Like many makers, he started out as a performer. One of Butler’s loyal suppliers over the decades has been Jeremy West, who makes cornetts and serpents. Really they should sell for 30 or 40 thousand, but he can’t sell them for more than 10 thousand.” We deal with a retired head of woodwork at a school who makes spinets, a keyboard instrument like a small harpsichord, and he can only make two a year. ![]() ![]() But really this is not a business you can get rich in. His wife said, go on buy the serpent, so he did. “I had one customer who’d saved £10,000 and the choice was either a new bathroom or a serpent. They sell either to professionals, or to people who just have a passion. “There are certain instruments people just love to see in the showroom, like the serpent and the hurdy-gurdy and the theorbo.” But are they actually affordable? “You can buy some instruments, such as an entry-level recorder or lute for several hundred, but with a richly decorated keyboard instrument with a complicated technology and rare woods you can pay many thousands. “Switzerland and Germany are strong on recorders, harpsichords we buy from Italy and the UK and America,” says Butler.īutler admits his business trades on the alluring oddity of these instruments. But the biggest concentration of makers is in Europe, and within that, there are regional biases. He has a specialist supplier of bow resin in Australia, and a workshop making lutes in Pakistan. Butler buys from makers in every continent except Africa. In response, a world-wide niche craft industry has grown up. When they do, they fetch astronomical prices – last year a 17 th-century harpsichord by the great Dutch maker Ruckers was sold at auction in the UK for £180,000.Īnother problem is that these old instruments need endless maintenance and are too fragile to be moved around. The few surviving ancient harpsichords and lutes and crumhorns are locked up in museums and rarely come onto the market. The reason is that there is a real need for these instruments which the supply of genuinely old instruments can’t satisfy. So there’s a whole generation of makers coming to the end of their careers, but fortunately there are plenty of younger ones coming up.”īutler describes his business as “niche” but some might find it incredible that it exists at all. This created a surge of interest, and lots of instrument makers started their careers as a result. “Munrow was this incredibly gifted musician who could actually play most of these instruments. “Setting up this business was really made possible by one man, David Munrow, who almost single-handedly created a passion for “early music” back in the 1970s,” says Butler. The proprietor at Snape, Chris Butler, has been in this unlikely business for half a century. ![]() In the UK the marketplace where many of them bring their wares is the Early Music Shop, which has two walk-in stores, one at a UNESCO world-heritage site in Saltaire in Yorkshire, the other at Snape Maltings. Incredible though it may seem there are dozens, perhaps even a hundred craftsmen and women all round the world, who actually make a living from producing these exotic instruments. Leaving aside the mass-market for school recorders, which are factory-made, all these instruments are hand-made. There’s the long-necked lute called the theorbo, the huge extravagantly curved serpent, and many others. There’s the rebec, an ancestor of the violin, there’s the nakers, a pair of medieval drums, there’s the cornett, a curved wooden instrument played like a trumpet which gives a special soft glow to the splendours of 17 th-century Venetian music. But some are really rare beasts, known only to intrepid explorers in those far-off times. Sometimes you glimpse them in ‘normal’ music-making, for example when an opera house decides it’s time to revive a masterpiece by Monteverdi from the 17 th century, and lutes and harpsichords appear in the orchestra pit alongside familiar violins and oboes. Step into the distant past of classical music, and you’ll encounter a strange menagerie of fantastical instruments.
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