark Yakoushkin. “We set up Oxford Violins back in 1983. And we’re still there, the three of us, working away. So we’ve been there 40 years, God help us.” He laughs. 

Kearns and his colleagues spend a lot of time on restoration and “looking after people’s instruments.” Only an hour from London, Oxford is a popular stop for touring orchestras, and the shop often tends to instruments from the English Chamber Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and others. He clearly likes to take care of visiting musicians and locals alike, especially if they’re a couple of days preconcert and having trouble with their instruments. “They’re starting to blame themselves,” he observes, “and usually it’s the instrument. So that’s nice, to sort them out in that respect. It’s a very hands-on world. It’s a very personal world. And these players are so skilled.”

Restoration takes patience but can yield particularly satisfying results, especially if the instrument involved would’ve been initially classified in the trade as “a noble wreck.” “In a masochistic sort of way, I quite like these long-term restorations,” says Kearns with a chuckle. “I love bringing an instrument back to its full potential.” He points to a recent example of a client who’d brought in a Nicolò Gagliano with extensive water damage. “The back joint was opened up,” he says. “It was just a mess. And it had ink damage as well, because when it was in the case, it had a program in there against it when it got wet, so it got ink damage. When [the client] got it back, she couldn’t believe it: it’d never looked this good. And then she took it home and played it. Two days later, she rang me up and said, ‘It’s never sounded this good.’ And she came in with a bottle of wine as well. That is nice.” 

Ever led by curiosity, perhaps subconsciously nudged into action by immortal Oxford-educated writerly types (J.R.R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, Samuel Johnson, Dorothy Sayers, Seamus Heaney . . . ), Kearns has recently taken a turn as an author. He’d written a bit over the years, but nothing he’d considered substantial. And then he had the idea: “I wanted to write a piece in which music was threaded into plot and character in a way that I’d never quite seen before,” he says. “I wanted it to be a drama, not a musical, not an opera. So that was a pretty vague start, I have to say. But somehow, I thought about this guy that goes in search of a lost piece of music.” 

Thus, the foundation of Kearns’ novel, Clinkerstone (Troubador Publishing), tumbled into existence. But it was a chance encounter in the shop, when a friend brought in a recording by fiddler Paddy Glackin, that supplied some further key details. “I always thought Irish fiddle playing was a bit sentimental, and then I heard Paddy, and I just thought, my God, this would make a guy with two left feet stand up and like to dance the night away.” Kearns’ protagonist, Sean Gallagher, consequently became an exceptional Irish fiddler who ends up in America searching for a lost piano sonata and, in the process, “working out a piece of his own young life that’s been shut away from him.” 

But as ever with Kearns, it would seem, one thing led inevitably to another. And, in this case, to another once again. First, Kearns took a fancy to the idea that the piano sonata referenced in his work should be . . . a real sonata. So he commissioned one from British composer Adam Gorb, who took a deep dive into the composer’s character and “what sort of influences he would’ve had and the reason why each movement was composed.” In short, Gorb really did a job, resulting in a piece that has had one performance so far. “I think it’s a good piece myself, a very good piece,” says Kearns.

Second, Kearns spent some time in Ireland (where he met Paddy Glackin) to get a feel for the culture and to do some research for the book. There, he met the head of the Donegal Violin Trust, which lends out instruments to Irish fiddle students. Kearns was disheartened by the condition of some of the fiddles. “The more I looked, the more I thought, God, these kids are playing on stuff that doesn’t work. Whether it’s a Strad or a student fiddle, the strings have to be the right height off the fingerboard, the pegs have to work, you have to have a decent set of strings, the soundpost roughly in the right place.” 

Thus began Kearns’ involvement with the organization. Clients in Oxford will sometimes bring in a violin, often that they’ve “dug out the attic, and they’re not worth a hell of a lot,” he says, “but they’re OK if they were set up well and had some care and attention put into them.” If the client donates the instrument to the trust, he sets it up, fixes the big issues, finds a bow, and puts on a fresh set of strings. So far, he’s sent eight to ten instruments to Donegal and five or six to a similar program in Letterfrack. “And again,” he says, “all because a friend of mine walked in with a CD by Paddy Glackin.”

Visitors to Oxford may observe this champion of serendipity zipping past the city’s venerable honey-blond stone facades in the 1955 Jaguar XK140 roadster he helped restore, perhaps on his way to help “look after” 98-year-old El Kabir—the man who gave Kearns a ride, and a path forward, all those years ago. He’s already working on another book (hoping his first eventually ends up onscreen) and a couple of long-term restoration projects. He paints when an appealing notion drives him to the canvas. And in a way, it’s as if Kearns’ life mirrors the qualities he most admires in the work of the old Italian masters: one curve leading to another, all contributing to an ineffable sense of movement, wonder, harmony. “You just follow your nose with life,” he says, “and usually something crops up. And quite often, not quite what you expect, but that’s part of the fun.”