Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
Geoffrey Seitz is an old-world violin maker and shopkeeper, and an old-time fiddler—supremely accomplished in all of these categories—surviving as a small businessman in a midsized Midwestern American city in the modern world. He has consummate respect for his craft, his instrument and the music. Yet he has puzzled disdain for a musical culture that fetishizes a false sense of purity in the craft of instrument-making and inflates the needs of beginning students. He is the old world, encroached on by a new generation. Even as he earns his living from that generation, he shrugs his shoulders at its oddly misplaced emphases.
From his station at Geoffrey J. Seitz, Violinmaker, in Holly Hills, Seitz is quick to expound on what he sees as the swelling of hype in the field—auction-house crowds genuflecting to giants like Stradivarius and Guarneri without being informed about either. It can be traced, he says, to J.B. Vuillaume, a violin maker and Parisian shop owner who went to great lengths in the 1800s to generate mystique surrounding the makers of the instruments he sold. “He elevated the business to a higher level,” Seitz says.
But that higher level had some ill effects. More than a century later, we have a public in awe of the million-dollar Stradivarius, without understanding that the instrument—indeed all those like it—has been altered in such significant ways that it’s no longer, as Seitz says, “truly a Stradivarius.” Not only that, but there is high quality to be found in today’s violin shops. “There are instruments made these days, and since then,” he says, “that are just as great.” And last (Seitz’s accountants might want to stop reading now), just because you’re interested in a top-of-the-line violin doesn’t mean you should buy one—even if you’re shopping in Seitz’s shop. “Now, people—beginning violin students!—go around town from shop to shop, spending an inordinate amount of time gathering a bunch of violins that they then present to their teacher,” Seitz says, “and the teacher makes a big deal out of picking the perfect violin ... and the person isn’t even there yet. This is a beginning violin student! It’s mind-boggling, to our perspective, especially with us being players.”
“Us,” in this case, includes Marc Rennard, who works in Seitz’s shop and, like Seitz himself, is an expert fiddler. (Among other talents: Rennard also sings beautifully.) They are as well known as could be in the local roots-music scene. Seitz played violin for many years with the Ill-Mo Boys (now defunct), and Rennard played with The Flying Mules (who carry on without him). Both are still in demand as square dance fiddlers. Seitz also has on his mantle this country’s two most important individual traditional fiddling awards: First Place for Old-Time Fiddle (1993) at the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, W.V., a sort of Golden Globes for the genre; and First Place, in 1985, at the 50th Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, Va., the largest competition of its kind, considered to be the Oscars of country fiddle.
Perhaps it is their rarified abilities and accomplishments that keep them grounded as they feel the violin world go quietly mad around them. As masters of their instrument, Seitz and Rennard know that most of the magic is in the fiddler, not the fiddle. “The fact is, you can walk into a violin shop, throw a dart at the wall, grab the violin it lands next to and it will play just fine,” Seitz says. “Our shop tries to keep things honest and realistic in that regard. We’re more like a traditional violin shop, like they were many years ago, which is difficult to maintain in this modern craziness.”
Though Seitz attempts to maintain old-fashioned perspective and offers for sale a wide range of beginner’s violins (mostly provided by Los Angeles Stringed Instruments, based in Dallas), when he finds the time to build a violin himself, he is a master craftsman. One of his creations, a fiddle named Indian Red (featured on his solo CD, The Good Old Days Are Here), fetched $30,000 from a buyer. Some of his violins will tour the state this summer as part of a Missouri Folk Arts Program exhibit titled “Work Is Art and Art Is Work: The Art of Hand-Crafted Instruments.” Seitz is also a master Mister Fix-It of violins. When world-renowned violinist Mark O’Connor was in St. Louis some years back and needed an emergency overnight repair on his vintage French fiddle, Seitz got the call and worked through the night—and the show went on.
Seitz can build a fiddle today because he once tried to fix a fiddle and botched the job. A bed had collapsed on his instrument in its case back home in St. Louis, and his amateur repair job came undone when he was on the road in Spokane, Wash. This was 1977, when the roads of America were open to young musicians who had bypassed the electric trappings of rock music to ramble with a fiddle, banjo or acoustic guitar, playing music on the streets and picking fruit in the orchards to pay for gas and a bottle of wine. With the fiddle out of commission, Seitz was out a source of income, so he found a fiddle repairman and builder named Glen T. Stockton, who fixed it correctly.
It was then, Seitz says, that he decided, “I’m not trying to fix anything ever again before I learn how to fix it properly.” He moved to Spokane and learned from Stockton (and another man, Armin Barnett) how to fix—and build—fiddles properly.
The fiddle that broke on the road and that he had tried to fix in Spokane wasn’t Seitz’s own. It had belonged to his father, Frank Seitz, when Geoffrey was a boy. Frank and Mary Seitz, both now deceased, raised a remarkable brood. One son, the late Roger Seitz, was an acclaimed architect and a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which built the Sears Tower. Another son, Martin Seitz, has a Ph.D. in physics and served as an advisor to Caspar Weinberger. A third son, Glennon Seitz, is an electrical engineer, and there are also two daughters, Natalie Ries, a realtor, and Diane Brunworth, president of the school board in Washington, Mo.
A patriarch who left his children many gifts, Frank’s most productive legacy for Geoffrey was his castoff musical instrument, whose very fragility, in a roundabout way, set his son on the path that would make him a musician, craftsman and small-business owner. (And, for that matter, a husband: Geoffrey met his wife Valerie while fiddling at a square dance in 1988.)
Seitz started his business in 1987 in his house across from Carondelet Park, moving it down the street into its present location at 4171 Loughborough in 1993. He subsequently bought an adjacent building and added landlord to his duties; he currently rents to a papermaker, a beauty shop, a chiropractor, a musician and two retired teachers, who use their apartment to shelve a private library. He says the income from his tenants goes mostly to maintenance, because he keeps the rents low. “I like small businesses, and I know a really true small business needs affordable rent,” Seitz says. He worries that rampant development will “make a fancy place out of the city, so regular, small businesses will have a hard time existing here. We need a refuge for small businesses.”
Seitz’s own small business receives visitors every day, players at all levels looking for a pricey commissioned instrument, an antique violin Seitz has acquired and restored, or—careful—something appropriate for a beginner with a desire to learn. From time to time, he also hears from those looking not to buy a violin but to sell one. Though Seitz stands to profit if he takes the instrument off their hands—indeed, it would seem to be part of his business plan—he always cautions the seller to consider keeping it. “I always tell them,” Seitz says, “‘You know, it doesn’t take up that much space if you leave it lying around the house ...’”
