Professional Custom Flutes

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Jon Landell Sr. reminisces about a lifetime romance with the flute. Continued from page 1

Meanwhile in the midst of my college studies I discovered flutemaking. First the publication of Boehm's "The Flute and Flute Playing" by Dover, and then numerous visits to the Powell Flute Company, which was located exactly across the street from NEC on Huntington Ave. I worked very hard to convince the four new owners that I was someone who would be able to make beautiful flutes someday, and how I dreamed about the possibility of making hand made flutes for professional musicians under my own name. At just the right moment a workbench opened up, and they offered me the job as an apprentice during the summers between academic years. The work was fascinating, even though they gave me the easiest and most repetitive tasks to do. I first learned how to make all the parts and build the body, solder everything together and get it ready for the 'stringer' (the man who makes the keywork). This was fall of 1968.

The next year I married a young woman who graduated from Eastman in flute performance and education, and I worked evenings and weekends doing piecework for the company and saving money. We were given a trip to France as a wedding present and attended the Summer Academy in Nice with Rampal together. It was there that I finally learned how to use his marvelous techniques of articulation, plus meeting many of the important people that helped me so much in my early years making flutes. By the middle of 1972 I had left Powell and built my first Landell flute for William Bennett using his new and excellent scale, which he developed together with Albert Cooper. Throughout those years I was asking people from Europe if they knew anything about Cooper, and I heard some very strange and interesting things about this one-man flute maker in London. So during another trip to Europe, we made a stop in London and stayed with Bennett and visited Cooper. For me it was like going to India and meeting my 'Guru' (something people were doing a lot in those days). Here was a man working alone and producing about 6 excellent flutes a year - without electricity. Out in his garden shed he forged and cast parts for his flutes entirely by hand!
I left London inspired for life.

By the time I had finished my first flute in 1972 I already had about 25 serious orders, mostly from Europe. I was the first American maker to use the Cooper scale with Bennett's slight alterations, the same scale I use today. I made all my castings using the old sand casting methods, forged the key cups with my own dies, studied engraving with my German engraver, and continued to build my shop with tools of my own making. But, those were extremely troubled years here in the US, and I was becoming more and more deeply involved in the turmoil of the day. In 1973 my wife was becoming more and more unhappy, so we separated and things just generally got worse and worse. I can't relate all the details here, of course, but finally in July of 1976 I decided to move to Vermont and leave the pressure of city living behind. My spirit was so deeply troubled, and yet the business was growing stronger all the time. I had made silver flutes for Julius Baker and Murray Panitz, my first all gold flute for Maxence Larrieu, and people were coming to visit my shop from all over the world. It was really an extraordinary time, because my personal life was so messed up, but the professional work was all consuming. I needed to find something much deeper, and I also needed a wife!

...concluded on page 3->