Sixteen Years at the Bench
Sixteen years
between wood and sound
Kyungsoo Jun has been making string instruments for well over a decade. The work began with violins, violas and cellos, until one day it reached the violoncello da spalla, the viola d'amore and the viol family — instruments that had stood still for three hundred years. Reviving them has been the workshop's principal work ever since.
The work began to bear fruit in 2018, when he started taking part in China's international instrument exhibition every year. Recognized for their sound and for the rigor of their historical reconstruction, many of his instruments have crossed into China's early-music world, and are played today by ensembles in Chengdu, Shanghai and Guangzhou. With the players who seek early instruments, the instruments came before borders.
Jun is a devout Christian. A long-held love of sacred music — and its resonance — is what led him to early instruments. Bach signed his scores Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone the glory — and he hopes the same holds true at his workbench.
He does not thin the plates to make a new instrument sound impressive on its first day. He builds instruments that grow in value, and deepen in sound, as the years pass.
He measures everything that can be measured.
Thickness, weight, arching curvature, tap tone — confirmed in numbers before intuition is trusted. Intuition is only accurate when it stands on measurement.
One pair of hands, from start to finish.
From choosing the wood to the final set-up, the whole instrument is finished to one person's judgement, without division of labour. That is why the sound has a consistent character.
He studies the historical sources deeply.
Early instruments cannot be made from imagination. Surviving technical drawings and the documentation of original instruments are brought together into the workshop's own models — instruments that work on today's stages.
He listens to the player first.
An instrument is a player's tool before it is a maker's work. The sound they want, the music they play, the way their body sits — the conversation is half of the design.