My Space, The Strad, March, 2010

Hans Johannsson
Reykjavik, Iceland

My workshop is in a beautiful old Norwegian wooden building dating from 1907. I was attracted to it by the original wooden panelling on the floor and walls – it’s mainly pine with some spruce, the same materials that I work with. When the wind blows the whole building sounds. It feels very organic and warm, and has a great ambience – from the first day I saw it, I felt strongly that it was the right place to make violins, surrounded by all this old wood. Every now and again I’ll see some wood on the wall and think it would make a nice instrument. I actually have made an instrument out of wood from a building before – about 30 years ago, I was working in an old wooden building and one of the beams had to come out. It was a beautiful piece of old pine so I made a violin out of it. It now belongs to a music school in Iceland.
I’m quite spartan in the way I work, I don’t need much. I don’t have a huge collection of tools. The room in the foreground is where I do rough arching and work on plates, so there are shavings all over the place. The second room is for scraping and closer work, as it has a South-facing window that gets better light for seeing shadows and controlling arching shapes. I move in there for the final phases of instrument making.
Usually I like to focus on one instrument at a time, but at the moment I have two cellos and two violins on the go. The cello on my main workbench is for Bryndís Halla Gylfadóttir, the principal cellist of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. The violins will go to agents in the US. The neck on the windowsill is for a double bass. Generally I focus on making violins, violas and cellos – I don’t make basses often. It’s like boat building, it’s so huge. But every year I visit Rene Zaal in Holland and work with him for a while. The neck in the window is for one of my rare basses, made to my own pattern.
I focus on new making, so I don’t usually have a lot of instruments hanging around the workshop waiting for repair work. But there are a few cellos in the corner – in front is one I made in 1988 that’s in for a bit of a check-up. One belongs to a friend, another I found in an auction years ago and never got around to fixing up, and the fourth was found by a friend of mine in a rubbish bin in Paris – it’s an 18th-century small-size cello.
The instrument on the wall beside the white cabinet is a langspil, a traditional Icelandic instrument. It’s the only instrument from the zither family that is played with a bow. It was popular from the 16th to the 19th century but it isn’t widely played any more – the tradition gradually died out as cultural traditions in Iceland became more focused on poetry, literature and singing. An old man gave it to me as he knew I made instruments and he wanted it to be with someone who would take good care of it. On the other side of the door is a tenor gamba. I made it for my daughter in 1980, when she was born, so it’s the same age as she is. The head is a carving of her face as a newborn. She studied cello so she used to play it, but she is a visual artist now.
On the windowsill on the left is one of the most important tools in my workshop – an espresso machine. I also have a very comfy chair in the corner, so my friends can come and chat and have coffee. Being a violin maker can be a hermit-like lifestyle, so I like to have visitors, but I have developed the ability to talk to people and still carry on working. When clients come to try out instruments, I take them to a small church just across the street – it is visible from the window of the second room. I’m lucky that it is very little-used during the week, so it’s almost like my own private concert hall. The acoustics are beautiful and have just the right amount of reverberation without being gaudy. It’s nice to have somewhere to try out instruments that’s less constricted than a workshop.
Although I’m very happy here, I’ve been moving between countries since I was very young, so I don’t ever feel that I belong in a particular place. I also have a flat in Berlin, where I work occasionally, and I like to travel to meet other makers and visit famous instruments. Therefore I think I’ll always be able to work in other places too.