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In Memoriam: Eugene Clark

In Memoriam: Eugene Clark

July 11, 1934 – December 9, 2016

by Cyndy Burton, Marc Silber, Brian Burns, Michael Gurian, Jay Hargreaves, R.E. Bruné, Jeffrey R. Elliott and Federico Sheppard

Originally published in American Lutherie #129, 2017

We finally met in September of 1979. I say “finally” because all through the process of building my first guitar in 1978, with Bill Cumpiano’s excellent instruction, I heard stories. Eugene says this, Eugene says that — all spoken in a tone of reverence. I thought, “Who is this guy?” He was legendary. Michael Gurian was one of Bill’s teachers and employers, and it was Michael who helped spread the word, having known Eugene well from his New York City days between ’65 and ’68. For more details about Eugene’s life and thoughts on the Spanish guitar, I strongly recommend Jon Peterson’s “Meet the Maker” article (AL#65, Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six) and “The Classic Guitar: Four Perspectives” (AL#64, BRBAL6) and other substantive articles on Spanish guitar rosette construction, flamenco guitars, building guitars using a Spanish solera, and French polishing — all published by the GAL. His contributions were always instructive and stamped by the vision and conviction of one whose depth of knowledge seemed boundless. Taken as a whole, they could almost be a book, perhaps the one he said he was working on all along.

Back in September 1979, with my first guitar in hand as a calling card, I visited many West Coast luthiers, looking for a place to land and pursue my newly found life’s work. After stopping at Jeff Elliott’s in Portland, Oregon, I headed south to the Bay Area and Eugene Clark’s. He lived with his family in a second floor apartment on Solano Avenue in Albany, California. There was a pet supply store at street level, and his shop, which I did not see, was located behind the pet store. He welcomed me warmly and examined my guitar. He liked that it was mahogany and Sitka. “Any woods can make a good guitar.” He served us delicious spaghetti for lunch, and sent me on my way. With very few words exchanged, I felt that I’d received the encouragement I needed — a blessing to continue the quest.

I didn’t know he’d mostly given up guitar making and repairing at that time, or that he’d suffered a severe head injury in 1968 just after moving back to California from New York. He had significant memory loss and numbness on the right side of his body. He retaught himself math, reading, writing, speaking, and gradually, over the next twenty years, gained back both his mental capacity and everything but 10% of feeling in his right side. During those years he attended community college to study criminology and received an associate’s degree (two years in one semester); trained as a police officer (which included a great deal of learning codes and maps and physical fitness training), after which he volunteered as a reserve police officer for about seven years; relearned Morse code and became very proficient; overcame speaking limitations and was able to get a good job as a radio operator for ITT and later with the Merchant Marines. Around 1988, he began his own landscaping business, and found that the heavy-duty work ultimately completed his recovery.

In 1996 he was invited to speak at a Healdsburg Guitar Festival and that event marks the beginning of his return to lutherie, his second epoch. He gave up landscaping (“it had done all it could”) and unpacked his guitar-making and repair tools. I met up with him again in Healdsburg a year later at a two-day intensive class on French polishing he gave at the American School of Lutherie. It was an amazing display of organization, knowledge, and teaching skill. I was there to witness, participate, and write an article for the readers of American Lutherie. The result was a joint effort on our part; a long, detailed article that I still highly recommend today to anyone wanting to pick up a muñeca.

The second epoch lasted about twenty years, and he died of respiratory illness in his living room/shop. I don’t know how many guitars he built, repaired, or restored during that time, but I know he shared a great deal of his considerable knowledge in GAL articles, lectures and workshops at GAL Conventions, and individual instruction. We all are the wiser for his extraordinary gifts and willingness to share them.

The following quotes are taken from the previously mentioned “Meet the Maker” and “The Classic Guitar: Four Perspectives” articles. He was truly legendary, and his words live on.

“...in my late twenties I did make a decision to pursue one craft. As Swami Vivekananda once wrote, ‘Give up forever this nibbling at things. Take up one thing. Do that one thing wholeheartedly.’”

“To pursue a craft there is something you obey. It’s not different from the martial arts, in which you don’t succeed until you stop imposing yourself. Lutherie is a visceral pursuit, not a cerebral one. It is neither an art nor a science. It’s brujería — sorcery!”

“...I learned from guitars, not from books. There weren’t any books. My work is influenced almost solely by the work of Manuel Ramírez and his two students, Domingo Esteso and Santos Hernández. For me, those makers define the Spanish guitar. All guitars make tones, but few have a voice. Those are guitars with a voice, with clarity, and with presence.”

“French polishing is part of my way of life. There’s hardly a more beautiful way to spend my time in this presumably one human life that I’ve been allotted — to be in the quiet of my shop with nothing but the sound of the pad going over a piece of wood. It’s really quite beautiful. This is the kind of thing you don’t have to run away from to go fishing; it’s at least as good as fishing.” (laughter and applause, live audience, 2006 GAL Convention)

— Cyndy Burton

One day, about 1962, I was in the back of Lundberg’s Fretted Instruments Shop here in Berkeley. Jon Lundberg came back and asked me if I could go up front as a guy had made a nylon string guitar and wanted to sell it or get feedback. Jon said, “Marc, you have a better ear than me, and also it is a nylon string guitar, not something we feature here.” So I went up to the counter and there was Eugene Clark with a guitar. This guitar was beautifully crafted and so I innocently asked Eugene, “How many guitars have you made?” He answered that this was his second, and the first did not turn out very well. He went on to say how he had made the first one “upside down” meaning with the top facing upwards until he studied a Spanish-made guitar and decided that they were made with the top facing down, and the back put on last. All this came from him noticing that some glue had run in that direction inside the guitar showing the position that was used to originally make it.

I had always felt that nylon strung guitars had a weak G string (3rd) but this guitar had a bold voice throughout, and so I began asking Eugene questions. And he always had the answers, all these years. These answers from Eugene remained useful and pertinent.

I was lucky to run into him when I was very young and just starting my path along the trail of music making. In November 1963 I opened my Fretted Instruments Shop in Greenwich Village. A few years later Eugene moved to New York with his family. He worked in the repair shop at the back of my store for a while, and soon had his own location, on 24th Street I think. The West Village had a lively scene of guitar making with Freddie Mejia, David Rubio, Michael Gurian, David Santo, Lucien Barnes, and others. We all learned from Eugene, more or less. For me it was more!

We had long talks about music with flamenco being Eugene’s favorite style. He was a very good music maker; he never played much and so had limited chops, but he had great ideas. My background was in American roots music and we compared the rhythmic ideas and lyrics of flamenco and blues. We each learned a lot by doing that. Eugene was also very fond of Bill Monroe and his bluegrass music.

I am proud I was able to encourage Eugene into his “second phase” of making guitars after he had quit for many years. His second coming exposed a much larger audience for him and his ideas concerning this craft. It was the depths he went to when investigating ideas that was so impressive and valuable.

Eugene will be missed as a great guitar maker, a great teacher, and for me, a close and valued friend.

With deep gratitude,

— Marc Silber

Eugene Clark was a difficult person that you couldn’t help loving. By turns charming and irascible, he could easily have fit into one of the Reader’s Digest articles “My Most Unforgettable Character.” If you can inherit charisma, it’s clear where Eugene got his. His father was a preacher with the Science of Mind church in Los Angeles. My in-laws used to attend, and thought highly of Eugene Emmett Clark.

I looked up Eugene in San Jose, California, in the spring of 1963 at the urging of my flamenco guitar teacher, Freddie Mejia. Gene, as he was then called, had just finished a guitar for Freddie, and it was a cannon! With lumberyard spruce back and sides and European spruce top, it was as light as a feather. Freddie was playing it at The Old Spaghetti Factory Café in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, along with Dave Jones (David Serva). We hadn’t yet discovered that California cypress was great back-and-sides wood.

I was about halfway through my first guitar, and had just decided to get serious about guitar making, so I drove down to San Jose from Palo Alto, and Eugene and I ended up talking for several hours. He was living on less than a shoestring with what Zorba called, “wife, kids, the whole catastrophe.” His workshop was one bedroom of his house, about fourteen feet square. We would often visit Warren White who lived across town in a trailer with three Sheltie dogs. The aroma was terrific!

Eugene had a guru in India named Gopal Singh, and was a strict vegetarian. He offered me an unpaid job, partly because he had recently been to a group meeting with a clairvoyant. You passed some personal object up to the “seer,” and got a prediction. Eugene sent up a key ring with some keys on it, and got the prediction that a man would come to him that “understood tools.” In my ignorance I was all for using a portable belt sander to speed up production. So I bought one, and against my advice, Eugene tried it out on a spruce soundboard. He almost wore a hole through it in about twenty seconds!

In those days secrecy was the norm. Nobody knowledgeable would tell you anything, and the only thing written on guitar making was A.P. Sharpe’s little thirty-two-page booklet Make Your Own Spanish Guitar. It served to get me hooked, and I’m grateful. The GAL changed all of that, and I’m really grateful! Otherwise we consulted violin-making books, and Eugene became fascinated with oil varnishes. He always French polished his instruments, but in later years added walnut oil to his shellac for durability. I suspect that those violin making books had a lasting effect.

Eugene had one condition for taking me on — that I was not to open a shop within five-hundred miles of him when I went off on my own. I accepted gladly. Our association lasted six or eight weeks before it became apparent to me that I was more of a pain to him than a help. Rather than wait to be fired, I quit, and moved to Claremont in Southern California. I was ready to get out of the Bay Area anyway, so it was no real hardship.

So did I learn things from Eugene that I still use? You bet! How to make an elegant neck from 4/4 stock; how to joint tops and backs with a block plane; how to make a double-bladed veneer scraper for traditional mosaic rosettes and purfling; and much more.

In the last few years we would have long phone conversations once or twice a year, and I will miss those. Eugene will always remain for me, the most unforgettable character I ever met.

— Brian Burns

I recently found out about the death of Eugene Clark from Jay Hargreaves and was truly saddened by the loss. Jay brought Gene to a recent Seattle Luthiers meeting and we had a chance to catch up with some of the times spent in New York.

It was in 1965 or ’66 that I had the opportunity to work with Gene and Lucien Barnes IV in the Carmine Street shop. I had just taken over the shop when Lucien and Gene needed exit money for California. At that time Gene was mostly making exceptional classical guitars, mostly for local players like Karl Herreshoff (lead player in Man of La Mancha). We spent the month talking about different techniques in building instruments and sounding them. At that time he was strictly building Spanish-style instruments while I was more involved in two-piece construction, each of which had their advantages. We talked about all aspects of hand tools, materials, glues, and finishes. To the three of us, it was the age of enlightenment, for we all had something to give to each other at a time when the few builders that existed were not too willing to share any information regarding construction, material acquisition, or anything else.

Gene was exceptional in researching all the necessary aspects of instrument construction and related topics. This, I believe, was the basis of his ability to come up with methodology dating back to when hand tools were the dominant force in building, and the supply of materials was limited. We talked extensively about how important it was to feel the wood in every aspect from the planing of the top, back, and sides to the final calibrations in order to make adjustments towards accomplishing the sound desired as you were building the instrument. We both concurred that the builder unconsciously registered that information for use in the future construction of instruments. This, as far as I know, has been Genes’ mantra to this day.

Though over the years we saw little of each other, I still regarded him as a friend and am forever indebted to him for the little time spent with him in New York. I regard Eugene Clark as one of the finest builders of our times and know the legacy which he left in instruments and knowledge will be cherished.

— Michael Gurian

Eugene Clark was an excellent craftsman, a meticulous teacher, and a crusty old fart to boot! I first met Eugene in 1996, walking down a dirt road to see a flamenco performance that was part of the first Healdsburg Guitar Festival. We bumped into each other at the next couple of Healdsburg festivals. He was genuinely happy that so many people remembered him and were glad to see him. At that time he was living in California. He then moved to the south end of Tacoma, within walking distance of Pacific Lutheran University where the Guild of American Luthiers holds its conventions. Thereafter I saw him at each convention and we became friends. I studied with him one-on-one to learn French polishing. Shortly after that he coaxed me to continue my studies with him to learn how to build a flamenco guitar.

I went to see him almost every Saturday for a little over two years. We would have lunch at Reyna’s Mexican Restaurant, then work on the guitar and French polishing for the rest of the day. It was a rare opportunity to learn from a great master, for which I am eternally grateful. I will carry those memories with me forever. And to have that close friendship with Eugene was very special.

— Jay Hargreaves

I was very saddened to hear of Eugene’s passing. We had many interesting conversations at the various GAL Conventions, and I fondly remember being on a panel discussion with him on the subject of “What is a Flamenco Guitar?” In his inimitable wry sense humor he considered a classical guitar to be “...any guitar that a client will pay me $2000 extra to leave off the tapping plate.” I thought that summed it up perfectly. Eugene was one of the great American pioneers to evangelize the Spanish guitar. He will be missed.

— R.E. Bruné

Eugene’s passing saddens me greatly — he was a friend, and one of the very few true icons of mid-20th-century classical and flamenco guitar makers in America. Indeed, together with Manuel Velázquez and Manouk Papazian in the early 1960s, he represented and sustained the European tradition here in the US, helping to usher in the first wave of the renaissance to come. Eugene was an inspiration to me early in my own pursuit of this art and craft, and he taught many others both personally and by his example. I feel fortunate to have known him for the past twenty years, and I consider it a privilege to have served on panel presentations with him twice at GAL Conventions. His presence will be greatly missed, but his guitars, his teaching, and his example will continue to inspire future generations.

— Jeffrey R. Elliott

We mark the passing of a wonderful man. Not one easy to live with, but he was comfortable in his own skin. As hard headed as any man I ever met, including myself, which is in itself quite an accomplishment. He scratched out a living for part of his life making guitars, and then returned to it to fulfill his destiny. A superbly self-educated man, he sharpened his eye and his mind even better than his tools. Generous with words, and with a glaring stare for any student who let their mind drift from the subject at hand, Eugene had a way of infecting anyone smart enough to listen with his passion for the Spanish guitar. For a select few, it seemed to stick.

He infected me for one, with an incurable romantic vision. Of living like the old masters whose time was regulated by the ringing of church bells. Of counting their years by the Spanish calendar, where it is not your birthday that is celebrated, but that of the saint’s day that you were named after. Once I had the dilemma of how to handle the death of a client who was to pick up a guitar he had ordered but died four days before the delivery. I thought “There must be a tradition for this!” So I called all of my teachers. None of them knew of a precedent. But Eugene, practical to the last, responded without hesitation: “Has it been paid for?” A tribute to his lifestyle, about which he quipped to me, “I am so tired of hearing people ask me, ‘Do you build guitars from Inspiration?’ I answer, ‘Hell no! I build them from desperation! I have to eat!’” He had never been to Spain, but absorbed it through his fingertips in the old guitars he worked on, like young skin absorbs the tattoo artist’s ink. You could say the Spanish guitar was tattooed on his heart. But for him it was not just that permanent reminder of a fleeting feeling. The Spanish guitar was also tattooed into his soul.

For those that do not believe in the transmission of divine thought across generations, through the ether, and across as yet undiscovered universes, please explain to me how on the very day that I moved my woods, carefully collected over forty years, into a thousand-year-old church in Spain, now transformed into a guitar workshop, that I learned of the master’s death. It is me ringing the church bell now, lovingly restored for future generations, putting knife to wood, and as long as my health lasts, trying to make the best of the time I have left. Many times I have looked to the stars and shaken my head in wonder.

I miss you, old friend, but your work will live on. At least until my dying breath. Gracias Maestro.

— Federico Sheppard

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In Memoriam: Richard L. Schneider

In Memoriam: Richard L. Schneider

March 5, 1936 — January 31, 1997

by Jeffrey R. Elliott

Originally published in American Lutherie #49, 1997 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Five, 2008

 

I first met Richard in 1964 while accompanying a long-time friend on a chance visit to his Detroit workshop. The three of us spent an enjoyable afternoon taking turns playing his guitars, and I fondly remember Richard’s Mexican folk songs. That afternoon changed my life. My friend left knowing he would have a new guitar, and I left knowing I had to make them.

Fate smiled and eventually Richard accepted me as an apprentice, fulfilling my dreams. Many months later Richard began my friend’s guitar. One day Richard asked if I’d like to work on it. I was surprised and delighted with the prospect of contributing to the realization of my friend’s instrument. This thoughtful gesture is typical of the generosity, trust, consideration, and a sense of the poetic that was Richard’s.

Photo by Ivan-Roger Sita.

I was the first of many who Richard taught over his thirty-five years of guitar making. He was a great teacher, and his enthusiasm was infectious and inspiring. His work exemplified his standard of fine craft and aesthetic harmony combined with imagination and the eternal search for the ideal sound. He was one of the most innovative people I have ever known, and his contribution to guitar making will continue to influence generation after generation of luthiers.

Via con Dios, Richard, you will be missed.

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In Memoriam: Robert Lundberg

In Memoriam: Robert Lundberg

June 25, 1948 – March 3, 2001

by Jean Gilman, Lora Lundberg Schultz, Dorothy Bones, Ben Lundberg, Michael Yeats, Günter Mark, Cyndy Burton, Jeffrey R. Elliott, and Jonathon Peterson

Originally published in American Lutherie #66, 2001 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013

Rushing to Explore Life

by Jean Gilman, Bob’s mother

 

From the time he was young, Bob was rushing to explore life. He wanted to learn everything and do everything. When he was nine, we moved to the country. He immediately climbed into the rafters of the old barn and caught a beautiful barn owl, which he brought down for us all to admire before he let it go. He climbed up the silo and caught two bats which he kept in the refrigerator for several weeks so they would go into hibernation. He leaped from roof to roof of the outbuildings. He seemed fearless.

Our rural community had an annual Corn and Potato Festival to celebrate the harvest. There were competitions for the children — catch a chicken, sack races, climb a greased pole. They announced a competition for boys to pick up a single bale of hay with a skip loader and return to the starting point. Bob decided to enter. He had used a skip loader a few times, but was competing against farm boys who used them every day. He won by fifteen or twenty seconds. I asked him how he did that. He had watched our neighbor boy Harry picking up hay and thought if he had used a combination of scoop-and-tilt action he could load it faster. This competition gave him a chance to test his theory, to the chagrin of the farm boys.

Baby Bob and Mom. Photo courtesy of Jean Gilman.

Bob attended Summerhill and returned knowing how to cook, make wine, pick locks. He also had an English boy’s long haircut. The principal at school told him to get his hair cut or be suspended. Bob dug in his heels and refused. A battle ensued. Faced with a lawsuit, the principal withdrew his objection to Bob’s long hair. Without saying anything to us, Bob got a haircut the next week.

He worked at his father’s veterinary clinic to earn money for hobbies. He learned to sky dive, scuba dive, sail, pilot a plane, fix cars, race dirt bikes. He studied Eastern religions, and memorized Eliot’s The Waste Land to audition at Pasadena Playhouse.

Bob told me that what made his life good were two mentors: Ted Bergeson, his high school art teacher, and the Rev. Walton Cole, his minister at the Unitarian Church in Pomona.

Probably His First Apprentice

by Lora Lundberg Schultz, Bob’s youngest sister

 

Tagging along after my older brother was my favorite thing to do. Whether I was watching him scale the inside of our silo to pluck a sleeping bat from the top or fashion a plaster mold of his own hands in wet sand, I was always mesmerized and quickly learned the art of silence in the presence of a Master. I was probably his first apprentice!

The Lundberg kids: Bob (10), and Anne (7) are behind Lora (4), and Tommy (2). Brother Ben was either new or not yet born. Photo courtesy of Lora Lundberg Schultz.

Bob had secret places, high in the towering eucalyptus trees and hidden deep under the lively activity of our house, all inaccessible to me, as unreachable as he always was. His “laboratory” was in that storm cellar, and I still remember the day my thin arms could finally lift the storm door, that heavy and wide barrier, without him! I descended the cement steps into the shadows with trepidation, not so much out of fear of being caught, but more of what I might find in that dim and dusty place where my brother spent so many tireless hours... some chemicals, a crystal radio he had built, and odd tools lying on his workbench. The bats were later found hanging upside down from a wire shelf in my mother’s refrigerator, their tiny eyes squeezed shut in a Bob-induced hibernation.

When Bob was older, he went to a school called Summer­hill, in England, and he returned home on the cusp of Britishmania, propelled by the music of our generation. He had long hair, a British accent, and a love of ground pepper and of tea. All of the high school girls were instantly in love. I remember a carload of girls passing Bob and me in his sporty, black Fiat Abarth, with their horn blaring, heads out the windows, long hair streaming, “We love you, Bob!” He turned and looked at me with a satisfied smile and said, “Someday this will happen to you, too.”

Because It Was There

by Dorothy Bones, Bob’s childhood friend

 

Bob Lundberg and I were best friends, as well as cousins. We were always in trouble when he would come to visit. Mostly, we rode horses — raced one another and anyone else — on the sandy flats or up the steep hills to overlook the vastness of the high desert where I lived. We were, of course, always admonished to avoid playing around “the dam” — a mighty cement reservoir span ’cross the steepest gorge — and so we decided one day, at age six or seven, to ride the six miles up the wash to the dam. Arriving in the hot afternoon, we tied the horses and slid down the sides on our rumps, until our feet hit the solid curve of the dry spillway. We ran across it, climbed the rusting iron-bar steps to the adjacent upper level, and hollered for joy as we attained the middle. On one side, the little pond that flash floods and winter storms often would fill to the top; on the other, a 200-ft. drop to the wash. The wind blew our laughter down the canyon, and we felt like Sir Edmund Hillary must have, and for the same reason — we climbed it because it was there! Bob’s daring eyes and smile askance tempted us to do most everything my parents ever forbade, but, of course it was always his fault! I miss him in my life.

The Truck

by Ben Lundberg, Bob’s youngest brother

 

My brother Bob was ten years my senior and was in a world far removed from my own. Sometimes, if I was lucky, Bob and our cousin Eddy would take Tommy and me out on their dirt bikes to play hide-and-seek in the corn fields by moonlight. Those dark night rides with corn leaves slashing at my bare arms and legs, the wind whipping against my face, and the screaming engines are still vivid in my memory.

I was three when he rebuilt his first vehicle, a 1938 flatbed Chevy truck. Bob had been driving farm vehicles since he was ten, for haying and hauling, weeding, and taking salt blocks around the pasture. He was tired of riding the bus, so he talked our Mom and Dad into letting him buy the truck for $25 from the farmer down the road. They never thought he would get it working. After all, it had been rusting away in the field for who knows how long. However, a few weeks later he had it up and running. My parents were surprised, but figured if he could get it to work, and pay for gas, he was capable of driving safely. I love this story, because it sums up the way Bob went about things. He didn’t mess around. He got things done.

Continuing Resonance

by Michael Yeats

 

I’ve met few people in my life who could wear the word “brilliant,” and Robert Lundberg could. In addition to being one of the greatest instrument makers I’ve had the pleasure to know, he was also a good friend. Through analysis, wit, and humor, days in and out of the shop became days well spent.

Personally, I owe my place in our community to Robert Lundberg; I began building instruments with Bob in 1975, and although I didn’t continue making lutes, the years I spent with Bob gave me a foundation not just in training and teaching, but in a broader view, they established an approach to and basic conceptualization of problem solving. My level of success as a bow maker in New York City is a direct result of Bob’s influence twenty-six years ago on a naïve kid from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, and our friendship begun then is one of my most cherished possessions.

Robert Lundberg was one of a few exceptional people promoting a free exchange of knowledge, out of a desire for us all to achieve the highest standards of work. The current high level of American instrument making exists today partly due to the influence of Robert Lundberg’s generosity. His quest for knowledge and command of it is as great a legacy as the number of fine instruments he’s created.

As a true Renaissance person, his passion touches not only our community of instrument makers, but all the other communities he was involved in. If you’ve ever lost a close friend or loved one, you know how their being continues to resonate in your life consciously and unconsciously, and, like the proverbial drop of water in the pond, Bob’s presence and influence continues outwardly, not only to the people who knew him personally, but through them to others who never had the opportunity to know him, and on.

He will be deeply and profoundly missed, but I know Robert Lundberg will always be present in the deeds we do and the accomplishments we all achieve.

Teaching a Generation

by Günter Mark

 

When I first met Bob, at the 1979 lute-making course in Erlangen, he had to argue with some instrument makers who doubted almost everything he said about lutes. Lute makers then were trained in 20th-century lute making with thick tops, single strings, guitar-like sound, and they claimed tradition on their side. But tradition in real lute making was interrupted during the 18th century, and it was makers like Bob who started a new tradition in going back to the roots. Bob was one of the foremost experts in this field, having seen and measured nearly all of the extant lutes. He read through all sorts of stuff related to lutes and instrument making in general, and discussed his findings with other makers and players. Through his lute building courses in Erlangen, he taught a whole generation of lute makers in Germany.

And what was different to German luthiers: Bob did not have “secrets.” He shared all of his notes, his experiences, and his thoughts with us. I learned from him that not a certain trick will make a good instrument, but that it is the result of your own ability, attitude, and knowledge.

Bob and his first wife, Ellen, in Europe during a summer of lute research in 1971. Here they are in Nuremberg. Photo courtesy of Ellen Leatham.

When he showed us things, it all looked so easy. I know now that he was the most skilled woodworker I ever met. It was his perfectly controlled balance of power and delicacy that I always admired, and I remember strongly his attitude of, “just do it, don’t fuzz around!”

When I worked with Bob in Portland in 1982 and 1983, I was in apprentice’s heaven. His knowledge, his openness, and his flawless technique were almost intimidating, but also very inspiring. He let me study his big black book with the photographs and measurements of all these lutes in European and American museums. I read through the various treatises and articles about lute making, violin making, wood treatment, toolmaking, varnishing — it was all there. Bob had a broad knowledge of instrument making, lutes only being a small part of it.

Why make it right if you can spoil it — one of his ironic comments. Why do it in time if you can have stress up to the last minute — my answer. We had a good time, and I left as a friend. Wish I could see him back.

Giving Everything

by Cyndy Burton and Jeffrey R. Elliott

 

Anyone who knew Bob appreciated how he loved teaching and sharing his knowledge. We were very fortunate to be within range both by being part of the GAL and by living in Portland. He wasn’t easy to reach; he often didn’t return calls. But when he was present, he was completely with you and willing to give everything he had. A recent memory: Bob came to consult on a very old guitar that was here for restoration. The back was off, revealing the history of many repairs, both competent and not. Interpreting a black light’s glowing reflection on the many trails of hide glue was the key to the story. Bob was like a precocious child with a jigsaw puzzle. Very slight differences in shading taken with other painstaking observations revealed “the truth.” The reasoning required to unravel this complex puzzle might appear convoluted to anyone other than a forensic scientist. As we pondered the instrument, he inspired a growing confidence that stayed with us through the rest of the project. We treasure many other similar memories of our far-too-short time together.

Excellence

by Jonathon Peterson

 

In the late ’70s, after a glorious stab at being a professional ballet dancer had failed in the make-a-living department, I decided to be “realistic” and become a guitar repairman. I fixed factory-made guitars, cheap violins and cellos, mandolins, electric basses, the odd double-neck or harp guitar, and the like. I was doing good work, but other than factory standards, I really had very few examples of fine workmanship against which to judge my efforts.

Then, while attending one of the first handmade musical instrument shows in Portland, Oregon, I saw, on an unattended table, something which ultimately changed my life: a snakewood, ebony, and ivory Baroque archlute. I was awestruck. Speechless. It was so clean, so tight, so directed, so authentic, so ultimately human, and, in a way, so out of place and time. I possessed no historical context, no art or craft context with which to understand this thing. Who did this? How did they do it? Why did they do it? I tried to conjure up some plausible reason for showing up at the builder’s door. (Gee mister, I saw your really cool thing at the show. What was it? How do you do that?) I didn’t even know the right questions to ask. I found out that the builder was Robert Lundberg, and that is all that I knew about him for several years.

14-course Baroque archlute, 1990. These three photos courtesy of Linda Toenniessen.

Most of what I know about Bob’s life before I met him I learned at his memorial service. He seems to have devoured his youth in big bites. He outgrew high school, dropped out, and went to study engineering at community college instead. He worked for a while in a fabrication shop building race cars. He souped up and raced his own ’40s Chevy with a modified GMC straight-6. Bob told me that guys would show up at the track with their small-block V-8s thinking they were hot stuff (not the word he used), and he would blow their doors off — then he smirked, obviously still enjoying the thought. He attempted a solo flight across the country when he was just in his teens, but ran into a storm and had to be talked in by a flight instructor. He was a boat builder. And then he got interested in lutes.

Finding very little published material with any depth on the subject, Bob spent a good deal of time and energy early in his lutherie career combing through most of the major museums and collections in Europe and America, attempting to discover how and why the lute builders of old did what they did. On one six-month trip to Europe, he measured, photographed and/or documented about 140 different instruments.

Bob studied violin building with Paul Schuback in Portland, Oregon, and lute construction with Jacob van de Geest in Europe; did conservation and restoration work for the Smithsonian and other museums; and read seemingly everything related to the subject. He could have been just a scholar, or just a conservator, or concentrated his substantial talent solely on instrument building, and he would have been at the top of any of these fields, but he did all of these things and more. His energy, his work ethic, his creativity, and the depth and breadth of his skill, knowledge, and experience were remarkable, to say the least. He was the most accomplished artisan I have ever met.

This photo is from a January 8, 1972, Oregonian newspaper article about Paul Schuback and his shop. The caption reads, “ROMANTIC — Modern reproduction of small tenor lute, Renaissance instrument of 13 strings, has mellow, bell-like tone. Apprentice Bob Lundberg hopes to craft these amorous instruments. Staff photo by Wes Guderian.” Photo courtesy of Paul Schuback.

In 1978 he began teaching an annual seminar on historical lute construction in Erlangen, Germany. Sometime in the mid-’80s Bob and Tim agreed to collaborate on a print version of his course for American Lutherie. His historical lectures were reworked and published, then Tim put a camera in my hands and asked if I would like to go and take some pictures of Bob building lutes. Would I ever! To finally have a chance to be in his shop and watch him work! Besides parenthood, it was the funnest and most interesting job I’ve ever had. Over a period of five years we spent dozens of hours photographing his building procedures. It was amazing the amount of work he could accomplish over the course of a couple of days. He never seemed hurried. I never saw a misplaced chisel, knife, or saw cut. He didn’t fuss. You simply do this, and then you do this. “That’s good enough,” he’d say. Good enough, indeed! He was so organized. It all looked so easy. It was all so excellent.

Bob was fun to be around, and I always learned new things. We talked about instruments, cooking, art, cars, plants, woods, finishes, family, religion, metaphysics, and much more. He was intensely interested in everything he did. I never asked him a question on any subject that he didn’t have something interesting to say or a useful direction in which to point me, and he always had questions for me. What started as a working relationship changed to friendship and love over a period of time.

Bob helped me with lots of projects. For instance, last summer I was trying to develop a print version of Paul Schuback’s 1995 GAL Convention violin-making workshop (“An American in Mirecourt,”), but was having difficulties with the tape recordings. Many audience questions were inaudible, and the answers would often be something like, “Hold your tool like this, and cut this way, going from here to here...” I wanted to hand Paul a readable document to work on. Bob had spent a year and a half working in Paul’s shop in the early ’70s, so after doing the best I could, I asked Bob for help. He said sure, and I made the drive. He made breakfast for us, and then took about an hour to go through the transcript with me. After months of struggling, it suddenly all made sense.

Paul had given me the notes he had made as a teenage apprentice on the sequence of procedures for making a violin, and I thought that they would make a nice addition, but wasn’t having any more luck with Paul’s notes than I’d had with the transcription. I asked Bob if he could help me make sense of them, and he thought for a minute, looked at the ceiling and said, “Hmm, well first you make the form...” and he proceeded to list and explain Paul’s building procedures from beginning to end, off the top of his head. I later rewrote my notes, sent them to Paul, and he approved the seventy-five-item list with just two minor clarifications. Bob had not worked in a violin shop or made a violin for almost thirty years! But the really amazing thing is that he could just as easily and accurately have been talking about construction procedures for any of a number of other instruments, or some aspect of their historical development, of restoration protocol and procedures, of varnish making or French polishing, or peg making, or tool design and construction, or details of instrument collections throughout Europe and America, or marquetry, or of welding, or fiberglassing, or engine building, or woods, or Pacific Northwest Impressionist painters — the list goes on and on. He had an incredibly organized mind, a thirst for knowledge, and he loved to work.

Robert Lundberg with a newly finished lute in July 1993. Photo by Jonathon Peterson.

I found out about his cancer through the grapevine and got upset with him for not telling me. He was a private guy, and this wasn’t the first incident. He fought like hell, again and again. We talked about life and death. He said he felt good about his life, and about the family and work that he would be leaving behind, whenever that might happen. About death, he said he felt a little fear, but that he was curious. He was always curious. The end was hard — a second, nastier form of cancer required a very serious operation, and he was starting to get better, but all of a sudden it was over.

When I think of the quality and quantity of work he accomplished in his too-short lifetime — of his level of craftsmanship, of his very conscious focus on using work as a path towards self-realization, of the depth and breadth of knowledge he accumulated in the wide range of subjects in which he had interests, of the unblinking way in which he faced death, and of his strength and determination to not give in to it — I am left with the same awestruck, dumbfounded feeling I had when I first viewed that archlute, and with a pain and inspiration in my heart which I will carry for the rest of my life.

Two Lundberg lutes which were displayed in “The Harmonious Craft,” a juried show of instruments by some of the best American musical instrument makers, at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, in 1978–1979. Left, a 10-course Renaissance lute after Michielle Harton, 1976. Right, an 11-course lute after Magno Dieffopruchar, built in 1974. Photo courtesy of Linda Toenniessen.
Planing a spruce soundboard in his home shop, 1989. Photo by Jonathon Peterson.

Shortly after Bob’s memorial service I went to visit his wife, Linda, and his daughters, Tabitha and Branwyn. Linda and I went into Bob’s shop, where he and I had spent most of the time we had together. There were the familiar workbenches, the tools in their racks on the walls, and instruments in various stages of completion — projects he couldn’t finish. There were also stacks of boxes and tubes containing drawings, wood and other vestiges of his work, things that he had been reorganizing when he had the energy — the evidence of his reevaluation of time and work, and of his efforts to make things easier for his family should the worst happen. As Linda and I stood there hugging each other, she pointed out some of the personal notes which he had tacked up on his walls, the way most of us do, to remind us of our better intentions. Many of these had been up for years, but I had never taken much notice. The one Linda said was her favorite was a single typewritten line on a small slip of paper taped to the front of a cabinet. It said, “We all have to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” Bob had amended the first words, with a pen, so that it read, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

I think of Bob every day, of how he enjoyed and used his life, of how intensely he wanted to live and work, and I think of that scrap of paper. Perhaps time will dim these memories and the heightened awareness that they engender of the gifts of life and of the preciousness of our time here on earth. I pray that it will not.