A never dying Art Form
Instrument makers are passionate artists, who, mostly out of their hobby – playing on an instrument - have made a profession. Be it violin maker, a woodwind instrument maker or piano maker, all are all crazy about their handicrafts. We take a closer look at the various musical instrument makers.
Let's start with the organ builder. The organ-building was taken up as one of 27 forms of culture and craft techniques in the Nationwide Directory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Clients for organ builders are mostly churches and organ experts. For the specifications of the spatial, technical and tonal conditions the organ builder must find solutions. His task is then the design, the construction, the production and the sound design of the desired organ. Furthermore, the organ builder takes care of the maintenance, renovation, restoration and reconstruction of organs.
The piano maker executes similar operations. Even though the piano manufacturing mainly happens via industrial batch fabrications handiworks such as restringing, the installation of the mechanism and the regulation of the musical mechanism need to get done by hand. Some piano manufacturers are internationally successful, for example the company Steinway & Sons or C. Bechstein.
The brass instrument maker can look back on a long tradition. Already in the Bronze Age systems for sound generation were applied by blacksmiths in the form of signal trumpets. At that time, fanfares or hunting horns were still casted in one piece or bent by the help of metal tubes. With the invention of valves in 1819 by A. F. Sattler trumpets or trombones were decisively developed further. Today there is a variety of fine mechanical means for the sound generation of a brass instrument.
The instrument maker Johann Christoph Denner applies as the inventor of the clarinet in 1700. At that time the craftspeople worked with methods of mathematics and acoustics at the tab and key systems of the woodwinds. The aim was and is still to produce a beautiful sound and a perfect intonation for flute instruments, clarinets, saxophones, oboes and bassoons. They achieve this through the material, the tone holes, the mounted keys and finally by the external shape of the instruments.
