A Luthier finds art in his work
A guitar is like a living creature in Harry Becker's studio.

The guitar rested on a set of padded blocks like a trauma victim lying an operating table. Harry Becker, guitar surgeon supreme, leaned over it, delicately examining its fractures, bumps and bruises. Instead of scalpels and hypodermics, Becker's toolbox is filled with files and vices and bottles of lacquer. The patient, you can be sure, would be up and singing in no time.

"I look at repairing guitars as like being a doctor," he said. "You're trying to preserve life. You correct suffering and make the best of limitations. I can't change this guitar, but I can make it do what it was born to do as well as it can."

If that sounds anthropomorphic, it's because guitars are indeed living things to Becker. At 58, he has handled thousands of them. Some he has built from scratch; others have made music at his urging, everything from blues/ragtime to bossanova. The majority have come to him with broken necks and cracked soundboards and popped frets for healing.

The small Easthampton Road studio that Becker shares with longtime business partner William Cumpiano is part wood-working shop, part classroom, part museum. There are instruments in all stages of being, from unfinished shells to newly-lacquered beauties to broken husks. There's philosophy in the air, along with the smell of wood and glue.

Becker himself is a study in quiet energy. A thin man whose curly hair and beard is salted with gray, he goes about his work carefully and joyfully, always paying attention, usually smiling. He moves like a man who has studied comparative religions and industrial design and has learned how to apply both to fixing guitars.

A Brooklyn native, Becker fell in love with the guitar in the '50s while watching Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show. It took a back seat to his career in industrial design until college when he met Cumpiano at the Pratt Institute, where both of them were students. A Puerto Rican native with a love for classic music, Cumpiano introduced Becker to the nylon string guitar. By the time they graduated in 1968, Becker was headed in a new direction.

"The whole country appeared to be going mad," he said of those times. "Industry was the last place I wanted to go."

Instead, he took a teaching job in a Long Island high school while he pondered music and the state of the world. He eventually turned down tenure and moved to Provincetown, where he looked into various religious schools of thought.

"I felt the need to delve deeper," he said, "to try to find some kind of center. I found my understanding of how things worked, why they were they way they were."

And so Becker opened a bicycle shop. The bicycle, to him, was the perfect machine: efficient, healthy and non-polluting. At times, he said, he felt like Mahatma Gandhi at the spinning wheel.

Becker moved his shop across the state to Williamstown, where he reconnected with Cumpiano. While helping him start his first guitar studio, Becker was exposed to professional musicians. It occurred to him that, with some practice, he could make a go as a singer-songwriter. He was about to launch his new career when he was suddenly called back to Brooklyn to tend his ailing parents. For the next 12 years, Becker set down his guitar and drove a cab.

In the early '90s, after his parents died, he moved to Northampton and hooked up with Cumpiano once again. They started a studio in Leeds, moving it to Easthampton Road about five years ago. The partners found they work well together. Cumpiano makes most of the guitars, specializing in the Puerto Rican cuatro, a 10-string instrument for which he has established a national reputation. Becker has made 30 or 40 guitars from scratch but prefers re pairing them.

"Repair is problem-solving," he explained. "I find it more challenging and interesting."

Guitars from all over the world line the walls of the shop, awaiting their turn at the repair table. Becker took out one sent from Switzerland, a battered Michael Gurian model with a broken neck. Cumpiano was one of Gurian's students, and the shop is one of the few that Gurian owners trust implicitly. Becker likes that the instruments in the shop come from every continent and reflect a variety of cultures.

"Building a guitar is like creating life," he said. "You're creating an object that resembles a human being and also has a voice and an ear."

Like a living creature, he said, guitars respond to heat and moisture. They come in all shapes and sizes and can be the best of companions.

"A player expresses their innermost feelings to a guitar that they can't express even to their loved ones," Becker said.

To demonstrate, he picked up an original guitar he was finishing and played some bossanova, gently drawing out the subtle rhythms and luminous chords produced by the Brazilian stew of Caribbean, African, indigenous and jazz influences. Becker teaches bossanova and composes in the style. Although he last performed at First Night 2000, he hopes to work his way back to the stage.