Crafting the Invisible
CRAFTING THE INVISIBLE
Musician Chris Rippey speaks with master flute maker Geoffrey Ellis about the essence of his craft.
I first discovered the xiao flute years ago when, due to tendonitis, I had to give up playing the Irish flute. Having spent innumerable hours in devoted practice up to that point, I was desperate to find a way to continue to play the instrument I loved and keep my skill going. After a year or so of resting my hands, I came across the xiao online and was instantly intrigued. Here was a flute which was held vertically, weighed virtually nothing, could play chromatically, and had a haunting, ancient voice. I suspected that it was maximally versatile, which suspicion was proven utterly true in time. Over the years, the xiao became my voice, front and center in any of the styles of music in which I composed.
The world of English speaking xiao enthusiasts, especially builders, being quite small, it was only a matter of time before I got to know the work of Geoffrey Ellis. I had previously come across his site and admired his beautiful work, but it wasn't until a mutual acquaintance and fellow xiao player introduced us that we first spoke over the phone.
He was immediately warm and engaging, and during our long conversation I could barely restrain my enthusiasm at speaking with someone so knowledgeable about every possible detail of flute building, design, music and philosophy. Here was a man who knew his stuff, not just about xiao, but many other world flutes which he has built over the years as well.
When I first played his instruments, a lovely pair of wooden xiao turned and stained to resemble bamboo, I could immediately sense all his long experience at work. The tuning (an issue he and I had discussed at length, being a somewhat esoteric subject sometimes problematic for the Western player) was quite balanced struck the correct compromises; I can and often do use these flutes in equal-tempered music, but am able to shade and color the tuning for other musical styles quite easily. The craftsmanship of these flutes is impeccable and beautiful and the voice is rich and complex.
As a composer playing the xiao, I have endeavored to be true both to the instrument's roots and to my own, and to discover new forms of expression for its unique voice. As a builder, Geoffrey is making my work (and that of a growing number of Western players) possible. To play his flutes is to both touch the far reaching, ancient heritage of the instrument and to awaken new possibilities for as yet unheard sounds and styles to emerge.
One thing I know about Geoffrey Ellis is that he never stops learning and is always refining his craft. In this interview, you will hear about this ever-unfolding process in Geoffrey's own words.
Chris Rippey: It is said that good design is invisible. The finish work on your flutes is certainly exquisite, but the real magic of the instruments is in their tone and playability. None of the design elements which influence these qualities are readily apparent to the naked eye; the simple layout out of finger holes and mouthpiece appear no different than that of any other xiao - yet your flutes are the best I have played in terms of tone and intonation, and are the result of many years of refinement. Can you tell us something about the process of crafting the invisible?
Geoffrey Ellis: I like that: “crafting the invisible”! That’s a great way to describe flute making as an art, since everything hinges on shaping a container to hold invisible air. I do love making something that is beautiful to the eye, and I’m delighted that players like the look of my flutes, but of course that beauty wouldn’t be worth much if the flute didn’t function properly as an instrument. So from the beginning of my career I've emphasized function over form. Or to be more accurate I focused on function until I had it dialed in, and then I set about making it beautiful to look at.
The refinement of any flute requires a bit of understanding of where the flute came from and what its intended uses were. The xiao came from China—ancient China, originally—and has been evolving for millennia to fit into a particular musical tradition. My journey with the xiao has been interesting and humbling, because when I first attempted to make them I took the completely wrong attitude and approach. I had acquired a very nice bamboo xiao from China, and I could see right away that it was a very versatile flute and I was entranced by it. But I knew nothing at all about Chinese music or the context in which these flutes were typically used or the intention behind them, so I evaluated them using a metric that was utterly biased to my Western conditioning and expectations, and by doing so I misunderstood them. I have since corrected these misunderstandings but it took a long time. But my point in mentioning this is because I have learned the hard way why it is important to understand where a flute comes from if one wants to craft a believable version of it.
Any traditional woodwind is recognizable because it has certain characteristics that shape its harmonic signature. When you are making any flute, you are controlling a few physical design elements, and learning how each one of these elements contribute to the character and tone is important. Experience brings an intuitive sense of how they work collectively. So the process of crafting the invisible is really all about tweaking these elements in a way that enhances the flute without erasing its character. Manipulating the physical design changes the harmonic signature, and that allows you to recognize a particular flute. You can play the same note on a trumpet that you play on a xiao, but no one is going to mistake it for a xiao because the harmonic signature is so different. Your ear knows it’s a trumpet. So the way a maker arranges the various design elements is what makes a xiao a xiao. If I change the basic elements too much, I can make a great flute but it might not be a xiao any longer, at least not in the traditional sense. It will be something else. This is a big topic on its own, really. How does one define a traditional woodwind, and how far can a maker push that definition without altering its identity?
As you say, visually my xiao aren’t any different from most other xiao in terms of visible design elements. Most of my own refinement of the design revolves around choosing a particular bore diameter for each key and then making subtle alterations to the blowing notch, and the shape and placement of the finger holes. The finger holes are really the only difference that you can observe, and they are not radically different from other xiao, so a player may or may not take note of them. But it is really just subtle alterations of these features that enhance the response or the tuning of the xiao. Especially the tuning—that is where a lot of attention and energy go when crafting a xiao, and I would say that my steepest learning curve centered on understanding and implementing a tuning approach that made the xiao work in its traditional context.
CR: What is the desired tone of the xiao? Is it something that you, as a maker, can find and settle upon in your designs, and if so have you found it? Is the tuning part of that? How much of that is up to the player?
GE:This is a question that I’ve been trying to come to grips with for years, actually.
I think tone is synonymous with timbre, and timbre is called things like “tone color” or “voice”, and it is dynamic and mobile because the player is altering it organically. Of course the player has a massive impact on the voice of a flute, but timbre as it applies to the physical characteristics of the xiao is another thing. The physical properties of the xiao don’t change—they are part of the design, and they create what I might call the “fixed” timbre— the harmonic signature of the xiao, which results from these physical properties of the xiao that are independent of the player. When player technique is combined with the timbre of the xiao itself, then you have the tone of the xiao.
So to stay on the question of what the desired tone of the xiao itself might be, yes, that is definitely something that I have a lot of control over and it can be engineered.
Timbre is strongly influenced by the bore of the flute, both its inner surface and its aspect ratio, which is the proportional relationship between the length of the bore and its diameter. A high aspect ratio means a longer, narrower bore, and a low ratio means short and fat. If you divide the sounding length of the flute by the diameter of the inner bore, you get the aspect ratio. A flute with a high aspect ratio tends to have a “brighter” timbre because it emphasizes different harmonics, and different harmonics means a different voice.
Most of the refinements that I’ve been applying to my xiao over the last several years hinge on experiments with aspect ratio. You can make an effective xiao in a wide range of bore diameters, so long as they don’t make the aspect ratio too low, which will cause intonation problems.
The tuning is really a separate issue that doesn’t affect the tone, except insofar as finger hole size (part of the tuning process) can increase the strength of the voice a bit.
But as for finding and settling on a tone…I haven’t achieved that yet! Tone/timbre is a combination of design elements, all of which work symbiotically, and small changes can have big effects. Some of my experiments with bore diameter involve making changes as small as .015”. This is very, very slight! And yet an experienced player can perceive the difference in timbre, assuming the other factors are more or less equal.
CR: You have made many different kinds of flutes over the years, and some types, such as the xiao, have become a mainstay of your workshop. Does knowledge gained from making one type of flute transfer to making other types? What attracts you to build certain flutes over others?
GE: Knowledge gained around crafting one type of flute applies directly to all other types of flutes. The basic concept of a flute—any flute—is very simple, really: it’s a hollow tube with holes in it and a mouthpiece that allows the player to agitate the air molecules that are contained within. As mentioned earlier when discussing tone/timbre, it’s the variation in the design components of this basic structure that creates recognizably different instruments. So lessons learned in crafting one version of a flute automatically become insights that apply to all other flutes.
As for what attracts me, certainly a big factor is the challenge presented by the design. Some flutes are tricky to get right. When I started making what are called Irish flutes (replicas of 19th century pre-Boehm wooden flutes), they represented a new challenge to me as a maker. They had features like a conical bore, a metal tuning slide, and tenon and socket joints. Making them required that I learn to manufacture steel reamers for the bore, learn how to make the joints, stabilize the wood, etc., and I also had to glean some understanding of what the players of these flutes expected from them (that was as important as the technical side). Making them is pretty standard flute-craft, but at a higher level than I had heretofore aspired to, and that attracted me strongly. I wanted to expand my horizons and learn new skills, so I really threw myself into it, and the skills I acquired in the process advanced all of my flute-making endeavors. The same thing happened when I started making wooden head joints for Boehm flutes—I had to raise the bar very high in order to meet the expectations of serious players. And again, a similar experience happened with the xiao. They presented a different set of design requirements that were equally challenging, and the process of refining the design has held my interest for the last fifteen years.
Some flutes are easier to craft than others, but they all have some appeal, even if it is more of an aesthetic attraction than an actual technical challenge.
CR: You have created new flutes as well - can you tell us about your latest design and what the creative process behind it is?
GE: One of the most exciting parts of my work is when I actually come up with something new. This is very rare in the world of woodwinds, because given the history of flutes around the world, it is nearly impossible to come up with an original idea, so most original creations in the flute world are really more like “re-creations” or modifications. Doing a riff on something is much easier than coming up with something totally new and original, so even when I do something I might call “new”, I have to acknowledge that what I’m really doing is just riffing. But riffing is fun for both me and my customers, at least those who love exploring new flutes. Trying new things is stimulating to me and keeps me engaged and inspired, and every so often something really cool emerges from the process.
The Quimera* is a great example of this. When I claim it to be something new, what I’m really saying is that I’ve looked around and I can’t find any commercial maker doing anything remotely like it. But the core concept is hardly new, and I’m willing to bet that somewhere in the history of the xiao, there has been a maker who has stumbled upon the same thing that I did, which is just a design variation on the traditional xiao. Some maker in China or Taiwan in years past probably grabbed a piece of bamboo that was a bit too large, and made a xiao with a deep blowing notch and came up with something that was very like my Quimera design. I’m super confident that they didn’t rename it and claim it as a new creation however—that bit of inspiration fell to me! I came up with this design when I deliberately fused an Andean quenacho and a xiao, which is to say that I first made one of my quenacho and then I gave it the same scale as the xiao. Doing this simple mash-up produced an instrument that is clearly neither a traditional xiao nor a quenacho. So then what is it?
A few years ago I wrote a blog called “What’s With All The Optimization?”, and it explored the very thing we spoke of earlier regarding flute design elements and identity. That question of what happens when we take a recognizable flute design and start to alter it? Where does it start to diverge from one identity and take on another?
This is a vast gray area, because not only are we talking about subjective perception on the part of the player/listener, but also the things that make a certain type of flute recognizable (like timbre) are in the ear of the listener to a great degree. And of course the player has so much control over this, the lines get very blurry.
The Quimera is a flute that has the same scale and musical range as a xiao. But it’s voice and response are different because it has features more akin to the quenacho, such as a wider bore and a much more generous blowing notch. Two simple design elements are altered, and the flute’s character change. How audible these changes are to a listener is going to depend a lot upon how the player uses is.
But so far player response to the Quimera has been unexpectedly enthusiastic. It has a certain something that is difficult to define, but so far everyone who has tried one—both professional and amateur—has responded with a big “WOW!”. And that is just the coolest thing. In fact, it was so inspiring that I’m actually working on several new “fusion” ideas that look very promising. We’ll see how it goes.
*Quimera is a registered trademark of Geoffrey Ellis
CR: Flute making is a specialized craft that relies on knowledge, often orally transmitted, which is not always easy to come by. How did you learn to do it? What advice would you give someone starting from scratch?
GE: These days starting from scratch is a lot easier than it was when I started making flutes in 1997. The internet was relatively new back then and the amount of online resources was very thin. YouTube didn’t exist, there weren’t any Facebook groups, and there were not many forums. And the limited forums that did exist were unknown to me. I did manage to find some books on flute craft, and they helped a little bit but I mostly taught myself via trial and error, and from examining examples of flutes that interested me. But I started my career making exclusively Native American style flutes, and by the time I was taking an interest in other types of flutes the online resources had expanded tremendously, which is good because that has taken the place of oral traditions or the tradition of apprenticeships, which really don’t exist any more. So over the years I’ve become acquainted with other flutes makers and musicians, and collaborations evolved. That really accelerated the learning process. Working in a vacuum had a lot of value early on, but collaboration is something I value even more.
The advice I’d give to someone starting out, apart from encouraging them to avail themselves of the many useful videos and such online, is to take the trouble and expense to invest in high-quality examples of the types of flutes they’d like to make. You learn the most from simply playing and examining great instruments. Most flute makers throughout history are copyists, building upon what has come before them. Being able to replicate a great flute teaches you a lot, and the investment in quality instruments to use as examples pays off significantly in the long run. I looked on it as being a type of tuition for school or the equivalent to buying tools for the workshop. Without something to compare your work to it is difficult to know how close you are to the mark unless you are already an accomplished player of the type of flute you are trying to make. That’s another useful tip: if you can play the flutes well, you’ll have an easier time honing in on your goal. You don’t have to be a virtuoso, but you do need to be able to effectively voice and tune them, and that requires some playing skill. And finally, many makers are willing to impart some guidance to interested amateurs, especially if they have the right attitude, so it is worthwhile to reach out to them.
CR: What attracted you to flute making in the first place? Why not build bagpipes, citterns, or hurdy-gurdys?
GE: When I moved to Northern California, I had come to pursue art—I wanted to be a painter. But after I got here, I realized that I needed a job to support me in my pursuit of art and I was wondering what to do. I didn’t have a car, or a college education, and I lived out in the middle of the woods. But I did have a little wooden flute that I had been gifted before moving here, and I used to sit out in the woods and play it during my free time. At some point I was looking it over and wondering how difficult it would be to make one. I wasn’t thinking of selling them—I just wanted some more to play. So I got some very basic books on the subject (these were Native American style flutes) and started messing around. My first flute turned out really well, and then I found myself wondering if I could sell them to make a little cash. I made some more of them and got some positive feedback, so I drove up to Portland to visit my wife (then my girlfriend). While up there, I went around to a few musical instrument stores and showed them around, and amazingly some of them bought some! After that, I was totally committed to trying to make it into a real job. Ironically, it blossomed to such an extent that I gave up wanting to paint and became a flute maker instead.
Anyway, it’s one of those odd, twist-in-the-road sort of things, because I didn’t ever intend for it to be a career at the outset, but once I started selling them I realized that I was much more likely to make a viable living do that as compared to painting. The term “starving artist” exists for a reason.
— Learn more about the work of Geoffrey Ellis at ellisflutes.com —
