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If you stop by the Texas Violin Shop, you’ll likely find me at the workbench, making new machines and restoring old ones. My husband and trading partner, Estefan, will probably test the instruments, and play everything from classical music to playing the old violin. You’ll see violins in various stages of completion, with nearly complete instruments hanging by their coils from a shelf, waiting to be polished and set up. Among a pile of sawdust on the workshop floor, you might find our two shop dogs, Amati and Lucy. When we’re not adjusting the instruments, classical music plays in the background and the sound of wood scraping fills the room.
For our family, Texas Violin Shop is an old dream that has recently come true.
Growing up in Patchoug, New York, Estefan had a passion for music from a young age, listening to artists such as Tony Bennett, Michael Buble and Josh Groban. When he was 10 years old, he started playing the cello and quickly excelled. By the time he was in the seventh grade, Estefan learned that he wanted to pursue a career in music education.
Estefan was the first to receive classical training in music in his family, and while completing his music degree, Estefan fell in love with the trade of delicately curved string instruments. “The story of each antique machine is unique in its own way, and I love owning a tangible piece of history,” he said. When it comes to contemporary tools, he said, they have “their own story to create, and we’re just the first chapter.”
I grew up 30 miles east of New York City in a town called Melville. My father worked as a technician for General Electric, and I spent a lot of time in his workshop, watching him fix things. I found it amazing to see how he can take something old and broken and make it look new. This is where I found the passion for working with my own hands.
When I was ten years old, I started playing the cello. At the age of fifteen, I began training as a workshop assistant at the Long Island Violin Shop in Huntington, New York under the supervision and direction of American Lothair Charles Rufino and Hungarian Lothair Andre Fischer. With the skills I’ve learned, I often repair tools at school for my teachers and classmates. Seeing the excited faces the students made when I was tweaking their instruments was incredibly fun. It was especially rewarding to take an old family heirloom that has been sitting around for decades and restore it to its former glory.
While working at The Long Island Violin Shop, I continued my studies as a violinist and bow instrument with other master makers at Oberlin College, the University of New Hampshire’s Institute of Violin Industry, and Mohr and Mohr. I found that my passion for finely-curved stringed instruments and my talent for carpentry went hand in hand with violin making, bow making and restoration.
Estefan started his career at Long Island Violin Store in 2013 as an Education Coordinator. He soon made a name for himself as a teacher and violin dealer. As a major seller, he coordinated instrument performances at conservatories, universities, and orchestras throughout New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. We often work together to deliver educational workshops, fixes, and instrument demonstrations to aspiring performers, students, and music teachers.
We fell in love while working together and decided to start our own journey.
With an acceptance letter from the Violin Industry School of America, we packed our bags and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. While in Utah, we worked at Summerhays Music and ran the largest professional chord division in Utah. During our years in Utah, we have taken it upon ourselves to pursue professional development to gain experience identifying instrumentation and selling precision bowstring instruments.
After a long, fun and exciting journey dating and working together, we ran to Oahu, Hawaii to have a private beach wedding and start a new chapter of our lives together.
Stefan and I have always dreamed of opening a violin store together. We wanted to create a happy working environment surrounded by history, art and music. We explored many different areas and found that research is only part of the equation. We traveled to San Antonio to check it out for ourselves and fell in love with the culture, the weather, and most of the people. We love that there is a sense of community and that the musical community was very welcoming of the idea of us moving to this beautiful city.
In July of 2021 we set up the Texas Violin Shop to share our experience with our community. We offer sale, rental, restoration, lessons and educational workshops for violin, viola, cello and bass. It is also important for us to serve as a resource to support music teachers, public and private schools, local symphonies and the community orchestra.
Our mission is to provide our community with the education and means to succeed in achieving a player’s musical goals. One way to do this is to offer educational workshops for music teachers and students. Our most popular workshop is the hardware maintenance workshop. We have done different levels of this workshop for music teachers with professional development, college students pursuing a music degree, high school and elementary school.
We are often pulled aside by professionals and educators who have played for decades to thank us for teaching them new tips and tricks. Another reason I love doing these workshops is to show that there is success to be achieved in a male-dominated field. It’s not often that you find a woman luthier (stringed instrument maker), and the number of women working in this field has been growing tremendously since I started at the age of 15.
As we approach our store’s first anniversary, we were so grateful for the welcoming support of the professional stringing community in San Antonio. As a new business, one of the main rules is to never stop promoting. We have worked hard to promote our small family business and have found word of mouth to be the most powerful advertisement. So far, the majority of our customers come from a recommendation from a friend or colleague who had a great experience in our store.
As our business grows, we are pleased to continue to create a community of players around us. In the future, we plan to offer master classes, performances, a scholarship fund to our employees and students on their way to a music career, and much more to give back to our community for what they have given us.