Thinking with the hands

in­ter­view

Skill, pa­tience, in­tel­li­gence, sen­si­tiv­ity, tacit un­der­stand­ing and artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties all come to­gether in a Bo­hemian house in Barcelona’s Gràcia neigh­bour­hood. David Bagué i Soler greets me in his work­shop, in a shirt that is open at the col­lar and in an apron that is worn with time. I sud­denly find my­self in a world of wood, sur­rounded by metal tools, glass cab­i­nets, as well as news­pa­per clip­pings that trans­port me to an­other place and time. I re­alise that I have been taken back to the world of the luthier, the world of the crafts­men who make and re­pair stringed in­stru­ments. Bagué’s world is from the past but nec­es­sary in the pre­sent, an elit­ist world of dirty hands.

Re­cently recog­nised by the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment for his work, Bagué comes from a fam­ily of artists. When he used to get home from school, it was to find his so­prano mother singing at the piano, while his fa­ther would be paint­ing at an easel. These Bo­hemian sur­round­ings in­vested him with a love for the arts as well as a spe­cial sen­si­bil­ity. His fa­ther bought him a vi­o­lin, and one sum­mer af­ter­noon, the 12-year-old David dis­cov­ered his vo­ca­tion: “I was alone at home with my sib­lings, and I be­came cu­ri­ous about the in­stru­ment and so took it to pieces. When my par­ents got back home and saw that the vi­o­lin was de­stroyed, they re­acted with true vi­sion. They did noth­ing about it, but that was every­thing. I knew then that I would be a luthier.” At a time of re­birth in the coun­try, when crafts­men were again ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a golden mo­ment, Bagué learnt from them by vis­it­ing their work­shops in Gràcia, and later on in Italy. “A trade is forged; it’s a mat­ter of at­ti­tude,” he says, re­veal­ing his hu­man­ist spirit that al­lows him to think with his hands.

“If I wasn’t nos­tal­gic I couldn’t make in­stru­ments,” he says. “Mak­ing in­stru­ments in an age of tech­nol­ogy is patently ab­surd. I have my ways of being able to recre­ate in my­self 18th cen­tury think­ing: stay­ing away from tech­nol­ogy and the speed it sub­jects us to by tak­ing refuge in my own uni­verse, so I can keep going with this crazi­ness.” He adds: “The proof is that still, when I come down each day to my work­shop, I see with the eyes of a 12-year-old child. That is the art of liv­ing.” A craft is the com­bi­na­tion of emo­tion and rea­son, “but in bal­ance, be­cause un­tram­melled emo­tion can lead to mad­ness.”

To de­velop in this trade you need “art to live, art to feel the emo­tion for un­der­stand­ing the ma­te­r­ial,” he says. “To cut down a tree you have to ask for per­mis­sion, and that means in­spir­ing peo­ple into let­ting you work for a good cause.” The life-long jour­ney of cre­at­ing in­stru­ments is not a tech­ni­cal issue, al­though with­out tech­nique you can­not be free. At the same time, he speaks of con­cepts, thought, phi­los­o­phy, mys­ti­cism, hu­man­ism, of pass­ing on tech­nique, al­though he warns: “Tacit un­der­stand­ing leads to the tomb.” The craft of the luthier needs de­fend­ing “ve­he­mently be­cause it is high cul­ture, and the only way that Cat­alo­nia can move for­ward is work­ing for this high cul­ture,” he says. His trade is elit­ist, but he adds, “I am not, I think like a crafts­man.”