Jiri Cepelak

Jiri Cepelak (b. 1957) is a Czech luthier who specialized in XVI-XVII-century instruments. Since 1984, he builds lutes, small lutes, archlutes, theorbos, baroque guitars, and even more exotic variations: "liuto attiorbato" (a small type of archlute), "Roman" archlutes (with longer strings), etc. Some of Cepelak's builds follow infrequent Italian and german instruments—of Paduan school, renowned but scarcely preserved Füssen tradition, Venetian bass lutes of the early 1600s, etc. From 1972 till 1976, Jiri Cepelak studied luthiery at the School of Musical Instrument Making in Kraslice (where violin-making proliferates since the early XVII-century). He further apprenticed at the renowned Czech guitar-maker Josef Kubla's workshop in Luby, a small town in Cheb District (known as "Austrian Cremona" during the Thirty Years' War era). Cepelak worked as a museum curator in Karlovy Vary (1980–'94). The luthier advanced his unique specialty in master-classes with a German lute-maker Günter Mark in Utrecht (1992) and at David van Edwards's summer school in 1993.