Former carriage house vibrates with new life as violin shop

The red-brick former carriage house on Little Rock's East 11th Street where Joe Joyner does business is a bit over a century old.

But the art he practices goes back a few more centuries than that.

Joyner, owner and proprietor of the Little Rock Violin Shop, is a violist with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and the current president of the Chamber Music Society of Little Rock. He is also a luthier, a fancy word for a maker of stringed instruments.

Joyner handles instrument appraisals and concentrates on bows. Staff member J. Wesley Rule, a Knoxville, Tenn., native whose father and grandfather built organs, does most of the shop's building and repairing of violins, violas and cellos.

Several dozen violins hang from specially designed racks; nearby hang a dozen violas (a larger and deeper-voiced cousin of the violin) and stand another dozen cellos (the bass-baritone member of the string family). On shelving units are cases, some empty, some filled with the instruments the shop rents out to students -- including "fractional" instruments (eighth-, quarter-, half- and three-quarter-size violins suitable for the size of the child).

On another wall are bows aplenty, from eighth-sized for youngsters to bass, ready for sale or awaiting repair, and a couple of hanks of horsetail hair used to string them.

Tools and accessories (bridges, tailpieces, tuning pegs) are all neatly in their places, either

on the workbenches or the walls, where Joyner and Rule also hang their diplomas -- Joyner's bachelor of music degree from the University of Houston, Rule's from the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City.

The shop's mascots, two long-haired miniature dachshunds -- Truffles, who gained a measure of fame by posing for photos with violin superstar Midori during her recent Little Rock residency, and Omobono, who is named for a son of legendary violin maker Antonio Stradivari. Joyner says among other duties, the dogs help distract the children of customers from wandering about the shop touching things they shouldn't.

Joyner's stock ranges from beginner, mass-produced instruments to finely constructed instruments for advanced players and even professionals.

"We buy and sell instruments from China like everybody else, but we have some nice antique instruments," Joyner says.

You won't find a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius, Guarneri, del Gesu or Amati here, but Joyner does sell the occasional multi-thousand-dollar copy -- for example, the cello, a copy of the one played by late legend Jacqueline du Pre and current legend Yo-Yo Ma, that a customer from Tulsa with Little Rock family ties was trying out the other day.

The stock list, available on the website (littlerockviolinshop.com), has included the seven violins and a cello Rule made as a student, plus a few he has made since.

Rule's current workload includes making a new viola for Joyner, with the usual spruce top (almost 100 percent of violins have spruce tops) and an unusual poplar back (most luthiers use maple). "It's especially unusual to find [the wood] this beautifully flamed," says Joyner, turning the constructed but not yet varnished piece over in his hands.

Joyner, who turns 33 this month, and Rule, who's turning 28, are the shop's full-time staff; some days you'll also find a part-time sales associate and a handful of apprentices who are learning the trade.

The shop also sells strings, cases and accessories like rosin, which string players apply to their bows so they'll hold more firmly on the instrument's strings; mutes, which, when applied to the bridge of the instrument, reduce the vibration of the strings to create a muted sound; and shoulder rests, to help a player ease the strain of holding an instrument under his chin.

Joyner, who worked part time at the Lisle Violin Shop in Houston while in college and completed a four-month bow restoration course with master French bow maker Jean Grunberger at the Violin Making School of America, started his business eight years ago as the Little Rock Bow Shop with an investment of $5,000, which he used to buy a workbench, a hank of bow hair and some tools. He still does all the shop's bow repairs.

He operated in various downtown Little Rock locations, including a stint in an architect's Quapaw Quarter loft space (where the acoustics were perfect for occasional chamber music concerts), before finding three years ago the 1880s carriage house in which a Little Rock grocer named Baer kept his horses and wagons.

A loan from the Federal Housing Administration helped him renovate it into a work and living space, with the limitations of the MacArthur Park Historic District's rules and regulations; the shop's growth, however, has begun to impinge upon the rear apartment and Joyner's collection of unusually carved instruments, many of them made in the state. An eventual goal: to put on an exhibition showing the history of Arkansas violin-making.

Joyner has another connection to that history: He bought a number of tools and a few instruments that belonged to late violin maker Robert Rife at a March 2009 estate sale. Most of the instruments have long since been sold, but the tools are still in the drawers of Joyner's workbench.

Guitar shops and area music stores that have made most of their money selling brass and woodwind band instruments have been selling student violins and accessories. But before Joyner set up shop, professional musicians, including his Arkansas Symphony colleagues, had to travel out of town, to Memphis or St. Louis or even New York, to have their instruments properly cared for.

"That's why I started this shop," he says. "It's a place where professionals could take their instruments to somebody they can trust."

Style on 12/02/2014