Biography
In the mid-1970s, amidst Mao's cultural revolution, Cao was a farm worker. A violin-making teacher who visited the area offered him the opportunity of an apprenticeship. He graduated from the Guangzhou Institute of Professions in 1977.
When China opened its borders Cao went to the United States in 1985. He originally stayed in San Francisco where a violin dealer suggested that he should study repairing older instruments under a master luthier. His mentors included eminent violin makers such as Louiz Bellini, Hans Weisshaar, and Roland Feller. In 1990, Scott partnered with Heideo Kamimoto to start a violin shop and returned to China, where he founded a company which makes affordable instruments and bows, including violas, cellos, basses, guitars and established Scott Cao Violins. Three years later Scott was able to open his own shop in the United States in Campbell, California.
His best instruments are meticulous copies of famous Stradivari and Guarneri designs.
Read more about this topic: Scott Cao
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)