Here is a beautiful salterio, hammered dulcimer or psaltery. It’s a trapezoidal-shaped salterio with quite an unusual number of bridges – six. It has two sound holes, decorated throughout with foliage and garlands of flowers. The front of the instrument features a Mediterranean bay, which seems to be Catalan in style. There...
Slide whistles or lotus flutes made of ebonite stamped Swanee often show up at auctions and for sale on websites. They can be great fun, but also challenging to play, especially if you want to get a decent melody out of one. People call them Swanee whistles, lotus flutes, slide...
Louis-Maurice KASRIEL (1815-1899) was a musical instrument maker who was born in Krotoschin, Prussia – today's Krotoszyn in Poland. In 1839, he started a company in Paris that would specialise in making harmoniums, harmoniflutes and guide-chants. Louis Maurice Kasriel was married to Sara KAHN. The company was awarded medals for...
This third flute was made by the Bavarian maker Johann Samuel STENGEL (1771-1826). Johann Samuel was the first in a generation of woodwind instrument makers in the business for around 100 years in total. Johann Samuel was born in 1771 in Döhlau/Hof (about 60 kms from Bayreuth) and was...
Wow! What we have here is an ivory flute made around 1740, perhaps in England. The flute is beautifully made and features a solid-silver key. The profiles are very finely and masterfully turned and demonstrate superior craftmanship. The embouchure is small and round and in perfect, original condition. The key...
Here is a stylish, reliable pocket metronome with an extremely accurate Swiss precision mechanism. This vintage Cadencia chrome-plated pocket metronome was made by Home Watch Co. Ltd. in Switzerland. It features a scale from 40 to 200 beats per minute. The centre hand regulates the beat while the hand pivoted at...
A five-keyed B-flat clarinet by the maker Johann Georg STEINER. He lived from 1783 to 1862 and worked as a woodwind instrument maker in Rottenburg am Neckar, which is now Baden Wuerttemberg in Germany. The instrument is made from Boxwood , with brass keys and horn...
This extraordinary F clarinet was made at the workshop of the Uhlmann family in Vienna, Austria. The company was an extremely important manufacturer of woodwind and brass instruments. It supplied the Austrian army and exported worldwide. The founder was Johann Tobias Uhlmann (1776-1838), who started the business in 1810. He...
Here is a nice boxwood fife made by the London firm Goulding & Co. The company was created by George GOULDING (1759-1814) in around 1785 and started out in music publishing. A fife is a cylindrically bored transverse flute. It is normally made in one piece or sometimes two and...
Brass has a wonderful, bright, gold-like appearance. It is malleable [workable], low friction and has a golden glow. Even when dirty and tarnished, it can be brought back to its former glory with a bit of cleaning. But what is brass and why use it to make musical instruments? Brass is...
Boxwood is a lovely wood and it’s hardly surprising that it remains quite a favourite among today’s woodwind instrument makers. Buxus sempervirens, known as European boxwood, or common boxwood, is a species of flowering plant. It is an evergreen bush really, rather than a tree. It takes a long time to grow and it is difficult to find completely straight trunks without knots to use for items such as flutes.
Boxwood has a uniform grain and is very dense and hard, which is why it was so popular for wood turning and instrument making in the 18th century. At that time many instruments were predominantly made from boxwood. Then several tropical hardwoods became popular during the 1800s as tonewood. People wanted to have furniture and also instruments made from exotic types of wood. So, boxwood lost ground to these newcomers to Europe.
There were also some disadvantages to boxwood: its tendency to warp and easily soil. This led to the ‘banana’ effect with flutes for example, as the wood warped over time.
The wood is naturally yellow in colour and can be left with a natural, polished finished. Boxwood then darkens over time to have a nice honey-yellow colour. It can also be stained using acid staining to give it an orange-brown or dark-brown colour, and in wooden flute construction, many makers use a violin varnish for the finish. This is an extremely arduous technique that requires expertise and precision.
Sadly, since around 2006, the spread of the box tree moth called the Cydalima perspectalis has led to huge losses of boxwood ‘trees’ that have taken hundreds of years to grow. It was sad to see forests of boxwood reduced to almost nothing.
Now it’s very rare and wonderful to see just one full grown 100+ year boxwood tree. So, when that happens – some people just can’t resist and have to hug it!
