Jonathan Cooper, a luthier who crafted violins of such supple tone and exquisite range that they allowed players to bridge the gap between classical and American fiddle instrumentation, making him a favorite of musicians like Mark O’Connor and Alison Krauss, died on Monday in Scarborough, Maine, a suburb of Portland. He was 76.
His brother, the journalist Matthew Cooper, said the death, in a hospice center, was from sepsis.
Mr. Cooper, who possessed an almost preternatural understanding of woods, varnishes and strings, was one of only about 100 expert violin makers in the United States. After spending several years studying in Cremona, Italy, the birthplace of the modern violin, he opened a shop in Portland, where he worked for over 40 years.
He made every instrument from scratch. After selecting his woods, often sourcing his spruce and maple from specific stands of trees, he carved each piece by hand. He preferred traditional tools and natural varnishes, which he kept neatly organized in his one-man workspace.
It took him about a month to make each violin, typically customized for each client. A Jonathan Cooper violin cost about $15,000, including free maintenance and repairs.
Many violinists have different instruments designed for different types of playing. Customers valued Mr. Cooper’s instruments for their immense tonal range, allowing them to use a single violin across a variety of musical styles — European classical, Cajun, Appalachian folk.
He customized all of his instruments based on extensive conversations with his clients, drawing on their styles of play, their travel routines and whether they used amplified sound.
“If I make a violin, I start off with a concept of the instrument, and I make every part of it from beginning to end, and I present it to the musician, I hear the person play it, I know that violin,” he told Maine Public, the public media network, in 2015.
Among his admirers was Mr. O’Connor, a Grammy Award-winning artist known for spanning Old and New World traditions. For years, he played a violin made in 1830 by the legendary French luthier Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, but he eventually set it aside in favor of one of Mr. Cooper’s instruments, which he found more versatile — and just as well made.
“I was looking for a unique sound that would help me bridge what I was doing musically, between the worlds of American string playing and jazz and classical music itself,” Mr. O’Connor said in an interview. “Here was a man that was really kind of excited to do with an instrument what I wanted to do with music.”
After Mr. Cooper learned that Daniel Pearl, an American journalist who was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, was an amateur fiddler, he set out to design and build a quartet of string instruments — two violins, a viola and a cello — in his honor.
Every year, four students from a music camp run by Mr. O’Connor receive one of the instruments to play for a year. Many of the recipients have gone on to successful professional careers.
“These young people carry the message that love fights hatred through music-making and understanding that Daniel Pearl’s family want him remembered for,” Mr. O’Connor said.
Mr. Cooper was not just an accomplished violin maker; he relished the opportunity to repair them.
After Ms. Krauss, a Grammy-winning fiddle player, accidentally dropped her prized violin and split it nearly in two, she asked a luthier in Nashville to repair it. He demurred, saying it was too hard a job, but he recommended she take it to Mr. Cooper.
It took him months of work, but he returned it to her in perfect condition.
“My fiddle was in shards,” she said in an interview. “When I got it back, I couldn’t believe it.”
Jonathan Gelula Cooper was born on May 17, 1950, in Boston, where his father, Daniel, was completing a doctorate in nuclear physics at M.I.T. and his mother, Bette (Gelula) Cooper, was an artist. They soon relocated to Morristown, N.J., for his father’s job at Bell Labs.
He taught himself to play guitar as a teenager and played in bands around suburban New Jersey. In 1969, he enrolled in the New Division, an experimental program at Nasson College, now closed, in Maine. The New Division shuttered in 1970, and Mr. Cooper left higher education.
In 1971, he moved to Franconia, N.H., a small town in the middle of the state, where he played in the Con Fullam Band, a bluegrass ensemble. Though never a breakout success, the band gained a regional following and, in 1973, was one of the first acts to perform at CBGB in Manhattan.
Mr. Cooper did not encounter the violin until he was in his early 20s, when one of his bandmates brought one to practice. He tried it out and was immediately taken with it.
“There’s my life before that day, and my life after that day,” he told Strings magazine in 2021, “because I woke up in the morning, went downtown to a thrift store where I’d seen a violin for sale, bought it for like $7, and pretty much started teaching myself how to play it.”
While on tour in Europe with a different band, he took a side trip to Cremona to observe traditional luthiers. Watching them in action, he decided to make the craft his life’s work — he quit the band and stayed in Cremona for three years.
Mr. Cooper’s first marriage, to Leanne Daniels, ended in divorce. Besides his brother, he is survived by his wife, Liz Bieber; two sons, Amos and Seth, with his first wife; another son, Wyatt, with his second wife; and a sister, Ellen Cooper.
Admirers often characterized Mr. Cooper as an American Stradivari, the Italian master, a comparison he was too modest to accept in full, though he said he hoped that, like those of Stradivari, his instruments would also still be in use centuries after his death.
“When I make a violin, I’m pretty confident that, unless it’s really heavily damaged along the way, it’s going to be here 300 years from now,” he told Strings. “I really like that. Long, long after I’m dead, some of my violins will still be around, making music and, hopefully, you know, still making people happy.”
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