Handmade

A maker who specializes in instrument bows, Ken Altman. Starting at around $2800 for the basic violin version, and going up ...

Guitars were represented by at least a dozen local makers. (Above, Jay Dickinson, Portland Guitar.)

There were violins, fiddles, violas, cellos, double basses, flutes, lutes, ouds ...

Mandolins ...
High-end tuning machines ...

Small, medium, large, and all manner of shapes ... (Mark Roberts made the four ukes on the left, Abe Su'a, the two on the right.) 

The pictures are from the Handmade Musical Instrument Exhibit, held this past weekend at Marylhurst University, just past Lake Oswego, Oregon. My wife and I try to make this one every year. Just walking around in the big room is a treat -- the sights, sounds, smells.

As part of your three-buck admission fee, you can cross the walkway to the BP John Building and the Wiegand Performance Center, which was once a chapel, and listen to the mini-concerts. These are generally twenty-minutes sessons, wherein a player will demonstrate a maker's instruments to the audience. Room holds a couple hundred people, and they all sit there quietly listening. Anybody makes a noise, the whole audience turns around and shushes them.

We went yesterday, and caught five of the sets: Steve Tool, playing an acoustic steel string by Michael Propsom; followed by David Franzen on a classical guitar by George Smith; then Craig Alden Dell on a ten-string classical by Michael Elwell. Dina Fergurgur and Maria Olaya played a pair of classicals by Keith Rhodes -- one a cedar-top, the other a double-top spruce. The last player was Jeffrey Ashton, on a classical by Jeffrey Elliott. (I've mentioned Elliott here before. Staring price on his guitars is about twelve grand. The waiting list to get one is about twelve years ...)

All the players were adept. They did pieces by Bach, some Renaissance lute stuff, a piece one of the women composed herself with a South/Central American flavor, and composers like Villa-Lobos, who wrote thousands of pieces but only a score of them for guitar.

The guy playing ten-string had gone through a series of surgeries over the last year -- both shoulders, both hands -- and was supposed to be wearing a brace, which made his performance impressive. And a ten-string's resonance? Oh, my.

My favorite was Ashton, a man who was adept and into the music, and whose composition of Moorish/Spanish variations was a delight, including, for you players out there, an ending series of pinch harmonics going all the way to the second fret ...

The only problem was that my hearing aid kept cheeping feedback at me, so I had to remove it, but I was still able to enjoy the music with the good ear ...