A modern-day Stradivari

Joseph Rashid has just finished making his 95th violin, in time for his 95th birthday.

“This is my best yet,” he says, running his hand over the amber wood and pronouncing it as fine as his favorite, the esteemed No. 4, which he completed in 1937.

Rashid has been a boxer, a carpenter and an engineer, and since he retired to Nevada City in the early 1980s, he has devoted his time to creating violins that have been played by such world-renowned musicians as Yehudi Menuhin, Glenn Dicterow and members of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras.

Rashid has already surpassed the icon of the craft, Antonio Stradivari, in longevity, at least.

Stradivari built violins until he was 93. Working with assistants, he made more than 1,100 in all, and some 600 survive. The Italian craftsman was copied by many, so thousands of violins bear his name, some produced years after Stradivari’s death in 1737. The record price for a Stradivarius violin was nearly $1.6 million in 1998.

Rashid, on the other hand, has always worked alone, and as he turns 95, he has no plans to stop. He expects to finish two more violins in 2005. And while he has received offers, he has never sold a single one.

All 95 of his creations now reside in his modest home in this historic Gold Rush town about 150 miles from San Francisco. Row upon row of the gleaming instruments are housed neatly and chronologically in cabinets he also designed and built. The colors range from deep russet to nearly red to the amber gold of No. 95, the latest violin Rashid has varnished. The top of the cabinets are lined with photos and letters from some of the renowned violinists who have played Rashid’s creations.

“I put so much care into them. I love them. It is important to me not to connect money with the violins,” Rashid says. “All my life I’ve believed what’s wrong with the world is that everyone’s trying to get rich. The greed for money is out of proportion.”

It is far more rewarding to hear his violins played by many different musicians, he says.

Rashid says he also has “scientific” reasons for keeping all his violins. As violins age, the wood dries and the shape can change in ways that are subtle, but which alter the sound. Rashid likes to dissect his instruments to see just how they have matured.

“I wanted to do research on them and in order to do that I had to take them apart every few years. If I sold them, I couldn’t do that,” Rashid says.

Rashid says the key to their quality is that he doesn’t bend the spruce and maple he uses, and he dries the wood for at least 15 years so the shape of the finished violin is stable. That way, the sound doesn’t change over time as the wood ages.

Using handcrafted tools he engineered himself, he shapes each piece of wood in a shop off his garage, where unfinished parts of the next violins line the walls. It takes him two months to apply the multiple coats of thin varnish -- a combination of linseed oil, turpentine and rosin similar to the recipe used by Stradivari.

At this rate, he produces just one or two violins a year. The pace pleases him: “If I made one a month, it would just be another commercial violin. I couldn’t give them the care I give these.”