‘The woman who loaned me the Stradivarius offered to sell it for £140,000, but my own fiddle sounded better’

Jim McKillop began his professional life, more than five decades ago, as a marine engineer. It was work that took him all over the world, far from his Co Antrim birthplace. He was in his mid-20s when he decided to change course.

His father’s fiddle had broken, so McKillop took it with him to the oil tanker he was working on at the time, to see if he could fix it. The more he worked on the instrument, the more intrigued he became by its complexity. After teaching himself to play it (“after a fashion”, he says, with a modesty that belies his extraordinary grace as a musician, as well as his status as an All-Ireland champion fiddle player), he decided he wanted to learn how to make them.

His studies took him not just to Loughborough University, in England, but also to Cremona, in northern Italy, where Antonio Stradivari had been born and had his workshop. Regarded as the birthplace of the modern violin, the town still has more than 100 luthiers. When he began to make his own instruments, McKillop used their traditional techniques, working by hand, with tools that he also made. It was a pursuit that could be all-consuming.

“I’m somebody who loved working,” McKillop, who is now 76, says a little wistfully. “After working 16 hours in a day, I could take a scroll [a violin’s decorative carved head] to bed and maybe do some carving in bed. If I made a front I’d take it to bed and tap it and feel it, and even talk to it. You can’t do something well if you’re not passionate about it. I also feel, what’s the point of doing something that’s not good if you can do something that’s good?”

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The result of that passion was instruments in such demand that McKillop’s order book was always full. He has stopped making fiddles now – making and restoring model steam engines is his current passion – but recently he agreed to make one last instrument for the notable traditional musician Zoë Conway, to help mark her appointment as an associate artist with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, a move that will enrich traditional and folk elements in the orchestra’s repertoire.

“I was there when Zoë first put a fiddle in her hand,” McKillop says. “She was playing the banjo when I first knew her, about 25 years ago, and I think I had a reasonable influence on her in the early days. She was a very quick learner.”

Conway, who has made a number of recordings with McKillop, including the evocative DVD The Floating Bow Hand, wanted to pay tribute to his craftsmanship by chronicling the instrument-making process; her film-maker brother, Patrick, has captured this intimate, meticulous work in From a Forest to a Fiddle.

The meditative film, shot at McKillop’s workshop in the Cooley Mountains, will form the backdrop to Conway’s appearance with the orchestra at the National Concert Hall next week, which will feature a 45-minute piece that she has composed for the occasion.

[ Zoë Conway on a trad take on Terry Riley’s In C: ‘It’s totally out of the comfort zone for all of us’ ]

Conway regards McKillop as a huge influence on the development both of her own musicianship and of Irish traditional music as a whole. He’s a remarkable musician himself, she says. “He began playing the fiddle at the age of 26 and went on to win the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil just two years later. He has a flamboyant, exuberant playing style, and would famously play on the street at festivals for many hours to delighted crowds, my father amongst them. His compositions have been embraced as part of the traditional music canon and are regularly played in sessions. I perform a glorious tune he composed in an alternative tuning for violin, The Half Moon Waltz, at most of my concerts.”

Generally I think that if you have a feeling for something musical, it’s coming from deep inside, so it stays there. It’s an emotion as much as anything else

—  Jim McKillop, luthier

McKillop, an entirely self-taught musician, says he’s still learning. “I’d say my playing’s better today than it’s ever been. I think once your muscular system is working, you just constantly improve on it. Usually when I take something on, I like to make a reasonable fist of it, but the violin is a complex instrument and you never really fully figure it out. It’s full of mystery.”

How does he compose tunes? “I don’t read music,” McKillop says, “but I tend to put a tune together in five minutes. I’ve composed 20-30 tunes all in all. In the early days I’d memorise it. Now, of course, it’s easy to record them. Generally I think that if you have a feeling for something musical, it’s coming from deep inside, so it stays there. It’s an emotion as much as anything else. And then, when you compose the tune, make the fiddle and the bow, and then play the tune, I suppose nobody else has an influence on it.”

[ Frank Tate, the Dublin luthier making guitars and other instruments ]

McKillop estimates that it takes him between 160 and 200 hours to make a fiddle. “Like composition, I think it’s just instinctive, although I did handle some nice fiddles before I started to make them. I went back and forth to London to auctions, so I’ve handled thousands of fiddles down through the years. What got me into making was that I couldn’t find a fiddle that worked properly, so it was a necessity more than anything else,” he says.

My advice is to follow good tradition. Use your eye and your instinct and look at the great fiddles of the world: as many as you can get your hands on

—  Jim McKillop

The only machine tool he uses is a saw, to cut the wood at the beginning of the process. “I use maple or sycamore on the back, side and neck. For the front, the main sounding board, I use spruce pine. It’s a softwood that’s little more than half the density of the back and sides. The important thing is how well the wood is seasoned. I dry the wood in an open shed where the wind blows through it and the moisture doesn’t get in on it, over a 10- to 15-year period...

“It’s quite time consuming if you want to make something nice. My advice is to follow good tradition. Use your eye and your instinct and look at the great fiddles of the world: as many as you can get your hands on. I’ve made three or four cellos, five violas and maybe 60 or 70 violins, and they’re all over Ireland and in the UK. There’s even one in Japan.”

Aptly, given his time in Cremona, McKillop had the use of one of Stradivari’s violins for several years. Known as the Molitor Stradivarius, after the French Napoleonic general who once owned it, it was made in 1697. “The woman in Derry who loaned it to me offered to sell me the fiddle for £140,000 in 1987,″ McKillop says, “but because my own fiddle sounded better than it, I didn’t buy it. She put it into Christie’s auction, and she got £220,000 for it. It sold in New York in 2010 for $3.6 million. It had been bought originally in London for £3,600. It increased a thousand-fold in value over a 60-year period.”

The first half of next week’s concert will feature the premiere of From a Forest to a Fiddle, accompanied by Conway’s score; the second half will feature a raft of traditional music old and new, including her own Desert Storm/Rounding Malin Head, and Bill Whelan’s Riverdance. Conway says she is also planning a surprise for the audience as she doffs her musical hat to this luthier, musician and composer who has had such a formative influence on her own musicianship.

From a Forest to a Fiddle with Zoë Conway and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, with guests John McIntyre, Dónal Lunny and Louise Mulcahy, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Wednesday, November 15th