A.G. Piano & Violin Tunes Up Tenino

Musicians in south Thurston and Lewis counties have cause to celebrate now that A.G. Piano & Violin is open in Tenino. Owned and operated by Andrew Gillispie and Julia Felix, the shop has been in business for over a year. Musically minded area residents have welcomed them with open arms.

Gillispie tunes, moves, repairs and restores pianos while Felix runs the shop, creates her own handcrafted violins and does violin repair. The shop itself is warm and inviting, filled with refurbished pianos waiting to find a new home. The walls are adorned with numerous paintings, created mostly by Gillispie and his grandfather who still enjoy going on painting excursions together.

Gillispie grew up in Olympia, where he played the trumpet and considered becoming a music teacher. Ultimately he chose to study advanced piano technologies at the North Bennet Street School (NBSS) in Boston, Massachusetts. This institution offers training in traditional trades and craftsmanship. It was at NBSS that he met and fell in love with Julia Felix.

Felix was raised in New Mexico and earned her bachelor of arts in Studio Art from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. 

“I graduated in 2008, the worst possible time to graduate,” Felix said. “I had friends with master’s degrees who couldn’t get a job.”

Felix had played classical guitar for a decade and was considering becoming a music major. Then someone suggested violin making. 

“I knew I really liked woodworking and I did a lot of three dimensional work,” she said. “Violin making sounded perfect for my personality and the way my brain worked. I liked to do really tedious things really slowly.”

Felix applied to NBSS. A stop-motion video that she had created utilizing pennies caught the eye of a professor there. 

“He said, ‘If you have the patience for this, you have the patience for violin making,’” Felix said.

After graduation, the couple relocated to Tenino where they opened A.G. Piano & Violin. The new business has proven to be a perfect fit. While Felix crafts violins and manages the store, Gillispie goes out to tune and move pianos. He enjoys interacting with his customers which can be amusing. 

“When I tune a piano I hit the keys multiple times,” he said. “It’s really repetitive. One time I was tuning in a retirement home when an older guy came up and got within a couple inches of me and said loudly, ‘That’s annoying.’ It was really funny and he was right, it is annoying. Another time, I was tuning a piano in a family’s home and their toddler started copying me. Every time I would hit a key he’d say, ‘Bong!’”

A gifted tuner, Gillispie has a particular affinity for refurbishing pianos. One of his refurbished works currently in the shop dates back to 1908. 

“I like doing restoration work more than anything else,” he said. 

Gillispie also loves to delve into the history of the pianos that he recreates.

“The most well-known American manufacturer before Steinway, a name everybody knows, was Chickering,” Gillispie said. “He was a real innovator in a lot of ways. The only problem was he made each of his pianos differently. It made it more fun and interesting. All the pianos are different sizes and all the designs are extremely different. His factory burned down at one point and he lost all his designs in the fire and had to start over. Chickering was the American piano maker back then. They were bought out in 1908. Now there are only two American companies left. Mason & Hamlin makes only around 200 a year and the other, Steinway, makes maybe 2,000 a year. That’s not very much considering that Pearl River in China makes about 200,000 a year.”

Speed and quality can be closely intertwined in instrument making. For example, according to Felix, a skilled violin crafter usually only makes 8 to 10 violins in a year. Each has his or her own label, but even this can be misleading. 

“Sometimes people put old labels on different instruments,” Felix said.

Fortunately a skilled craftsperson can often identify the true origins.

“Violins are a little like people,” Felix said. “When you get used to looking at them a lot you start noticing subtle differences. Once you have seen enough of them you start to associate them with certain makers. Everybody puts a little of themselves into their work intentionally or unintentionally. An expert can usually attribute an instrument to the correct maker.”

Felix loves the work of violin making. 

“I’m really good at following instructions, and violin making is really specific,” she said. “It’s fun to make a copy of a good violin that you like visually and is going to sound good. It’s really fun to copy all the subtleties and compare them in your head as you make them. It’s like sewing. You need a tracing of the plate to make an exact replica because the art of drafting the violin has gotten lost. There are some very well respected violin makers who have spent a long time trying to rediscover the art of drafting violins. It’s not impossible to do but nobody has found a definitive way to do it the way they did it back in the Renaissance era. So you make a template and use that to make a mold and use the mold to shape the wood around for the sides. Then you go from there. If you count varnishing, the process takes me about three months.”

Gillispie and Felix are enjoying their location in Tenino. 

“We decided to open the shop here because it’s tough to get a location in Olympia and we noticed that there was a weird gap in services down here,” Felix said. “It’s a really nice town. People here have been really welcoming.”

The couple are in the works of determining what will come next for A.G. Piano & Violin. They are planning to hold concerts at the shop and are contemplating the possibility of starting a community program. Whatever comes next will depend largely on the couple’s availability. A.G. Piano & Violin has been so enthusiastically welcomed that there isn’t a lot of free time to work with. Gillispie’s schedule is almost full for the next month. The couple is particularly interested in expanding awareness in the local community. 

“I am hoping to educate people a little more on the advantages of having modern instruments,” Felix said. “To encourage them to support modern makers and to be more interested in higher quality instruments. Buying cheap instruments is understandable. Violins are expensive. Even cheap ones are a couple hundred dollars. A lot of people can’t afford them.”

She said the less expensive instruments can discourage player development.

“It’s hard to explain to people that if they want to succeed, or want their child to succeed, they have to make sure that the instrument is easy to play and that it sounds good,” she said. “With violins it’s so easy to be hard to play already. That’s something I’ve been trying to teach people about. Hopefully we can get better instruments out there for people to see there’s a difference.”