Anna Peekstok Communications
Seattle, WA 206-524-5050 ap@annapeekstok.com
The hurdy-gurdy: Medieval sound finds a modern following
The Sun, Bremerton, Wash., Sept. 19, 2002
A decade ago, Suquamish resident Cali Hackmann worked for a law firm in downtown Seattle. She wore wool suits to work and did everything from graphic design to building trial exhibits out of Lincoln Logs.
Her husband, Alden, was a full-time research scientist at the University of Washington.
These days, Cali wears T-shirts to work and commutes a few seconds from the kitchen to the attached garage which she and Alden converted into a workshop. Her work is devoted to shaping, bending and gluing wood, then applying coats of home-made polish to create an obscure, medieval musical instrument.
Alden still works at the University of Washington two days a week, but spends the other days working at the couple’s metal lathe or on decorative carvings.
The Hackmanns’ new careers as hurdy-gurdy makers has put the Olympic Peninsula on the map as the hurdy-gurdy capital of the Western Hemisphere. Their company, Olympic Musical Instruments, is the only large-scale builder of the instrument outside of Europe. In addition, the pair started a West Sound festival that brings together hurdy-gurdy enthusiasts from around the United States and an international faculty of world-class instructors. In its seventh year, the Over the Water Hurdy-Gurdy Festival will be held Sept. 24-29 at Fort Flagler State Park on Marrowstone Island in Jefferson County.
(For public events, see the schedule at right.)
The general public usually confuses hurdy-gurdies with the barrel organ played by an organ grinder with a monkey sidekick.
The true hurdy-gurdy is a stringed instrument that sounds like a cross between a violin and a bagpipe and looks like a lap-sized fusion of a small guitar, harpsichord and coffee grinder.
The wheel at one end creates the instrument’s distinctive sound as it bows across the strings.
Yet the materials are familiar: strings of gut and metal-wound gut, bodies of big-leaf maple, spruce and walnut, steel for the shaft and brass for the cranks.
The Suquamish couple swears they did not set out to build hurdy-gurdies — or any musical instrument.
“It just kind of evolved one piece at a time,” Cali said. She fell in love with the hurdy-gurdy&8217;s droning, buzzy sound while studying music in college.
“Either you really like it or you really don’t,” she says. The hurdy-gurdy phase of her life began when she bought a hurdy-gurdy kit, though her prior building experience was limited to interlocking plastic toys.
“It said right on the advertisement that it was a difficult thing to build and that you needed woodworking experience and more tools than usual,” she said. “And I bought it anyway, which tells you something about me.”
But the kit stayed in a closet until she met Alden. He shared her growing hurdy-gurdy enthusiasm, but was just as clueless about woodworking.
One weekend they opened the box and became hooked.
“We looked at it and said, ‘This can’t be that hard,’ and we built it,” Cali says.
“There were all kinds of problems; things didn’t go together the way they were supposed to. But we just fussed with it until we got it finished.”
By that time, the couple had married, moved to North Kitsap and met several hurdy-gurdy players. In their intensive learning phase, the Hackmanns kept photos and detailed records of every instrument they could get their hands on. They searched every bit of documentation available on hurdy-gurdy building. They even got a notice from the Kitsap County Library to slow down their requests for inter-library loans.
Then came an apprenticeship with an experienced California builder who was closing down his hurdy-gurdy business. The couple shot hours of videotape as he talked them through the building process.
After Cali was laid off from a full-time graphics job, she spent months transcribing the tapes and searching for suppliers for the tools and raw materials needed to build hurdy-gurdies.
“I was definitely looking for a way out of corporate America,” Cali said.
The Hackmanns finally began building instruments. Orders came in, and they have never looked back. Since then, the Hackmanns have built and sold more than 80 instruments, each requiring an average of 250 to 300 hours of work. Prices of the four models they make range from $990 to $4,400.
The couple has a two-year backlog of orders from three pools of customers: players of traditional European folk music, players of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music, and the broad “other” category. The latter group includes musicians experimenting with the hurdy-gurdy in jazz, rock and country music.
The pop music segment got a boost in the 1990s when Led Zeppelin alumni Jimmy Page and Robert Plant took a hurdy-gurdy player on tour and featured him in their “Unledded” video. Garth Brooks’ 1995 album, “Fresh Horses” featured one of the Hackmanns’ instruments, and Bruce Springsteen’s newest album, “The Rising,” features another.
In their new career, the Hackmanns have acquired more skills than they dreamed possible.
“We both like problem solving,” Alden says. “I tend to be more of an engineer. I like looking things up in tables, and analyzing things, whereas Cali is more artistic and intuitive. I think we complement each other very well. We’re always bouncing ideas off each other.”
Being self-employed carries risks, Cali said. “But it’s a lot more fun to be able to set your own hours, to choose what you’re going to do, versus somebody else telling you what you’re going to do.”
“But you work a lot more hours,” she noted. “I had to work a lot of overtime for the law firm, but the 40-hour work week is a joke when you own your own business.”
The money translates to less than minimum wage, said Alden.
“We work longer hours, but we like what we do,” Cali continued. “For me, that’s the biggest thing. There’s a sense of satisfaction, of having taken something from its conception to completion. You’re intimately connected with every single part of that instrument.
“Of course, the best part of it is when you string the thing up and it makes the first sound, and you set it up and it starts to sing.”
The couple has a two-year backlog of orders from three pools of customers: players of traditional European folk music, players of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music, and the broad “other” category. The latter group includes musicians experimenting with the hurdy-gurdy in jazz, rock and country music.
Anna Peekstok is a contributing writer and hurdy-gurdy player who lives in Seattle.