To live in Serampore, a suburb of Kolkata, West Bengal, India, from June 17th to August 22nd, in order to learn the table-making craft from a master instrument builder.
The Oxford institution, a supreme cabinet of cultural curiosities, has brought together some of the finest instruments ever crafted by master instrument maker Antonio Stradivari, whose name is as synonymous with violins as Hoover's is with vacuum cleaners.
Others came to see the posthumous inductions into the Ukulele Hall of Fame of a master instrument-maker, Samuel K. Kamaka of Hawaii; Cliff Edwards, a performer better known as Ukulele Ike, and May Singhi Breen, New York City's Ukulele Lady of the 20's and 30's.
The debunkers include scientists, modern luthiers and some younger soloists who can't afford old master instruments and make a virtue of the new.
Prices continue to soar, and musicians still yearn to play old master instruments.
He is the master of the instrument and a total gent to boost.
The master makers of bowed instruments flourished in northern Italy from about 1550 to 1750, when supreme craftsmanship, superior woods and varnish, enduring models and a highly developed apprentice system centered on a few families.
Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony, who is recording my "Autumn Music" for violin and piano on the Avie label this summer, informed me that he has just been loaned the Lipinski Stradivarius (1715), one of the master's most celebrated instruments, which he will use in the recording.
She is the master of combining live instruments, percussion, digital manipulation and vinyl.
