The following interview with Armin Kelly first appeared in American Lutherie
magazine no.80/winter 2004, which is published by the Guild of American
Luthiers. Guitars International wishes to thank Cyndy Burton and the
Editors of American Lutherie for allowing us to reprint its
contents in a slightly abridged and amended form. (Reproduction of this
article in any form - in whole or in part - without the expressed
written consent of the Guild of American Luthiers is prohibited).
...
I see your ads for Guitars International everywhere. It looks
like you represent classical guitar makers in the same sense that an
agent represents musicians. Are you thinking of yourself as somebody who
is promoting classical guitar builders rather than selling guitars?
Yes. I mean obviously we have to
sell the guitars to stay in business, but it's a very personal business. We have been in business now for over twenty-four years. And still, this business reflects my taste in fine
classical guitars, albeit a broad-based taste. But you know, of the many
classical guitar builders we represent, I would say almost a majority
at one time were not known at all in the United States. They may or may
not have been well known in Europe. Many were younger classical guitar
makers whom I took on here in the U.S. who were not known at all, who
are now, I am proud to say, quite well known and respected. It's a very
important part of my work, bringing their names and the beauty of their
unique musical art before the public. Perhaps most
simply then one might best characterize me to be a seeker,
admirer, and promoter of unique, moving, musical sounds.
How have you done that?
First
of all, I had to find them. I travel a great deal, and I also have a
number of friends with very refined sensibilities who concertize both
here in the U.S. and in Europe. So all the time I'm asking questions and
looking at people's work. Often I see classical guitar builders whose
work is promising but not yet at the level that we deal with here. But I
will see them maybe two, three, four years in succession at various
festivals and notice how their instruments are improving. They may ask
me for a critique or pointers along the way, and with some of them,
there comes a point where they improve so much that it is a great honor
to invite them to join us.
Going back to this being a very
personal business, I still look at each one of these classical guitars
as a personal instrument for myself when it arrives. Each of my
classical guitar builders has heard this refrain more than they care to
recount: ``it might be July, but when your guitar comes in, it better
feel like Christmas." So there's a very strong personal element in each
guitar. I spend a lot of time talking to each classical guitar maker
about the next instrument that they're making for us. I carry back a lot
of information to the maker from customers on player response and/or
teacher response. The hope, of course, is always that the next
instrument will be an even more refined, more magnificent musical work
of art than the last.
What are you looking for when
you're talking to a classical guitar builder or a customer? That is, can
you verbalize what sort of instrument you're looking for from a maker
or suggesting to a customer?
That's one of the most difficult
aspects of the dealer/luthier and the dealer/customer relationships -
finding a meaningful workable vocabulary that is shared and understood.
And it's one of my greatest challenges and has been since I began this
business. I spend a great deal of time talking to customers on the phone
(which I prefer and find most productive) and by e-mail, trying to find
what that customer is looking for, suggesting what might work for that
particular customer. And once they describe their playing style, likes,
and dislikes to me, although I much prefer to see them play, I try to
define what might work particularly well for that person. When I say
that the guitars here reflect my taste, I need to add that my taste is
not so narrow so as to exclude a great many people. It might be more
accurate to say that what I am looking for in instruments are the finest
examples of particular types of guitars that inspire me. With this
said, I would be the first to admit that there are certain types of
guitars being produced these days that I just don't like. So these types
of guitars we don't offer. We could, and from a purely dollars and
cents perspective maybe should, but we don't. We are not in business
just to ``move product.'
The question that I get quite often
from customers, and which I find totally impossible to answer is,
``Well, let's cut to the chase. Which is your best guitar?" And God
bless my customers, they are usually very patient in my response,
because I cannot honestly respond to that question in the way that it
certainly implies. I have to explain to them that we do not represent
makers whose instruments we're not excited about. And we pride ourselves
in representing makers whose ability and talent are at the very top of
the group of makers with their experience in their particular price
range. And with that said, there is a whole range of different guitars
by different makers of very high quality that we represent. It's a
question then of discovering which guitars will work best for that
particular customer; and so there's no quick fix involved. If they come
to visit and audition guitars here, of course they can do a great deal
of elimination and find the instrument that's exactly right for them
with little help from me. If it's an elimination that has to take place
at arm's length with phone calls and e-mails and so forth, that can be
done too, and we've gotten to be very good at that.
The majority
of our customers do not come here and play guitars. So the way the
instruments are described verbally becomes extremely important. I must
define my terms that I'm using to describe guitars, but I also have to
stop customers and ask them to define their terms, the adjectives
they're using, to make sure that we're on the same page, and often times
we're not. One adjective may mean one thing to one person and another
thing to someone else. For example, even after all these years, I still
have found no consensus as to what the word ``boxy" means. So there's
actually a lot of talk to just define one's terms. The general response
of people we deal with is one of great gratitude, that they find that
the process has been a fun and rewarding learning experience for them.
It's certainly a learning one for us. We get to know our customers. I
enjoy that. As I've said, it's a very personal business. And it should
be, after all, they're buying a beautiful work of art that itself is
used to produce art. Can you imagine a row of disengaged, disingenuous
telemarketers sitting in an office somewhere staring into computer
screens involved in this endeavor? Sadly, I can, but sincerity of
purpose is going to be lost. What could be the point of such an
operation other than the fiscal bottom line? So yes, the manner and
terms used to describe these works of art, the sensitivity, experience
and love of the art which we bring to our discussions with our customers
are extremely important.
Do you deal mostly in new guitars or do you have used guitars as well?
We represent around thirty-plus
makers and those obviously are all new guitars that are coming in. Every
now and then we have a used guitar. Typically it's a guitar that we
previously sold to a customer and then the customer comes back after a
few years and wants a different quality, maybe changing from cedar to
spruce or spruce to cedar, or perhaps is looking for a more expensive
guitar. As long as the guitar has been well taken care of and still
sounds great, we can usually offer our customer a very good return in
trading up for another guitar. We take almost no guitars in from outside
sources, that is, non-customers who have a guitar to sell or a guitar
to consign. We do not see ourselves in the business of just selling
guitars to sell guitars. We have to be excited about each guitar as a
truly viable musical instrument, and often have turned down used guitars
offered to us on consignment made by well-known makers because we were
not inspired by that maker's musical aesthetic or because, though it may
have been a fine guitar at one time, it is now merely a tired old
guitar. We do some work with vintage guitars, not a great deal, but
again we're not interested in selling guitars just because they contain a
famous label from the past. With this said, some of our colleagues
provide an important service, offering excellent examples of vintage
instruments. But for me, as I once told a group of makers at a lutherie
convention, I find it more fun working with living makers than with dead
ones. Needless to say, there was no dissent from that particular
audience. (laughs)
What range of prices do you offer in the instruments you carry?
For the most part, from about
$2,000 to a over $50,000 with most falling between $2,000 and
$15,000. The exception on the low end is a student guitar, a truly
handcrafted student guitar for about $1650.00 which is very special in that
it's all solid wood and has an impressive dynamic range, excellent
balance and a lovely, musically flexible quality of sound, a wonderful
guitar at that price and a real alternative to the many factory
production guitars you usually find in this price range.
Since
you've been in the business about twenty-four years and experienced a lot of
instruments, where do you see classical guitar design headed and how do
you feel about it?
These days we often hear about the
dichotomy between quality of sound and quantity of sound, or
``loudness,' as it is often expressed, versus quality of sound. The
adjective ``loud' is imprecise, for what is usually being referred to
here is actually two different things: (1) acoustic feedback to the
player and (2) projection to the player's audience. Some guitars have
both attributes in spades, most guitars more of one than the other, and
in the worst case, some have next to none of either attribute. The quest
for greater projection is driven mostly by today's concert players and
aspiring concert players, many of whom will tell you they feel a need
for more powerful instruments, both to project their music in larger or
un-resonant concert halls and to be heard in ensemble and concerto
situations. And yet many of those extremely powerful so-called
better-projecting instruments have suffered in their sound quality. As a
boy, the first time I heard a classical guitar performed upon live, I
broke out in goose bumps. There was something so poignant, so
fundamentally beautiful about this instrument's plucked sound with its
perfect decrescendo. These days when I hear one of the extremely
powerful and aggressive guitars that lack a quality, flexible sound, I
can't imagine as a boy getting goose bumps over it. Hives, maybe, but
not goose bumps. (laughs) As one very respected concert artist once
commented to me regarding a particularly abrasive, aggressive guitar he
had just encountered, ``it was a relief when it stopped! The world is
full of many loud things, but that doesn't mean that they are all
beautiful or capable of subtle expression; a jack hammer is loud for
God's sake!"
I attend many solo classical guitar concerts around
the country each year held in many different venues - some acoustically
good, many indifferent, and a few outrageously bad - yet I can't
remember when, if ever, I could not hear the solo guitar. (Guitar with
other instruments, be it in chamber or orchestral settings, can of
course be a different matter). So in the case of artists performing solo
concerts, I really do think that there is a machismo, ``bigger is
better" factor which, though unspoken, is also driving this general
craving for more powerful guitars. Still, with this said there is one
other factor, a very real and undeniably important factor in certain
cases: a number of artists just don't want to work that hard to produce
their sound. To protect their hands from injury due to strain or overuse
and to facilitate the ease and artistic spontaneity with which they
execute fast passages, they want to couple a very low string height with
medium or low tension strings and produce a big sound with very little
effort. If to achieve these traditionally contradictory ends quality and
flexibility of sound must suffer, this is to a greater or lesser extent
a trade off some artists are willing to make. Whatever the reasons,
however, it is undeniable that there is a general desire for more
powerful, quicker-responding, easier to play instruments; and I hope
that with continued refinement of traditional designs plus innovations,
the sound quality will ultimately not suffer. In fact I think some
makers are already making very powerful instruments that have either
new, promising qualities of sound or qualities of musical sound that are
directly in line with the great masters of the past.
What sort of innovations are you referring to?
One promising example is what
we've been calling double-top instruments. Nomex, an extremely light and
strong honeycomb material made by DuPont, is sandwiched between very
thin layers of traditional top woods. A number of makers are now
experimenting with it. To date, although the pioneering work of a couple
of makers has yielded some very impressive instruments, there are other
makers following their lead who have had, at best, only mixed musical
results. But this is to be expected in any area of instrumental
innovation. In the long run, with a better understanding of its
potential strengths and weaknesses, I think this technology can present
some very exciting options for all makers. Many makers are trying out
different bracing designs as well: lattice, radial, and so on. Some are
altogether new and some are variations on more traditional patterns. And
sometimes going forward first necessitates not only looking back but
also reevaluating the current standing of certain received traditions.
This has certainly been the case with one of our gifted makers whose
lovely innovative contemporary guitar draws much inspiration not from
the dominant Hauser/Torres tradition which most are familiar with today
but from the generally less understood, less appreciated 19th century
Viennese guitar making tradition of Stauffer, Schertzer and others. By
the way, you would be amazed at how well some of these 19th century
makers' wonderful, musically refined, instruments project: Yes, clearly
as well as some of today's iconic, so called innovative, super powerful
concert guitars. Hmmm....
A friend of mine with golden ears who
is both a high-end audio dealer and classical guitarist tells me there
is a great deal that can be done with amplifying a quality guitar sound
which has not yet been fully realized. In this case, one might be able
to take the sweetest, most flexible, soft-spoken instrument and provide
enough discreet electronic support to fill the largest hall without
compromising the instrument's core sound.
I also think mixing
tone woods in a non-traditional manner has possibilities. I
know makers who laminate different back woods or mix different
back woods side by side. I recently purchased a gorgeous maple guitar
with a three-piece back with an African blackwood center panel. I
believe the blackwood lends a depth and warmth of color and added
projection to this instrument without destroying the beautiful clarity I
associate with an all maple guitar. It has a very interesting, very
refined sound. Mixing woods appeals to me not only for the possible new
and wonderful tonal flavors that may be imparted, but for the
conservation of extremely rare woods.
In any case, I believe
that whatever the approach (traditional design, innovative design, or
something somewhere between) and whatever the materials (traditional,
nontraditional, or various combinations of both) a great luthier will
more often than not create an artifact most discriminating listeners
will applaud as a sincere musical work of art, whereas a factory or even
a small production operation using similar materials and a similar
design will at best produce merely a shiny representation of a work of
art. There is still a very real difference between the two, you know,
thanks to the sincerity and sensitivity of individual artists dedicated
to cultivating their signature sounds. We mustn't forget, an individually handmade classical guitar
is in its highest form the rarest of the rare: a tangible work of art
which in itself is an inspiration and conduit to forming intangible art -
music. There lies the magic. As one great maker who eschews power tools
for hand scrapers and elbow grease says about his highly personal
approach, "The wood sings to me; I listen to its song and let the sound
guide my hands."
It's hard to hear the wood when the router's running!
I
know you're also involved with producing a guitar concert series in
cooperation with the Cleveland Institute of Music. How does that fit in
with your other activities?
As a profession, I see it as our obligation as guitar dealers to help
support the live performance of classical guitar music in our
communities. In Guitars International's case, it has been a great honor
to work with the Cleveland Institute of Music and its wonderful Guitar
Department in an effort to nurture local appreciation of the performers'
art. Participation in the live performance of music, be it as performer
or member of the audience, must be the greatest end towards which we
all strive as music and guitar lovers. After all, it is ultimately the
live performance at its finest, in my experience, that can produce the
most rewarding contact between instrument maker, performer, dedicated
amateur, collector, music lover, teacher, student, interested neighbor,
and professional musical colleague. For it is in those live, heightened moments
of musical magic - when time stops, egos dissolve, and we become truly a
community of one - that we are often made aware most of our shared
humanity.
I wish I'd said that!
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
As with all human gifts, lutherie talent is limited to no one country
or region. Today, around the world, a small, dedicated, group of
individual artists are creating at the highest level concert guitars of
various types capable of producing exceptional beauty, character and
flexibility of sound.
With this said, it is important to
understand that great materials and great or innovative designs do not
necessarily make great guitars. Great guitar makers make great guitars.
And even then, in the final analysis every classical guitar embodies a
set of compromises. There are no perfect guitars. Yet, clearly, a little
like a life well lived, some guitars do embody a more pleasing, more
complimentary set of compromises than others. In sum, one hears in the
finest individually handcrafted classical guitars an overall musical aesthetic which is without doubt more refined, more alluring than the simple sum of their parts.
Our
business philosophy is not a win/lose business model. Simply stated, we
believe that everyone up and down the line: maker, dealer, customer,
has to benefit in his or her way equally. There are no mere winners or
mere losers. Everyone has to be rewarded equally according to his or her
particular needs, or it's just not going to be a successful
relationship for us, the maker, or the customer.
Finally, I've been accused of being an armchair luthier (laughs), and
if that means I'm fascinated by the luthier's artistic vision and
construction process, I plead guilty. I have also been accused by one of
my dear friends of being a collector in dealer disguise, and I suspect
there is some truth in this as well. But unlike the collectors I know, I
have never quite figured out how to hold onto all the guitars that come
through here. In sum, I guess, I do what I do the way I do it because
it is fun and I believe that it is socially worthwhile; it makes me
happy if I can help bring a little musical joy into people's lives. I
greatly enjoy working with our luthiers, our customers, our player
friends, and everyone else associated with this business. As more than
one customer has told me over the years, ``you've created the greatest
job in the world for yourself." From where I stand, I can't disagree.(
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