West Van craftsman creates classics
West Van artisan has been making musical instruments since he was 13
Alexander Weimann’s fingers flew over the keys at a recent Vancouver Bach Festival performance, the sound not quite big enough for Christ Church Cathedral’s roomy nave, but the playing exquisite.
The names Turner and Tomlinson, the harpsichord’s builders, were printed above the keyboard, but what most in the audience were probably unaware of were the dozens of architects’ signatures inscribed on the inside, names such as Bing Thom and Arthur Erickson.
“It’s a who’s who of Canadian architecture,” Craig Tomlinson said of the names inside the harpsichord he built with Edward R. Turner at Turner’s North Pender Island workshop.
The harpsichord is now owned by Early Music Vancouver through donation, but was commissioned by the architects to honour longtime UBC dean of architecture Henry Elder when he retired in 1974. It probably cost around $15,000 at the time, roughly the same in today’s dollars as Tomlinson’s harpsichords cost. The handmade instruments he makes in his backyard workshop sell for $60,000 and up.
Tomlinson’s brother Grant is an acclaimed lute maker with a workshop in Marpole. The boys’ parents were artists who studied under the Group of Seven painters.
In fact, Tomlinson said his mom modelled for A.Y. Jackson, posing for what to some at least were indecent sketches.
“Jackson couldn’t pay her in money so he paid her with sketches,” Tomlinson said. “My grandmother didn’t like them and ripped them up.”
But for a 10-year break to sell West Vancouver real estate from 1992 to 2002, the 65-year-old Tomlinson has been making instruments since he was 13.
He’d always been into woodworking, building model flying planes as a kid. He started out as an instrument maker building a dulcimer from scratch, going on a small photo he had of the instrument. That took a year.
By the time he was making five a week, he looked for a bigger challenge and the harpsichord was a perfect fit.
After stints with Turner and then Berkeley-based John Phillips in California, Tomlinson struck out on his own.
“I really, really liked (Turner’s) sound, and I really liked the way John Phillips manufactured instruments, absolutely pristine instruments,” he said. “I thought, I can put them both together. That was my idea of what the perfect harpsichord would be like.”
When you enter Tomlinson’s home you’re greeted by period instruments he’s crafted: A piano circa 1790 that Mozart and Beethoven would have played; a beautifully decorated virginal; a clavichord J.S. Bach would have been comfortable composing on; and a harpsichord that gets rented out to shows at the Orpheum and Chan Centre about 30 times a year.
“It’s a history of keyboards all in one room,” his wife Carol, a retired dentist, said.
Tomlinson’s customers are orchestras, universities and individuals across Canada, the United States, Japan and Europe.
If you have a Roland keyboard at home, the synthesized harpsichord sound was arrived at after engineers came from Japan to analyze Tomlinson’s harpsichords in the 1980s.
He heads to a little valley in Bavaria every decade or so to acquire the European spruce wood for his soundboards. He tried spruce from the Rockies, but it just didn’t give the same sound.
The strings are made of soft brass, the bodies of poplar from New England, the keys are ebony over boxwood and the raised sharps/flats that he once made out of cow bone are now made of casein, a protein that’s abundant in cow’s milk.
“It got harder and harder to get good cow bone cut properly,” Tomlinson said.
He was doing quite well as a real estate agent in West Vancouver — it was difficult not to between 1992 and 2002 — when he closed the sale of a waterfront property. The grateful seller, a well-known TV anchorman in Japan, had a collection of CDs, all of them harpsichord music.
“I told him I used to build harpsichords and he said, ‘Oh, you must build me one.’ So he commissioned me to build him a harpsichord and he told his gazillion friends in Japan about it, and a lot of them wound up buying my harpsichords, too.
“There were about 500 real estate agents in West Vancouver and there was only one other harpsichord maker in Canada. It was kind of a no-brainer to go back to making harpsichords.”
He’s currently making two French harpsichords. It takes him about 1,000 to 1,200 hours to make one, and 1,500 to 1,700 hours to make a fortepiano.
Tomlinson wonders where the next generation of instrument makers will come from. Most of the masters in the Vancouver area are of his vintage, he said.
“There’s no one really stepping up,” Tomlinson said.
When he does retire, he said not much will change: “I’ll still probably be out here producing instruments. I just won’t have to.”
There were ... 500 real estate agents in West Vancouver and there was only one other harpsichord maker in Canada.