What does it take to become one of the world’s premier luthiers?
By David Wolman ’96
Andrew Mowry ’98 holds a tiny swatch of gray sandpaper and leans over a workbench. A lamp angled downward sprays a bright circle of light onto the subject at hand, as if this workshop were an operating suite. Mowry dips the sandpaper into a blue mixing bowl of water and then, with his nose just inches from the maple body of the mandolin, begins sanding. The motion is so gentle that it’s almost imperceptible. Yet sure enough, after a minute or two, the tended-to corner of the mandolin begins to look that much smoother. That much closer to perfect.
Not that the instrument is done. Sanding alone can take weeks. After that, Mowry will apply a “super-thin layer of shellac, to get that final gloss.” Over the course of the year, Mowry will spend countless hours in his Bend, Oregon, shop building 15 mandolins for customers throughout North America and Europe.
Tuned like a violin, mandolins look like the pudgy offspring of a guitar and a ukulele. With eight strings roughly 14 inches long and tuned in pairs of G, D, A, and E, mandolins are most popular for playing bluegrass and Celtic music. Among luthiers—that’s makers of stringed instruments—only a tiny group of people in the world build mandolins for a living. This lean 32-year-old with sawdusted hair and a goatee is one of them, and he is fast making a name for himself as a woodworking maestro. His instruments can sell for upwards of $5,000, and the buzz about his craftsmanship can be heard, although not necessarily understood by non-aficionados, throughout mandolin circles, such as this riff from the Web site JazzMando.com: “Mowry has artfully mastered the proper selection of wood and internal carving for maximum warmth and sustain.”
Growing up in Grafton, Vermont, Mowry was surrounded by music. His grandfather and siblings all did some fiddling or picking, and his first instrument was a violin. But he soon strayed. “I have this problem where I can’t resist learning to play lots of different instruments,” says Mowry, “but I never have the discipline to learn any of them really well.” In high school, Mowry was drawn to woodworking. He first made a drum, and some wooden flutes and whistles, followed by his first “real” stringed instrument, a dulcimer. Then he bought a book about mandolins, and over the course of a school year, he made his first one. “I lived some miles from other kids,” says Mowry of his atypical teenage hobby. “I was also a bit of an introvert. And a geek,” he adds, laughing.
A gifted geek. At Middlebury, Mowry majored in geology and spent his downtime pursuing bluegrass. He never thought of mandolins as a career; it was just something to play in a band. “No one else [in college] played it. It was possible to be a mediocre mandolin player and people would want to ‘jam’ with me.” To fellow “bluegrassophiles,” recalls Mowry, it was like: “Why have eight guitars when you could have seven guitars and a mandolin?”
After graduation, he moved around a lot: a summer internship in Mozambique, followed by stints in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Portland and then Eugene, Oregon, where Mowry earned a graduate degree in physical geography at the University of Oregon.
The next move was to Missoula, Montana, in 2003, where his wife, Sarah (Nichols) ’98, was enrolled in graduate school. It was there, in the basement of their rented home, that Mowry finally had a chance to get back to woodworking. “The space was tiny, dark and dank, and I shared it with a furnace,” he says.
Bluegrass is big in the Northwest, and Mowry soon connected with Greg Boyd, owner of House of Fine Instruments, in downtown Missoula. “Every now and then, people come into my store and say something like, ‘Hey, I make guitars. Maybe you can sell them?” says Boyd. He will take a look, but almost always ends up delivering a delicate rejection.
With Mowry, it was different. “Andrew called and very politely told me that he had made a couple of mandolins, and asked if I would critique them.” As soon as Boyd saw what Mowry had produced—on his own and with almost zero mentorship—Boyd knew the Vermonter had the right stuff. “That first mandolin he brought us, you could say some minor things, like the color was a little washed or something, but it was hitting all the elements as far as sound.” Those first instruments, recalls Boyd, showed that Mowry “was really doing what the big boys were doing, the guys with years and years of experience.” Without hesitation, Boyd lent Mowry a hand with some insider tips, about where to get the best materials, for example. “And then I told him he will always have a standing order with us.”
Fast-forward to 2005, when the couple moved to Bend after Sarah landed a job with the local land trust. They bought a small bungalow equipped with the skeleton of a workshop. Mowry added a new wall, insulation, and wiring, and before long was accumulating the myriad tools of a luthier’s shop: table saw, electric sander, standing drill, plastic jugs filled with varnish, instrument molds hanging from the walls, shelves overflowing with strips and blocks of spruce and maple, and razor-thin saws from Japan for cutting the delicate grooves in the fret board.
Mowry says his favorite mandolins are the ones he’s just finishing, because he’s always trying something different, always learning something new. He may play a completed one for a couple of days, for fun and to get a sense of the sound, but then it’s into a box and off to the customer. “I don’t live and breathe mandolin music. For me, it’s the making.” As for a signature, Mowry’s seems to be a scientist’s accuracy. “I want the work to be clean: good joinery and clean lines. For me, precision is a way to make a name for myself.”
Leaning against a tall chair in his shop, Mowry takes down one of six under-construction mandolins hanging from the ceiling. The inlay on the instrument neck is a tiny fly-fishing fly, as requested by the buyer. Mowry plays a couple of chords, and then sets the instrument on a green towel on his workbench. On the wall behind him is a geologic map of Vermont. People sometimes ask him how one goes from a liberal arts degree and graduate-level expertise in fluvial geomorphology to artisan instrument maker. He has thought about this, says Mowry, but he doesn’t have a clear explanation.
Yet spend an afternoon in his shop learning about life as a luthier, and more than a hint of an answer emerges. Mowry will tell you about the grain pattern of figured maples, which is what gives the back of the instruments a sort of tiger-striped design. “Apparently it’s still a mystery as to whether the wood looks like that because of some genetic difference, whether it’s caused by environmental conditions, or some combination of the two.” Moments later, he delves into the subtleties of acoustics, before moving on to discuss the Southeast Asian origins of the mother of pearl and abalone shells he uses for inlays and why spruce and maple are the go-to woods for making mandolins.
And as he continues this tour of his chosen trade, you realize: Mowry’s leap from liberal arts student to expert luthier wasn’t much of a leap at all.