“It was a thrill,” he says, remembering that first one. During nights and weekends in the fall of 1993-in a few weeks, with only a book to teach him and tools he’d been given by the violinmaker Günther Reuter-he built a violin. In his early 40s, his practice established and his kids getting older, Meineke indulged his curiosity and turned his scientific mind to the question. Darnton occasionally let Meineke try an antique violin made by one of the legendary Italian masters, and the tonal difference between a great instrument and an ordinary one continually struck the doctor. He played first violin in Oak Park’s community orchestra and got to know Michael Darnton, who worked on stringed instruments at Bein & Fushi, a dealer in downtown Chicago. Meanwhile, Meineke skirted the fringes of Chicago’s classical music world. He finished medical school in less than three years and busied himself establishing a medical practice and raising a family in Oak Park. Meineke graduated in 1971 from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a chemistry degree and went on to graduate work and research in molecular biology. “You never forget it if you hear it.” The experience lodged a question in his mind: Why is it that some instruments sound beautiful, while other, nearly identical instruments do not? “It had a buttery quality,” he later said. Nothing in the violin’s appearance marked it as special, yet its sound was unlike anything Meineke had produced before. He drew a bow across the strings of the old instrument. Meineke had recently become serious about playing the violin. A brief lesson on the instrument’s beginningsįorty-five years ago, as a freshman in college, Cal Meineke was poking around a music department storage room and came across a rare Tyrolean violin made in the 17th century by the German Matthias Albani.
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