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,...