Music: As Easy As Lying

It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. So said Hamlet, explaining how to play a recorder.

Now Hamlet’s ancient pipe is discoursing again.

The recorder was antique even in Shakespeare’s time. Although in England and Germany the recorder never quite became extinct, elsewhere it became a museum piece like the crwth (a type of Welsh fiddle), the nose flute, the theorbo. Five years ago, when a man asked for a recorder at G. Schirmer, Inc., Manhattan’s big music store, he drew blank. Last week Schirmer’s had a window full of recorders. Even during the dull summer months, sales had gone up 50%.

Chief reason, as some 15,000 amateur and professional players have discovered, is that the recorder is almost foolproof. Blow into the end of the wooden tube, and out comes sweet, soft, sad music. The recorder is easier to learn, easier on the neighbors, than the piano, fiddle, saxophone, for which ten easy lessons are never quite easy enough. It is decidedly less corny than the mandolin, banjo, accordion. Bach and Handel, and many another before them, wrote fine, easily negotiable recorder tunes.

A recorder blends well with a violin, or with other recorders. There are four kinds: soprano, alto, tenor, bass, the last surprisingly weak and whiskey-voiced for its three-foot length. Until five years ago, most recorders were made in Germany or England. The English revival had been started by the late untidy-bearded Arnold Dolmetsch, musical antiquary. One of his pupils, Margaret Bradford (who now helps run the American Recorder Society), got a Haverhill. N.H. cabinetmaker named William F. Koch to make some. Now Manufacturer Koch turns hard, red cocobolo wood into 90% of the recorders sold in the U.S. All a recorder maker needs is this South American wood, a lathe, a few tools, and an exceptionally acute ear. But Manufacturer Koch will have to hump. Schirmer’s, which takes all his output, estimates that 4,000 recorders—at $4 to $45—will be sold this year.