Inside Masquerade: a violinist’s cabinet

Working as a Masquerade violinist is a high-octane job. It requires physical stamina and relentless focus. After all, at any given moment, there is only one violinist for all six pulses.

But we also need the tools.

Few people know that behind a door, next to the first performance area, there is a violin cabinet.

On the right is my own violin, the one I play at the beginning of the show. It’s an anonymous French violin from the mid-20th century that I’ve been playing for the past seventeen years.

I got lucky. It sounds as good as instruments worth many times what I paid for it—Gaglianos, even Stradivarius violins I’ve played—while somehow being affordable enough that I could actually buy it. This is the violin I auditioned for Juilliard with sixteen years ago. It is also the violin I have played at virtually every concert, event, and Broadway performance since.

I doubt I will ever play another violin.

The bow I use is a Sartory. I love it for its snappiness: its sturdiness and unwavering energy, its balance, and its ability to sustain very long phrases without losing direction.

On the left is our “prop violin,” which we use for the scene with Christine toward the end of the show.

After the sixth Prelude, we have about two minutes to put our own violin into the cabinet, grab the prop violin, and head a few floors up the stairs for the next scene.

I’m fortunate to have five phenomenal subs—Bryan, Sami, Thierry, Ben, and Artie. We each bring our own violin for the Preludes, but all six of us share the same prop violin.

Which means somebody has to remember when its strings were last changed:

The E string is the thinnest and the first to give up. It snaps most often, so we replace it at least once a month.

Then there is the queen of rosins: Baker’s.

(For the uninitiated, rosin creates friction between the horsehair of the bow and the string. Without it, the hair simply slides across the string and produces practically no sound.)

The first time I ordered Baker’s rosin, I spent two years on the waiting list. It was worth it. I genuinely think it is the best rosin on the market. It is seasonal, too. Jordan Baker doesn’t know exactly how much he will be able to make each year because the answer depends, quite literally, on how much sap his trees produce.

There is something I love about that: in the middle of a multimillion-dollar theater production in Manhattan, the sound still depends, in some tiny way, on what a few trees decided to do that year.

Sometimes the rosin becomes unevenly distributed through the bow hair. For that, I use a small broken-off piece of a comb. (I loosen the bow completely and comb the horsehair.)

We also keep a hand-therapy ball in the cabinet. It is surprisingly effective for both relaxing and strengthening the hands, and becomes particularly welcome when they are tired or tense after hours of playing.

There are a few other necessities:

• the violin part;

• spare strings for the prop violin—we use Dominants;

• a nail clipper;

• alcohol prep pads, for cleaning the strings and fingerboard (and, in my case, the rubber cover on my bow leather).

  
  

None of these things is particularly remarkable on its own.

But after hundreds of performances, the cabinet has acquired a strange, almost oasis-like quality for me.

Violinists spend countless hours alone with their instruments. Eventually the relationship becomes difficult to describe. A violin is essentially wood, varnish, glue, metal, time that the luthier spent carving it... It is a peculiar object. And yet, after enough years, its value has almost nothing to do with any of those things.

My violin contains seventeen years of my life. Juilliard. Concerts. Broadway pits. Recording sessions. Good performances and terrible ones. Thousands upon thousands of hours with my left hand around the same neck:

This wood is ebony, one of the hardest. This dent on my violin was created through thousands of hours of playing, through the vibrations of the string.

And then, every night at Masquerade, after the sixth Prelude, I have two minutes to put it back into the cabinet. Grab the other violin. Run upstairs.

There is a kind of belonging in that cabinet that I find difficult to name. Not ownership. Something subtler.

After seventeen years, perhaps I belong to the violin as much as it belongs to me.