James McKean

Yorktown Heights, New York

During the summer of 1973, James McKean, then a Russian studies major at the University of Virginia, attended a month-long language-immersion course in Bloomington, Indiana, and played violin between classes to relax. A broken string sent McKean to the local violin repair shop, where he fell in love with the workshop’s scents and sounds. Soon after, he left Virginia and enrolled in the newly founded Violin Making School of America (VMSA), the first school of its kind in the country, located in Salt Lake City.

After graduation, McKean landed a job in the West 57th Street workshop of Frenchman René A. Morel, then New York’s preeminent restorer. “I lasted less than six months, but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me,” says McKean, who immediately started working across the street for an Armenian restorer named Vahakn Nigogosian. “He was one of the great restorers and one of the best people, with a basic self-taught knowledge of acoustics. I would watch him analyze an instrument to figure out how it made its sound.”

McKean started his own shop in 1980, bouncing around the city and its suburbs until 2012, when he settled in Yorktown Heights. Now the 63-year-old makes about six cellos (his specialty) and two violins a year for clients including the New York Philharmonic’s Carter Brey and Eileen Moon. “It’s an interesting question as to how you can make an instrument that has character when the ground rules have been so well established for 500 years,” says McKean. “By combining the different design aspects of the outline, the arching, the f-hole, you can come up with something that is original.”

Sam Zygmuntowicz

Brooklyn, New York