Gary Garavaglia Viola

One of the world’s foremost cello makers, Gary Garavaglia has had a long and celebrated relationship with the workshop of William Harris Lee and Company.

A native of Detroit, Michigan, and a cabinet maker by trade, Mr. Garavaglia moved his family to Chicago to study violin making at the Kenneth Warren School (now the Chicago School of Violin Making). After years of intense study, he joined forces with William Harris Lee, who was working to realize his vision of a Chicago workshop dedicated to the making of fine stringed instruments.

For the first twenty-five years of his career, Mr. Garavaglia focused on the making of cellos. He has always built his own instruments exclusively, and over the years has worked with a number of models, including patterns based on Stradivari, Guarneri, and Montagnana, as well as his own personal models. All of his instruments have a personality that is uniquely his, featuring a rich and resonant tone, with brighter, grittier elements, all combining to produce instruments with great tonal complexity and outstanding projection. He prefers a medium-grained spruce for his cello tops, and finishes his instruments with a rustic dark varnish of his own making.

In more recent years Gary has made a number of violins and violas. His smaller instruments have quickly established themselves in the marketplace as instrumentswith great warmth, power, and projection, that feature the distinctive Garavaglia sound.

You may find Gary Garavaglia working on instruments in the Michigan Avenue workshop of William Harris Lee & Co., Inc. seven days a week, from early morning until late afternoon.  The result of such perserverance and  commitment to his craft, is that Gary has made and sold over 400 violins, violas and cellos, establishing himself as one of the greatest and most successful makers of our time.