Jonathan Cooper

Jonathan Cooper was a Portland, Maine master violinmaker and fiddler whose handmade violins, violas, and cellos reached classical players, folk fiddlers, and studio musicians across the United States. He died just before dawn on Labor Day, 7 September 2026. His wife, Liz Bieber, announced the death on his Facebook page. Bangor Daily News reported the news on 8 September 2026. The Violin Channel and other music outlets followed. An exact birth day was never published in the sources reviewed here. Bangor Daily News said his exact age was unclear and that he was in his 70s. Strings Magazine's November-December 2021 profile places him at about age 20 in rural New Hampshire around 1970, which points to a birth year circa 1950 without inventing a calendar day. A stored year of 1950 is not a claim that he was born on 1 January.

He grew up in the New York and New Jersey area in the 1950s and 1960s. As a teenager he played guitar, bought and sold guitars, and after high school worked as a professional guitarist. Around age 20, during a band rehearsal in rural New Hampshire, he picked up a bandmate's viola and could not get a good sound from it. That night he dreamed he was playing the violin perfectly. The next morning he bought a thrift-store violin for about seven dollars and began teaching himself by ear. "The way I see it now, there's my life before that day, and my life after that day," he told Strings. He became a decorated contest fiddler in Maine and New Hampshire and started buying cheap instruments to repair and take apart so he could understand how they were built.

Formal training arrived late and in the traditional way. He took a University of New Hampshire summer course in violin making in 1976. In 1979, during a European band tour that included Italy, he visited Cremona, the city of Antonio Stradivari, and was "totally smitten." He quit the band, moved to Cremona, and spent about three years studying instrument making there. His own website names luthier Gregg Alf as the teacher for those three years. He then returned to Maine and opened a Portland shop making stringed instruments in 1984. Decades later the shop was Acoustic Artisans, for a time at 142 High Street, Suite 218, in the historic State Theater building. He was listed among members of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. Maine Public reported in 2015 that he was one of about one hundred luthiers in the country known as masters.

Cooper's method was personal and player-specific. He asked musicians how and where they played, whether they used microphones, how much they traveled, and whether they recorded often. Answers changed wood curvature, thickness, and setup. "I want the instrument to be able to speak, I want it to be able to sound," he told the Bangor Daily News in 2013. "That's why you have to make them one at a time. It has to be from one person for an instrument to have a personality that's distinct." To Maine Public in 2015 he said that when he makes a violin from beginning to end and hears the player, he knows that violin, unlike a factory instrument built from a set of numbers. He told Bangor Daily News that these instruments are used for "very emotional and spiritual purposes," not like cars driven from place to place. By 2021 Strings reported he was about to cross five hundred instruments, including cellos and violas. He was still making fiddles, more slowly, until his death.

His clients ranged from chamber and orchestral players to folk and bluegrass fiddlers. Peghead Nation and related coverage associate his instruments with players including Darol Anger, Michael Doucet, Mark O'Connor, Alex Hargreaves, Bruce Molsky, Chad Manning, Lauren Rioux, and John Mailander. He served as an artist in residence at the Acadia Festival of Traditional Music and Dance in Bar Harbor, mentoring students each summer. After the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent and fiddler Daniel Pearl, Cooper created the Daniel Pearl Memorial Instruments Award: a violin, then viola and cello, loaned yearly to players at Mark O'Connor's fiddle camp so they would perform and speak about Pearl. Jeremy Kittel received the first violin in 2003. Cooper told Strings he was confident that, unless heavily damaged, a violin he made could still be playing three hundred years later.

He had been dealing with health challenges for the last couple of years but, his wife said, was still active and looking forward to many years ahead until an unexpected decline in the week of his death. "We're all in shock but comforted knowing his end was peaceful and he approached it with incomparable grace and strength," Bieber wrote. She said that until the end he wanted to focus on what made him sing: his three sons, his sister and brother, dinner gatherings, music jams, violin making, and fishing. A celebration of life and memorial plans were forthcoming as of 8 September 2026. Cause of death beyond a peaceful death after recent health challenges was not made public. Resting place was not published in the notices used here. The Violin Shop in Nashville wrote that he left a permanent mark on violin making and playing "near and far." Acadia Festival called him a kind and encouraging soul who embodied the spirit of traditional music.

What he left is not stadium fame. It is hundreds of handmade instruments meant to outlive him, a Maine shop that treated sound as something made person to person, and a generation of players and younger makers who met him at jams, festivals, and the bench.

This page is for Jonathan Cooper, the Portland, Maine violinmaker, fiddler, and founder of Acoustic Artisans. It is not a page for NFL linebacker Jonathan Cooper, and it is not a page for unrelated people of that name in real estate, ALS research, or SPCA boards. No Facebook account URL was verified for this page, so none is linked.