The flute maker’s intricate craft
Craftsman Stephen Wessel combines his engineering and orchestral skills to produce an instrument made with precision and love
Birds are singing in a wintry Somerset garden in February, but inside Stephen Wessel’s workshop, all is quiet, and a warm smell of engine oil pervades the peaceful space. Stephen sits bent over a flute. He is checking the pads on an instrument he made several years ago, which has been sent back for a routine service.
His workbench is surrounded by racks of odd-shaped pliers and other hand tools; jars of metal rods and miniature chests of drawers containing assorted screws and nails. On either side are hooks for rulers and handsaws, and above, hanging coils of wire in front of a series of larger machines.
Stephen has been making flutes for over 35 years, and in that time, he has made 149 instruments. Flute making was not a career path he originally intended to follow, as he started his professional life in the steel industry and read mechanical engineering at Imperial College London. However, coupled with his love of engineering was a passion for music: he was the principal clarinet in the London University Orchestra. He was also fascinated by the harpsichord, and by the time he left university, Stephen had decided that he would like to make harpsichords: something he did for the next 10 years.
This all changed when Stephen’s first wife, Ann, a professional flautist and teacher, introduced him to John Webb, a maker of flute head joints. The head is the short, tapered tube at the top of the flute into which is cut the embouchure hole through which the player blows. It is often made by specialist makers and can be sold separately to the flute. The two men became friends, and a throwaway suggestion from Ann that together they make her a new flute, led to their teaming up. The plan was that Stephen would make the keywork: the complicated structure of keys and the mechanisms used to open and close them applied to the body of the flute, and John the tube, or body, of the flute itself as well as the head joint.
Stephen relished the technical challenges of making a flute for Ann, although he had no professional training. “There were no courses, but we were determined to break out of the mould of what we saw as conventional flute making anyway,” he says. “We decided that if we were going to make a new flute for Ann, we should try a few new ideas out and not just copy a factory-made flute.” The pair knew that professional players often used re-tuned, 19th century French flutes, which were quite light compared to their modern counterparts and so their first priority was to create a similar lightness. “We had an urge to go in the opposite direction from the increasingly heavy and complicated Germanic style towards a simple, lightweight design which, when played, would offer maximum colour and responsiveness with adequate power for the largest orchestra.”
Most flutes are made from a silver tube to which silver keywork is attached. The vast majority of factory-made flutes are made of ‘nickel silver’, which is an alloy of copper and nickel containing no silver, and then silver plated. The more expensive ones are made of solid silver, like Stephen’s, gold or occasionally platinum; usually including the keys.
In their quest for lightness, Stephen and John decided to break with tradition and use stainless steel for the keywork. “It’s lighter and stiffer than silver, and I had experience in working it,” explains Stephen. “As far as I know, we are the only people in the world who have ever used stainless steel for the keywork.” Worried that buyers might be put off by the difference in colour between the stainless steel and the silver body, Stephen decided to substitute the tops of the keys with discs of polished black plastic, which has now become his visual hallmark. The contrast between the black plastic and the metal was striking, but also had the added advantage of helping to reduce the overall weight of the flute. In addition, the plastic was less slippery than metal; something which players appreciated, especially in a hot concert hall.
Stephen was delighted with the finished flute, but assumed it was a one-off project until he suddenly received an order for another. As interest grew, his flutes started being ordered by professional players, and before he knew it,
“The soft complaining flute, In dying notes, discovers The woes of hopeless lovers”
John dryden, ‘A Song for St Cecilia’s Day’
Stephen had become a full-time flute maker. It was perfect timing for Stephen, as the engineer inside him had become frustrated by harpsichord making because it required creating exact historical copies of instruments with no room for modern improvements. “Meeting John, and having Ann playing the flute, meant that flute making literally fell into my lap because it was both engineering and music, which are my two biggest passions in life, and not about making historical copies,” he says.
The tube
Flutes are made in three parts: the middle and the foot joints carry the tone holes and all the keys, while the head joint carries the mouthpiece.
Making a flute by hand is an extremely complicated process. In the early days, John Webb made the basic tube for the flute body out of a sheet of seamed silver, drawing it by hand in his workshop, but now Stephen works on his own, and he buys seamless tubing from a firm in Birmingham. Each tube is made as a one-off, following Stephen’s tight specifications: they have to be precisely 0.35mm thick, and the bore size has to be exactly 19mm to ensure that all three octaves are balanced and can be played evenly and clearly.
Once Stephen is happy with the dimensions and smoothness of the silver tube, he marks out the position of the tone holes. It is vital to get this positioning right, as it
“I love thee as I love the tone Of some soft-breathing flute Whose soul is wak’d for me alone, When all beside is mute”
Eliza Acton, ‘I Love Thee’
determines the relative pitch of every note. He uses measurements given to him by William Bennett, a professional flautist and music professor. “You are trying to get the flute to play with equal temperament, but you have to make compromises to get all three octaves in tune: an improvement to the lower register might throw out the upper,” says Stephen. “The idea is to make playing in tune as easy as possible. Bennett has spent a lifetime trying to get the scale better, and I use his most recent version.”
The next stage is to make the saddles. These are the small, ring-shaped stub tubes that sit above the flute body at right angles, and they will eventually form the tone holes onto which the keys will be placed. They are made from small pieces of silver tube cut to the correct size. They are clamped in place around the future tone hole, then silver-soldered onto the body tube. Silver soldering requires bringing the metal up to red heat, then applying flux and a touch of solder, which has a slightly lower melting point, to join the two metals. The process creates a very strong join and means that the saddles become a homogenous part of the tube body. The heat of the soldering process also anneals the silver. This is important, as silver is a fairly soft metal which, as it is worked, hardens and stiffens. It then has to be brought up to red heat to anneal it, a process which re-aligns the crystalline structure of the silver and makes it soft again.
Unlike Stephen’s flutes, with their silver-soldered saddles, most factory-produced flutes have ‘drawn’ tone holes or saddles. This means that the silver is drawn up from the inside of the body tube to create the saddle, but, in the process, the material around each saddle is thinned and stressed. Stephen believes that the stresses this factory process causes are locked into the flute, as although the silver has been worked on, it has not been annealed. “The commercial flute body is full of unrelieved stresses put there for purely constructional, not musical, reasons, so it’s hard and springy,” he says. “Mine have had all this silver soldering done to them, which anneals everything in sight, so they go out in the world in a fully soft, annealed state. With time and all the vibrations produced by playing, they gradually harden up, but they harden in the way they want to: they adjust to the user and the music. I think that’s a better place to start, and I think that’s one of the reasons my flutes have a reputation
for being very uniform in the sound they produce from bottom to top; very even and very consistent.”
Once the saddles have been fixed to the flute body, Stephen has to cut out the metal inside each one to create the tone hole. “This is the most hazardous part of the whole operation,” he says. The silver is cut using a tiny burr, with little cutting teeth running at top speed in a hand-held drive unit. Any slips of the hand may result in a gash in the saddle, and the whole process has to begin again. Once the silver disc has dropped out, the inside of what is now the tone hole is smoothed with little sanding drums.
With the tone holes in place, the next stage is to make the stiffening rings which go on the end of the main tube and also form part of the sockets that connect the different sections of the instrument. These are made from rectangular silver strips formed into rings, then fitted onto the tube.
Keywork
The tube is now finished and is ready for the keywork. This starts off as hundreds of tiny pieces of flat stainless steel. When Stephen first started making flutes, he sawed out each individual shape from a sheet of steel, using a hacksaw. This was highly laborious, as although stainless steel is lighter than silver, it is much harder to work, and, consequently, Stephen now outsources them to a firm in Merseyside for cutting by waterjet. He sends the firm drawings of the shapes he requires, and they cut them from sheets of stainless steel of various thicknesses. When they are returned, he shapes them into the three-dimensional parts he needs; silver-soldering the separate components together where necessary. He gradually combines the individual parts to create an intricate mechanism of tiny posts and rods which will support the circular keys that cover the tone holes. Some of the keys are closed by the player’s fingers; others by a lever or clutch; all of which are individually made and fitted by Stephen. The tops of the keys are then inlaid with Stephen’s trademark discs of black plastic.
Once the keywork is in place, Stephen needs to do the padding. The pads are the soft cushions held in place underneath the key cup using a central screw, which help seal each tone hole as the flute is played. When the key is pressed by the player’s finger, it rotates about a hinge and so closes the tone hole. The pads are made out of circular discs of wool attached to a cardboard washer and covered with a very thin layer of skin: Stephen buys them from a specialist firm in Italy. It is very important to get the padding right, because if they do not seal the tone hole completely, it will ‘leak’, and the note will not sound correctly. Although Stephen has experimented with synthetic pads, he now uses the traditional wool pads, as they do not stick, feel more comfortable for the player and make a better sound. “Padding the flute is a vital and difficult task, and I will spend a day doing it, then another day going over the pads and adjusting them to make sure they are airtight,” he says.
The next job is to regulate how much each key opens. This is done using a system of wire springs and felt or cork bumpers under the key tails. The aim is to have each key opening equally, so the playing is comfortable and the intonation, or accuracy of pitch, is correct. “The whole mechanism must work quietly, smoothly and with total reliability,” says Stephen. The flute is then ready for the final polishing, as Stephen does not make the head joint. “I
never got into head joint making as I don’t play a flute well enough to know whether or not I have got it right. This is a task best left to specialists.”
Finishing touches
Once the flute is finished, Stephen still has to make the case for the instrument. Each one is made of walnut, and Stephen uses his knowledge of woodworking from his harpsichord making days for this part of the process. Inside, the cases are lined with velvet, with each individual support block being made separately and covered with material to give the necessary cushioning to the flute. Stephen’s wife, Jinny, makes the leather bags which protect the cases.
The whole process will have taken Stephen approximately six weeks of intense and often repetitive work, but, for him, the moment of collection makes it all worthwhile. “I wouldn’t swap it for anything because, when the moment comes, and the customer picks up their new flute for the first time and plays it, I think: ‘My goodness: where did that come from?’ and I look around the workshop, and I can’t see anything except mess and a few old tools, but I know I made it, and I feel privileged to have been able to do so.
“To me, the flute is fundamentally an orchestral instrument. I like the sound of it no more or less than any other of the woodwinds, such as the clarinet or oboe. However, after all these years of making, I certainly react to good playing and, if this takes place in my workshop on one of my instruments, I become absolutely thrilled. One can tell when the player and the flute match up together. And that is the true reward for all those hours at the bench.”
Stephen’s customers are mainly professional players or good amateur musicians, and they appreciate the way his flutes allow them to express themselves in a way that is not so easy with heavier, factory-made flutes. “So many of my customers have said that my flutes are very responsive and full of tone colour,” he says. He has no illusions about whether or not players appreciate his beautiful craftsmanship. “What they want is just a good tool that works for them. When they open the box, what they immediately do, without making any comment at all, is to plug their existing head joint into it and play. It’s then that you see their faces light up, and you know you have a happy customer.”