I continued with my flute studies, first with Harold Bennett at the Manhattan School of Music, then with Arthur Lora at the Juilliard School.
I suppose I thought that if I came up with something brilliant, one of the major flute companies would rush to grab the idea, run with it, and I’d get all the credit. I wasn’t sure what would come out of this note-taking, but I felt compelled to do it. (I was a skeptical little boy!) By the time I was in High School, I was keeping a notebook about the flute and writing down ideas as they occurred to me, regarding possible ways to improve flute design. I wasn’t always convinced that the answers I heard were right. I asked questions of my teachers and instrument repair people, and soon started to think more about how a flute could be made to work better. If something wasn’t working properly on my flute, I would take it apart, clean and oil the troubled area, and on I went. Later, I put this ability to more practical use. It was only much later that I realized that this was not something all kids would think to do it seemed normal to me. There were a few moments of frustration and confusion (not to mention outright terror!) but I figured it out and the flute was none the worse for it. This wasn’t the first mechanical thing I’d ever taken apart, but the difference between this and the broken watches and toasters I would happily take out of the trash and disassemble was that I knew I had to put it back together again. For more information on the BFS, check out their website at Shortly after I got my first flute at age 12, I took it apart. First published June, 2007 in Pan, the journal of the British Flute Society, reprinted with the gracious permission of Pan Magazine.
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