Micrologus; Boston Early Music Festival I

83-11 BOSTON EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL I

During the last week of May, 1983, there took place probably the grandest celebration of early music that has yet taken place in North America: The Boston Early Music Festival and Exhibition. I was there preparing this Micrologus program, and next week's as well. But before we get to the focus of today's show, I thought it best to persuade an expert to give you some background to this grand event. On the floor of the exhibit hall in Boston's Park Plaza Castle, I managed to collar one of the ringleaders, the well-known recorder player, Scott-Martin Kosofsky, and I asked him to talk about the history and activities of the Festival.

KOSOFSKY: Well, the festival began as a fair for instrument makers, people who make replicas of historical instruments from all parts of the world, and was inspired by festivals in London and Bruges that have existed now for quite some time. But we wanted a little bit more: a large series of concerts, scholarly symposia, lecture demonstrations, masterclasses, all of these things. And we began thinking about it around 1980, and did the first one in 1981. Now we are in the midst of the second, in 1983.

DUFFIN: You have plans for 1985 as well?

KOSOFSKY: Of course. Indeed we do. That is the great anniversary year of Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, and Schütz. And we are planning to have a grand exhibition of instruments and paintings of instruments from the lifetimes of Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach, at the Museum of Fine Arts. People are working this very moment on that, as a matter of fact. And we expect to have an even greater turnout than our well over 100 instrument makers from around the world, and a series of concerts that should be flabbergasting.

DUFFIN: Among the 100 or so instrument makers exhibiting at the Festival, there were a handful that are also outstanding performers on the instruments they make, and it was those people that I sought out in particular. You will hear that some have differing attitudes towards their making and performing, their backgrounds too are often dissimilar, but they are all young, interesting, talented, and genuinely in love with their work. I hope you enjoy meeting them. Let's go back down now to the floor of the exhibit hall.

I'm at the booth now of Catherine Folkers, baroque flute maker from Boston. How did you get started in music, Cathy?

FOLKERS: Well, I've been in music for about as long as I can remember. I don't really remember a time in my life when there wasn't a lot of music around, and when there weren't flutes around, for sure. And I went through quite a number of years being a modern flute player before I got into the early music business. I went to the New England Conservatory and I did a degree there in flute performance, and it was toward the end of my time there that I got interested in early music, and baroque flutes in particular.

DUFFIN: How does one get from being a flute player to being a baroque flute maker?

FOLKERS: One needs to make some money, and one gets tired of teaching flute lessons. So that was my beginning, that I was looking for a job, and had decided that I was going to find out if some of the instrument makers in town were in the market for a secretary who needed someone who could do a little bit of shop work on the side. And in the process of all of this, I met Tom Prescott, who hired me, and I went to work for him running his office, and doing some of his work in the shop. It worked out very well, and I took very quickly to the flute-making end of it and loved every second of it, and gradually spent more and more of my own time learning more about the music, and about the instruments, and about the technique, and the making all at the same time.

DUFFIN: How do you balance your own time in terms of being a professional baroque flute player and being a maker as well? … very much in demand as a maker.

FOLKERS: It depends a little bit that one of the very, very nice things, maybe the nicest thing about being an independent business person is that my time is my own. It means that when I have concerts, when I have tours set up, I can put the business aside for a month if I have to do that, to be able to practice, or to go off on tour to do the music that I want to do. That my waiting times for instruments are usually flexible enough that I can afford to do that and just to take the time when I need to, to do music. So for me, making instruments is definitely what pays the bills. Playing music in this country at this time doesn't really do it for most of us. And I'm just really, really lucky that I have a business that feeds the music, and the music feeds the business.

DUFFIN: How do you go about choosing the instruments that you use to copy, or at least to base your instruments on?

FOLKERS: When I first started making instruments, I chose ones that were readily available in this country that I liked a lot. The Dayton Miller Collection in Washington is probably the largest collection here. And Washington, being close enough to here to be there in a day, made it very simple for me to gain access to all of those instruments. There are makers who will choose instruments and work on them a bit and change things to try to make them much better instruments. What I much prefer to do is to find instruments that I like from the start, that play exactly the way I would want an instrument to play, and then reproduce them from there. So I've been very lucky that there are enough good flutes available, and as I've been making more and more and have the flexibility to be in Europe for a month, every year, every other year, and measuring instruments, and finding out more and more about where they are, and getting a real collection of measurements and photographs and castings, and all of those things that you can have a collection of that aid you in making instruments.

DUFFIN: What instruments are you making right now?

FOLKERS: My biggest seller is a copy of a flute that's owned by Bart Kuijken, a Rottenburgh that was made in Brussels sometime in probably the second quarter of the 18th century. From there, I go in both directions a little bit. I have an English flute by a maker named Schuchart. I make a Quantz flute that is at very low pitch. It's about A=392—a whole step below modern pitch—and it's a wonderful instrument.

DUFFIN: What are we going to hear on the tape?

FOLKERS: I’m playing with a group called Musicke of Sundrie Kindes. We were a group of four women from Ann Arbor who played together and toured together for quite a while.

DUFFIN: And the flute you're using?

FOLKERS: The flute I'm using is the Rottenburgh.

[MUSIC: Music by the 1983 centenary composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau, the movement La Cupis, from his Pièces de Clavecin en Concert. Baroque flute maker Catherine Folkers performing on one of her own Rottenburgh flutes, with Musicke of Sundrie Kindes]

DUFFIN: Now back to the exhibit hall. Sharing a booth with baroque flute maker Catherine Folkers is baroque oboe maker Grant Moore. He has a little sign up that says Grant Moore, Hedonist and Oboe Maker. How do you explain that?

MOORE: It's really none of your business; but Cathy and I were exhibiting instruments at the AMS convention in November, and a friend of mine just thought it very appropriate. So she made me such a sign, and we'll just leave it at that.

DUFFIN: How did you get your training as a musician?

MOORE: I have a degree in modern oboe from Oberlin Conservatory, and then I got a Watson Foundation fellowship to study abroad, and I went to Vienna and studied baroque oboe with Jürg Schäftlein and then oboe making with Paul Hailperin, who then played second oboe in Concentus.

DUFFIN: How did it occur to you to study baroque oboe making?

MOORE: I had been in Austria the summer before and met Paul, and he was doing a number of projects with three different people making baroque oboes, and I thought it sounded like great fun to do, after I finished and got a degree. And also at that time, there were not baroque oboes available like there are today. You sort of bought anything that came along, and nothing generally came along. So, I decided maybe I should just build one. And Paul said, “Sure.”

DUFFIN: Your professional playing is involved with what organizations?

MOORE: Primarily, I play with Ars Musica, the Baroque Orchestra in Ann Arbor, which provides me about nine months of employment during the course of the year. And then I do some freelancing in Washington and around, but mostly I spend my time playing with Ars Musica.

DUFFIN: What instrument are you making now?

MOORE: At the moment I'm making a baroque oboe after Jacob Denner's instrument that's in Nürnberg, which is a very famous Baroque oboe at A=415, and an oboe da caccia by Eichentopf, who lived in Leipzig when Bach was there. And I think they had a very close relationship of making instruments for certain pieces, and certain sounds. The oboe da caccia is the forerunner of the modern English horn, for which there are just any number of beautiful, beautiful solos.

DUFFIN: A lot of people are curious about the wood that you use to make the instruments. What words are used, and where do you get them?

MOORE: The woods that I'm using are—for all of the oboes except the oboe da caccia—boxwood. And it comes from the south of France. I go over every few years and I found a wonderful little forest ranger who cuts logs, and I pick them out, and then he ships them to me. The oboe da caccia’s made out of rock maple—North American.

DUFFIN: As a professional baroque oboe player, and a professional baroque oboe maker, you have to juggle your time. You have decide how you're going to spend your time. How do you make those decisions?

MOORE: I usually look at my checkbook, and decide. You know, when we first started, Cathy and I had a shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan, along with another oboist, Dick Earle, and Cathy made instruments primarily, and Dick and I played and made instruments, and we were primarily performers, and that's sort of been my guiding light; that I feel that I'm a performer first and make about ten instruments or so a year. Part of it's just for therapy, to get away from playing, and part of it is to make something that I want, and feel it's important to make. There isn't a great deal of money in oboe making—I’d certainly hate to do it for a full time living—so I would say maybe three-quarters of my time is spent playing, and a quarter of the time—mostly in the summers—is spent making.

DUFFIN: It's interesting that so many professional baroque oboe players are also makers—much more so than other instruments. Why do you think that is?

MOORE: I think part of that is that there were so few baroque oboes around to be played on, say, ten years ago when this whole thing began to really blossom. And in order to get an instrument, you just made your own. And I think many people would agree that it's easier to make a baroque oboe, say, than it is to make a violin. You know, it's not easy, but you don't need nearly the paraphernalia to make an oboe that you would to make a harpsichord, or a gamba, or a violin.

DUFFIN: We now hear Grant Moore performing on one of his own Denner-copy baroque oboes, in a performance of the second movement of the second Brandenburg Concerto by J.S. Bach.

[MUSIC: The second movement of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, performed by baroque oboe maker Grant Moore and his cohorts of the Baroque orchestra, Ars Musica, directed by Lyndon Lawless]

DUFFIN: Back again to the exhibit hall. I'm now at the booth of Tom Pixton, who is a harpsichord maker and concert and recording artist from Brookline, Massachusetts. Tom, how did you get your musical training?

PIXTON: I studied with Gustav Leonhard in Amsterdam and Louis Bagger in New York City.

DUFFIN: And how did you turn from harpsichord playing to harpsichord making? Perhaps that's not a very good way of putting it.

PIXTON: Well, I didn't actually turn from one to the other. I have been playing harpsichord since early teens and had actually had some professional experience in high school performing. And I grew up in Philadelphia, and there was actually a lot of opportunities to play continuo with groups and in fact, I had a lot of performing experience before I got to college. And in fact, my senior year in high school, I met an instrument maker who I subsequently worked in the shop of, and made an instrument, just sort of ad hoc. It wasn't any decision. It was sort of, I wanted temporary summer work, and he said, Well, you know, while you're here, why don't you start an instrument? And so I did make an instrument, which I then used professionally and had it in college, and then made another instrument, sort of for my own use, again, sold the first one, and then sort of got an order for one, and then made another one, and sort of fell into it ad hoc. There was never any decision to do one full time. I sort of fell into it. I was doing some teaching also and performing here and there, and sort of got into harpsichord making purely because it seemed a better way to make a living than playing the harpsichord at the time.

DUFFIN: Do you still find that, or are you balancing them rather fifty-fifty?

PIXTON: No, I’m doing more harpsichord making; it’s mostly what I do at this point. I would say only 10% of my income is from playing.

DUFFIN: Here now is Tom Pixton performing William Byrd's “Lord Willoughby, his welcome,” on a harpsichord of his own construction, based on a 1642 Ruckers.

MUSIC: “Lord Willoughby, his welcome” by William Byrd, performed by harpsichord maker Tom Pixton on a 17th-century Flemish-style instrument of his own construction]

DUFFIN: Back once more to the exhibit hall. I'm at the booth now of Clifford Boehmer of Natick, Massachusetts, and Clifford Boehmer is a clavichord maker. He is not himself a professional performer, but he works very closely with the professional classical artist, Bernard Brauchli. How long have you been making clavichords?

BOEHMER: I’ve been at it for seven years now.

DUFFIN: And how did you get started?

BOEHMER: I first was interested in the clavichord by taking lessons with Bernard Brauchli, and I've been a woodworker for a long time, ever since I was small, and decided to put the two things together.

DUFFIN: Bernard, what's your input into Clifford's clavichord making?

BRAUCHLI: Well, we started by building an exact copy of an instrument which is in the Museum of Fine Arts, on which I had recorded one record. And that's the Onesto Tosi clavichord, the second oldest in the world—1568. And so I proposed to Clifford Boehmer to make a copy of that instrument. And we did it together; I brought him my own experience as a musician, and also I got to know more about early instruments, and so I guided his first researches and then, of course, we continued collaborating.

DUFFIN: Is it a matter of the player’s touch, or the kind of sound you're looking for?

BRAUCHLI: Yes. And the authenticity of instrument also, of course, and different ….

DUFFIN: How do you choose the instruments that you're going to copy? Does Bernard have input into that, too, or do you have some ideas of your own?

BOEHMER: Well, he has a good bit of input in it. We both do a lot of study of the early instruments, of the original instruments. And when we find an instrument that we know has good potential, or in fact is playable, and the sound pleases us, and then we carry a little further at that point in measuring the instrument, and doing everything that's necessary to to build it.

DUFFIN: You mentioned the Tosi instrument. What other instruments do you make?

BOEHMER: Well, right now I'm making a copy of the Hubert clavichord, one that dates from 1780, the original of which is in Basel. And that's a very special instrument that really represents about the highest point, I feel, that fretted instruments reached. And I'm also making a very small four octave clavichord that's based on an anonymous Austrian instrument dating from about 1680, the original of which is in Vienna. There are many other instruments that I'm interested in and probably would build if people expressed an interest in that. But right now, those are my two main instruments.

DUFFIN: Bernard Brauchli now performs the Intonatione del Primo Tono, by Andrea Gabrieli, on a copy by Clifford Boehmer of the 1568 Tosi clavichord at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

[MUSIC]

DUFFIN: With that, this week's Micrologus draws to a close. Tune in next week for more instrument-maker-performers at the Boston Early Music Festival.