Anna Peekstok Communications
Seattle, WA 206-524-5050 ap@annapeekstok.com
The hurdy-gurdy in America
Early Music America, Summer 2004
When Americans heard Donovan sing about the “Hurdy Gurdy Man” a few decades ago, they were more likely to picture an organ grinder with a trained monkey than someone playing a stringed instrument with a crank and a wooden wheel.
After centuries of familiarity—and sometimes notoriety—in Europe, by the 1960s the hurdy-gurdy had sunk into obscurity here. Surviving Baroque examples were preserved in the museums of Europe and the British Isles, and newer versions were still used in the folk traditions of both Eastern and Western Europe, but the New World was largely unaware the instrument had ever existed. Those who did know about it had few options for hearing one or getting their hands on a playable example. Build-it-yourselfers were daunted by the complex wheel, axle, and crank assembly, the wooden keys with their rows of tunable tangents, and the precise adjustments required to produce a working “trompette,” or buzzing bridge. Brave souls who undertook the project without a trip overseas had to work without mentors, sometimes without ever having seen or touched a working instrument.
As a result, the hurdy-gurdies most often found in the United States were barely audible boxes built from kits, employed by recorder and krumhorn consorts to spice up their performances of Medieval and Renaissance music. Little was expected of these instruments beyond the contribution of a haunting drone, a scratchy diatonic melody, or a simple buzzing rhythm from the trompette (if indeed the instrument had a trompette).
Today, stage-worthy instruments are being built by luthiers in the United States. A growing number of performers identify themselves primarily as hurdy-gurdy players, and an annual teaching festival in Washington state draws students from throughout North America for intensive workshops with an international slate of instructors.
This transformation began in the 1970s with a folk music revival in France, which brought the folk hurdy-gurdy out of its rural closet. A new generation of players discovered the power of drone-based music, researched traditional repertoires, and made recordings, many of which combined hurdy-gurdies and bagpipes with drum sets and electric guitars. Perhaps because folk and Medieval music often share the same modes, or because in Europe Medieval music is at the other end of an unbroken tradition, many of these records included Medieval dances among the newer bransles and bourées.
Interest in the hurdy-gurdy spread to the British Isles, where a similar blending of folk, early, and rock music was in full swing. Eventually the instrument found favor with pop icons such as Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin fame), who recorded and toured with hurdy-gurdy player Nigel Eaton in 1994 and 1995.
Meanwhile, some players and builders were looking back to the hurdy-gurdy’s heyday in the 18th century. They studied playing methods and instruments from that era, which pointed toward more elegance, refinement, and dynamic range than were commonly found in folk hurdy-gurdy traditions. Some who had mastered the folk oeuvre found new challenges in works by Antonio Vivaldi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and lesser-known composers who wrote for the hurdy-gurdy at the height of its popularity.
In America, fans of traditional and early music heard the instrument on records from Europe and the British Isles, and some American musicians came home from trips overseas with hurdy-gurdies that were larger, louder, and easier to play than the kit models available here. Air fare put the price tag for such instruments beyond the reach of many would-be players, however.
Made in America
In the mid-1980s, California musician and luthier Michael Hubbert began building a spare but full-featured hurdy-gurdy intended to bring the volume and functionality of European instruments within the budgets of American players. Hubbert called this instrument the “Volksgurdy.” It had a simple teardrop shape, with a flat back instead of the rounded lute backs popular on French traditional instruments, but unlike most American models, it had a full set of drone strings, a working trompette, and two unison melody strings that played two chromatic octaves.
Hubbert built quite a few Volksgurdies, as well as fancier models based on historic or French designs. Because of their playability, his instruments enabled several Americans—including this author—to become performers on the hurdy-gurdy, starting a chain reaction in which more performances created greater awareness of the instrument, which in turn created greater demand for both instruments and players.
By the early 1990s, Hubbert was ready to move on to other projects. He passed the Volksgurdy on to Alden and Cli Hackmann, a Seattle-area husband and wife who do business as Olympic Musical Instruments. The couple picked up where Hubbert left off, experimenting with the instrument’s design and introducing several refinements, including a curved back and top. Today they also offer six other models, including three that are particularly suited to historically-informed performance: a symphonie, or 13th-century-style box instrument; a 15th-century-style instrument based on a painting by Hieronymus Bosch; and a guitar-shaped instrument based on those that were popular in the 18th-century French court.
The Hackmanns have built and sold more than 80 hurdy-gurdies, most to clients in the United States. The Internet has also made it easier for Americans to buy instruments from overseas, with several builders offering multilingual web sites featuring photographs, price information, and even currency converters.
With more and more Americans finally able to acquire hurdy-gurdies, a new question arose: how would they learn to play their instruments?
Instructions not included
When my Hubbert Volksgurdy arrived on my doorstep in 1985, it didn’t come with instructions. I had bought a couple of imported method books, one from England (Method for the Hurdy-Gurdy by Doreen Muskett, Dacorum Press, 1979) and the other in German with a photocopied English translation tucked inside the front cover (Die Drehleier: Handhabung und Spieltechnik by members of the Frankfurt Hurdy-Gurdy Ensemble, Frankfurt, 1981, available from Verlag der Spielleute at www.spielleute.de). Both were (and are) good resources, but I definitely had questions they couldn’t answer, such as, “What is causing that horrible screeching sound and how do I make it stop?” and “When I put cotton on a string, why does the cotton bunch up into a wad instead of going on smoothly like the pictures in the book?”
Fortunately for me, I knew a more seasoned player who lived only an hour away. She was willing to offer advice and sympathy, and with her help I eventually worked out solutions to most of these issues. But it took me several years to deal with problems that could have been laid to rest in a few lessons with an experienced teacher. And many Americans are taking up the hurdy-gurdy in even more isolated circumstances than mine.
The good news for them is that there are now several resources that weren’t around 20 years ago. One is an exhaustive book on hurdy-gurdy setup and maintenance by two European player/builders, Philippe Destrem and Volker Heidemann (The Hurdy-Gurdy: Adjustment and Maintenance, Auvergne, France: AMTA, 1993). In three languages (German, French, and English), this reference provides illustrated instructions for dealing with just about everything that can go wrong with a hurdy-gurdy, from loose tangents to a warped wheel.
Another new resource is the Internet, which allows hurdy-gurdy players and builders around the world to give one another information and support. There are many web sites with information, photos, sound samples, and listings of upcoming festivals and workshops. By far the most extensive online reference is the Hackmanns’ interesting hurdy-gurdy site (www.hurdygurdy.com), which features a bibliography, a discography, a list of hurdy-gurdy appearances in films and videos, and advice on building a hurdy-gurdy from a kit or plans, including lists of sources for said equipment.
The Hackmanns also started and maintain an e-mail list on which hurdy-gurdy players, builders, and enthusiasts all over the planet communicate, commiserate, share ideas, and help one another solve problems related to the hurdy-gurdy. Topics have included how to evaluate an instrument before buying it, strategies for traveling by air with a hurdy-gurdy, and, of course the perennial favorite, “What is causing that horrible screeching sound and how do I make it stop?”
Up close and personal
Even with all of these references and virtual aids, there’s no substitute for hands-on instruction by someone who really knows what he or she is talking about. The week-long Lark Camp (www.larkcamp.com) outside of Mendocino, California, offers classes in hurdy-gurdy playing and French dance repertoire. It was here that I received my first actual instruction, seven years after buying my hurdy-gurdy, and I was relieved to discover that I didn’t have to unlearn any bad habits. But these low-key workshops under the redwoods are a far cry from the highly-structured settings in which European players learn to master their instruments and develop highly-skilled playing techniques.
To create an opportunity for more rigorous instruction on American soil, the Hackmanns—who apparently don’t require much in the way of sleep—started the Over the Water Hurdy-Gurdy Festival in Indianola, Washington, in 1996. Under the instruction of the late, great Pierre Imbert, former member of the seminal French folk group Lo Jai and the popular Canadian band Ad Vielle Que Pourra, a ragtag group of about 20 players from as far away as New England received several days of intensive workshops in techniques for the left hand, which plays melody, and the right hand, which turns the crank and plays the trompette rhythms. Accustomed to being lone curiosities and the best hurdy-gurdy players our audiences had ever encountered, we found ourselves in a room full of fellow travelers, cranking away and collectively making an astonishinng amount of noise. Pierre Imbert stood in the center, shouting out rhythms over the din and playing them with flawless precision while we struggled to match him and keep up. Eleven years to the month after I had acquired my hurdy-gurdy, my understanding of what it could do, and how to approach the development of my own playing skills, truly began.
Today the September festival is put on by a nonprofit organization and takes place at a former army facility on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Its faculty has included teachers from Italy, England, and France, as well as seasoned American players who can now help beginners over the basic hurdles. Attracting students from all over the United States, plus a few from Canada and even farther afield, it has produced a marked improvement in the quality of New World hurdy-gurdy playing. Classes have focused on playing technique at all levels; repertoire for both early music and traditional players; instrument setup and maintenance; plus performance topics such as singing while playing, and playing the hurdy-gurdy—or witha hurdy-gurdy—in an ensemble.
The festival has also created a community of players and builders who connect on many levels. In September 2001, the festival’s organizers—myself included—were still reeling from Pierre Imbert’s sudden and untimely death when the World Trade Center was attacked. One instructor was already in the air, on his way to teach at the festival, on that morning. His flight turned around and went back to England when all air travel to the United States was cancelled. Another instructor was told to simply forget about flying to the U.S. from Italy, and a third was stranded in Paris, where he had traveled by train to catch his flight. After weighing the many good reasons to cancel the festival, the organizers decided to go ahead with the instructors who could manage to get there and the participants who were able to come. This may not have been a sound financial decision, but none of us could think of any place we would rather be, or anything we’d rather be doing than spending time with our fellow enthusiasts and sharing the good business of making music, along with our shock and grief. (It took some doing, but two of the foreign instructors and more than half of the registered participants eventually managed to get there.)
As for the hurdy-gurdy’s growing presence in America, it’s not exactly mainstream yet, but there are hopeful portents. In the last decade, the instrument has appeared on studio recordings for everything from rock to country music, and Sting was shown cranking one while performing in this year’s Academy Awards show. More and better instruments are getting into the hands of players, and those players have more and better options for learning what to do with them.
The day may yet come when an American player can expect to answer questions about technique or repertoire rather than the current standard, “What the heck is that thing?”
Anna Peekstok is a freelance writer on a range of different subjects, including the hurdy-gurdy. She plays and sings with her husband John in a duo called Telynor.