Re: Shedding of veils

[Scott Odell <MAH0C01@sivm.si.edu>]

As one of the four founding members mentioned by Cary Karp in his
initial announcement of this new electronic version of the old,
short-lived, MICAT Newsletter, I should introduce myself and some
of my interests.

My earliest contacts with musical instrument technology came
during college in the 1950's, when I applied methods best
forgotten to the repair and maintenance of a couple of ailing
guitars I was attempting to play.  I began to gain some
understanding of just how far off the track I was during a few
weeks spent hanging around the tiny shop of a traditional maker
of Spanish guitars in Grenada, during the summer of 1958.  Seeing
simple tools, traditional methods, and years of experience
transform rough materials into exquisite flamenco and classical
guitars was an experience which prepared me for a decision in
1959 to forgo an editorial job with a Boston publishing house for
the chance to work with William Dowd.  The Hubbard and Dowd
partnership had recently ended, and Dowd was in the market for a
harpsichord maker's apprentice and helper.

In 1963, I left the Dowd shop and was hired by the Smithsonian's
new Museum of History and Technology (now renamed the National
Museum of American History).  A large part of my first work at
the Smithsonian was to plan and set up a restoration workshop for
musical instruments in support of what became a very active
performance program which continues to this day, albeit in much
altered form and emphasis.  Over the years the original focus
favoring use of restored museum instruments gradually shifted to
one in which today most of those used in performance are copies,
or if old, are owned by the musicians.  There are still
exceptions to this at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, and I
suppose that the pros and cons of such uses of old instruments
will become a continuing thread on this forum.

Over the past thirty years the changes in the museum's
performance program were matched by equally great changes in the
museum and conservation fields.   At the museum my role went from
that of an instrument maker hired to set up and run a small more-
or-less traditional museum restoration shop, to head of a larger
'technical laboratory', and from 1978 until last year, head of a
central museum conservation department with paper, textiles,
objects, and collections rehousing divisions, and contractors and
interns working on a variety of exhibition and other projects.

By the early 1970's, my experiences with the Smithsonian
collections and contacts with conservators working in other
specializations convinced me that there were few (if any)
practical or theoretical problems which were unique to  musical
instrument conservation.  I increasingly found it more useful to
look at musical instrument conservation as a particularly
interesting and enjoyable sub-discipline of objects conservation,
with some additional problems common to most functional artifacts.

The 1970 meeting of the ICOM International Committee for Musical
Instrument Collections and Museums (CIMCIM) meeting at the
Vleeshuis in Antwerp (where I first met Friedemann Hellwig), was
my first trip to see European collections.  These and subsequent
visits to most of the major European and American collections
formed the basis of long-term friendships and collaborations, of
which the present MICAT-L is the most recent.

I retired last October from my job as head of the conservation
department which had absorbed most of my professional energies
since the early 1980's.  Freed of administrative concerns, it is
nice to have time to pursue some long-deferred interests in the
musical instruments and conservation departments.   Privately, I
am enjoying more time on the water, fishing and sailing, and
visiting family and friends.  As for music-making, I still get
together once in a while with some friends in NE Vermont, playing
old-time banjo for local parties and dances.

As for interests relevant to this list, my experience has largely
been with instruments derived from European traditions,
especially historical harpsichords and pianos, fretted string
instruments, and traditional American "folk" instruments.  I am
particularly interested in the practical side of instrument
making as revealed by historical examples, and also in broader
questions of how instruments in public and private collections
are best preserved, studied and appropriately used.

My hope and expectation is that this new list will generate a lot
of good discussion on all of these topics.