A Master Finds A Home

Ute Brinkmann had a realization when she was 18 years old and finishing up years of playing — and falling in love with — the double bass in youth orchestras across her native Germany: She could continue onto the professional level, where the collegiality of younger players gave way for stiff competition and musicians who were physically bigger and stronger than she. Or she could learn how to fix the instruments on which that competition played.

The second option required a longer and harder course of study. She committed to it almost immediately.

Now the German-trained Geigenbaumeister is ensconced in New Haven’s music scene, working with students from Music Haven and the Neighborhood Music School as well as professionals in the area; and operating a repair business from a studio in her Hudson Street home.

How she got here is a story entirely of its own.

From Westphalia to Manhattan … And Then Quickly Back

Brinkmann’s love affair with the United States didn’t begin the first time she visited, on a trip sponsored by her youth choir that was tone deaf enough to need instrumentals to carry them. Brinkmann was 18, and struck most by small differences — rather than big, overwhelming ones like New York’s grime and the language barrier — as she and a group went to stay with an American family.

“My first time in an American house,” she recalled, ​“and I remember that the house had so many doors. I thought: ​‘Why does this house have so many doors?’ There are no wardrobes, so these people have no clothes. So I summoned all my courage and I opened a door … and there were all the toys and clothes! It was a closet. The first time I ever saw a closet.”

That was just her first trail of the trip. Another soon followed. In the middle of the night, something in the hallway started beeping.

“This was America, we were convinced there were burglars coming,” she said. ​“It was so horrible.”

She and her orchestra mates called their emergency contact. No worries, the contact said. The fire alarm was just in need of batteries.

She didn’t think it a good omen.

“This was the one-time chance to come to America,” she thought after the tour, as she boarded the plane back home.

From Westphalia to Lubbeek

But her return to Germany was, in a very roundabout way, the beginning of a long journey to becoming an American citizen. When she returned to her family ub Westphalia, she realized that there was a sudden, gendered ceiling to her love for the double bass.

“I fell in love with the bass,” she said. ​“There’s no doubt about that. And then I saw the boys growing up. We were now 17, 18, 19 — and they got so tall and so big. I had not grown since age 14, and I thought: ​‘Well these will be my competitors once we start studying music.’ In the youth orchestra you are all peers, but once you start competing, you are competitors, and that means I’m probably losing out. And then I thought: ​‘I’m not competing with them. That’s not what I like to do. Then why not serve them?’”

So she committed to a goal very few people — and even fewer women — pursued: becoming a certified master of her trade through a three-year apprenticeship in Lubbeek, a five-year stint as a traveling journeyman, business courses, and formal written and oral master exams before the German Guild in Hamburg, during one of which Brinkmann had to build a violin from scratch.

“It turned around … and that has been a much better leg to stand on,” she said. ​“I knew that I was living my dream.”

From Lubbeek to London

After candidates have passed guild exams in Germany, they are certified Meistern, technically qualified to open a business of their own. But Brinkmann felt she still lacked experience. She wanted to apprentice in another shop.

There was, as it happened, ​“a chance to work in the shop,” W.E. Hill & Sons, just outside of London. Despite her hesitations — she spoke no English, and the shop had never hired a woman before — Brinkmann went for it, enlisting a friend’s help to write an application in English. 

“A friend of mine said: ​‘you need to apply for the job … you have to. This is your chance.’”

It was indeed. The boss fortuitously spoke German … and hired her on the spot. She started in April 1987; she was the first woman in the shop to ever set hands on a violin.

“[It was] like winning the jackpot,” she said in the interview. ​“The world got bigger once I left home.”

So did her linguistic capabilities. Banking on the philosophy that ​“people like to help everywhere,” Brinkmann learned English on her excursions into the city, conversing with the cheesemongers at London supermarkets ​“slowly but safely” while speaking German in the shop, working her way up from the ​“cheap” violins — $20,000 instruments — to the shop’s first Stradivarius, so assigned to her for her careful attention to detail. She loved what she was learning; her boss was patient, and encouraging when she had a question. But when W.E. Hill & Sons closed in 1992, she didn’t just want to see more of London. She wanted to see more of the world.

Long Trip To The U.S.

When Brinkmann finished her job in England, she was determined not to go home to Germany for more than a visit or short stay. She was in her late 20s, and wanted to see as much of the globe as she could before settling back in Germany.

She applied to a position in Hong Kong, submitting an application to another in Japan when she was rejected from the first. She was more hopeful about this one, she said in the interview. Ultimately, she had reason to be.

“The Japanese did not realize that they were hiring a woman,” she recalled. ​“They didn’t know by the first name. But I had the best qualifications. They came and met me in London, and they weren’t sure whom they were meeting, a male or a female. In the end they hired me because of the qualification. So I went to Japan for two years.”

More specifically, to the city of Nagoya, where foreigners were all grouped in the same neighborhood and Japanese was difficult — Brinkmann recalls it being nearly impossible — to learn. For the first time in her career, the Geigenbaumeister was deeply lonely, and excited to move on.

“I survived for two years, and then it was time to leave. I’m glad for the experience, it was good money, but not forever.”

“I was done with not understanding the language,” she added. ​“So I was looking for a job in Switzerland, or Australia, or America.”

She got two offers: Switzerland or America. She chose Switzerland — until her employer cut the salary. Suddenly, at 34, she was faced with a three-year, visa-specific position in Guilford, Connecticut.

“So Guilford became America to me,” she said. She never thought she would stay.

But at the end of a three-year stay, she had the chance to extend her visa. And another chance at the end of six years. And then there was the chance of applying for a green card.

“When there is a carrot somewhere, why not end up going for it?” she thought.

Guilford to New Haven

Brinkmann’s green card came in 1998. By then, Germany had become part of the European Union, and the designation of Meister — once selective, prestigious and nation-specific — had devolved almost completely. Violin shops with French and British proprietors were popping up across the country. Friends, colleagues and family in Germany urged her to stay in the U.S. and pursue her career.

“In the old days, you had to be a master in any trade — a butcher, or bicycle maker — you had to be a master to run your own shop. It was overseen by the guild. But it was a German law … nowadays you just say: ​‘I have masterly qualities.’ But there is no proof. With a green card [in America] I could get a mortgage, and I could fulfill my dream of setting up my own shop.”

She returned to the U.S., buying a house in Wallingford where she could set up a shop.

“I always wanted to be self-employed,” she said. ​“I just never thought it would happen in a foreign country.”

She went into business in 1999, getting a steady stream of customers through word-of-mouth referral while working as ​“the CEO and the janitor and everything in between.” When business was slow, she would buy broken instruments, fix them up, and resell them.

Already she was feeling a slight strain from the way internet sales were changing the world of instrument procurement and repair: Customers would buy cheap violins off eBay, and then act dismayed when they were too far gone for her to fix. But she felt like she was making it. She had paid off the Wallingford property, and set up a new shop in Westport in 2008.

Then the economy collapsed. People weren’t buying violins anymore.

Brinkmann continued to pay the rent, depleting her savings entirely before selling the shop and watching it become an empty storefront.

“I had to bury a dream,” she said, and now she was desperate for money, ultimately moving her business into a 64 square-foot corner of Westport’s Suzuki Music School in 2010. 

Then, in summer 2014, she decided to open a shop in New Haven, on Hudson Street.

The city already felt like home to her. She had been working with Music Haven — a school for city kids to learn to play instruments—since 2007. Then-Director Tina Lee Hadari had approached her for advice on buying pint-sized instruments for the organization’s first classes of students and she had instituted re-stringing pizza parties and begun to bring violin-shaped cookies (pictured above) to concerts and performance parties.

“I got me a tiny little house in New Haven … a place to meet customers,” she said. ​“If you have a need, then you look for a repairer, and then you might find me.”

“I don’t have to be afraid of any instrument that walks in the shop,” she added. ​“I don’t have to be afraid of any repair that walks in the shop. After all these years, not much can throw me.”

This interview is part of WNHH-LP’s ​“Open For Business” series on immigrant business owners and leaders in the nonprofit community. To listen to the whole episode, click on or download the audio above, or subscribe to WNHH’s new podcast ​“Elm City Lowdown” to have the episodes delivered directly to your phone. ​“Open for Business is sponsored by Frontier Communications. Frontier is proud to be Connecticut’s hometown provider of TV and internet for your home and business. Their phone number is 1.888.Frontier and their website is Frontier.com.