As the curator of UC Berkeley’s Salz Collection of Stringed Instruments, Carla Shapreau traces the rich histories of treasured, centuries-old violins and connects them to the next generation of musicians.
If there’s one thing Carla Shapreau knows, it’s violins. Violins with a history, in particular — instruments that have traveled over centuries among families and throughout wars, sometimes disappearing for decades only to reappear in another country with another name.
A leading cultural property scholar, Shapreau holds several positions at UC Berkeley. She’s a curator of the Ashley K. Salz Collection of Stringed Instruments in Berkeley’s Department of Music, a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies and a continuing lecturer at Berkeley Law. But perhaps what she’s best known for is spotting a long-lost 316-year-old Stradivarius — after years of painstaking research — that had been plundered at the end of World War II. She identified it among photos from a 2018 exhibition of Stradivarius instruments in Tokyo. The New York Times covered it. So did Le Mondeand El País.Documentary filmmakers are now pursuing the rights to the story.
“I am surprised,” Shapreau said of the media attention. After all, she’s been doing this work for much of her life — she’s currently working on a book project about Nazi-era looting of musical material culture, which includes research highlighted by the New York Times in 2012. But this is the first time her expertise has garnered this level of outside fascination.
Shapreau’s interest in violins began as a biology student at Humboldt State University, where she heard a fellow student playing the instrument. “I was so struck, I changed my major to music,” she said. The school loaned her a violin, and she learned to play. “I was always driven by the depth and beauty of the sound of the instrument and getting as close as I could to the transportive nature of music at its best,” she said.
While browsing in the library one day, she came across the 1950 DIY book, You Can Make a “Stradivarius” Violin. “That’s how I got the idea,” she said. Soon after, a professor introduced her to a violin maker in the hills of Oregon, where she went for a summer apprenticeship. Shapreau made her first violin at age 19, and three years into college, she dropped out to make string instruments full time. She soon became a professional violin maker, working in San Francisco music shops, where she also did repairs and restoration.
Shapreau was compelled by the experience of making something from nothing, and of the creative process that goes into building each instrument. The creation of cultural objects like a violin, she said, “draws from the well of human intellect, experience and emotion and can transport both the artisan and those who interact with the object.”
A decade later, Shapreau finished her degree, went to law school and has worked since in intellectual, art and cultural property law. She came to Berkeley in 2007.
Shapreau’s involvement with the Salz Collection goes back a long time. As a young violin maker in the 1970s, she visited the collection to study the instruments, and went on to maintain and restore them as an outside expert for 20 years. Appointed as curator in 2015, Shapreau carries out a broad scope of work that involves examination, analysis, conservation, preservation and documentation of the rare Salz Collection instruments, as well as engagement with students, faculty, staff and members of the public, both locally and internationally. She’s often engrossed in historical documents, researching the provenance of the collection’s antique instruments.
One of several collections of rare, historic and beautifully preserved instruments in the music department, the Salz Collection was donated to Berkeley from 1955 to 1957 by lifelong collector Ansley Salz and his wife Helen, a prominent civil rights advocate. The collection, which has grown over the years through a number of independent donations, today includes around 50 antique violins and violas and dozens of bows, made by master builders like Grancino, Gagliano, Lupot, Villaume and Amati.
Intended primarily for educational use by Berkeley students and the campus community, the collection never leaves the music department’s Morrison and Hertz halls. Berkeley musicians are encouraged to visit, where they can play the instruments and study them for their research.
“Students have a rare opportunity to experience and understand many facets of these instruments,” said Shapreau.