‘Makers and players’ descend on Lowell Folk Festival, share craft of luthiery, instrument restoration
LOWELL — Mariia Gorkun was training to become a professional violinist in the United States when she stumbled upon a closet full of old, donated instruments at her university.
They were in “terrible shape,” having been stored in a dry closet. Some were missing parts entirely and some, Gorkun said, just looked “miserable.”
It was then that Gorkun had an epiphany.
“All of a sudden, I just remembered how I was fascinated by the violin maker who was fixing my instrument back in Ukraine, and I spent a ton of time at his shop,” she said. “I was just like, ‘Wow, I bet I could do this.’”
While she went on to obtain two master’s degrees in her home country of Ukraine and in Boston and perform with the highly regarded National Opera of Ukraine in Kiev, Gorkun continued to fiddle with restoration tools without any training. She was living in two worlds: making and playing.
This year’s Lowell Folk Festival highlights both the musical players and the instrument makers at the Folk Craft Area, where Gorkun and 12 other musical artisans and crafters demonstrated their work to concertgoers at Lucy Larcom Park on Saturday.
After Gorkun decided to leave her orchestra, she joined violin bowmaker David Hawthorne in his Waltham shop, and as of just a couple months ago, she runs a full-time restoration business out of her Andover home. There, she makes, restores and re-hairs bows following a delicate, complex procedure and takes humidity, history and several other factors into account.
Even selecting certain materials is complicated, Gorkun said, but it’s still incredibly rewarding.
“I have this reputation of being a dentist,” Gorkun said, laughing. “You don’t want to remove healthy tissue. … It’s one of those particular processes that you have to be very, very vigilant.”
This will be Gorkun’s first appearance at the Lowell Folk Festival, where she plans to show attendees her bows and materials and teach them the intricacies of creating the musical instrument.
“I just know so much about music that I guess it was something that I could be a student once again,” Gorkun said. “It’s fun to reveal something that wasn’t there.”
Chris Pantazelos of Spartan Instruments in Lowell similarly stumbled into restoration in 1985 after studying the classical guitar and even building his own in his late teens.
His introduction to music began with his father and uncle, who both played the Greek bouzouki, which resembles a Renaissance lute. Pantazelos recalls being captivated by the instrument and sneaking around just to pluck its strings when his father wasn’t there.
Since then, Pantazelos said he has restored “hundreds” of instruments under the tutelage of Peter Kyvelos at Belmont’s Unique Strings and then at his own shop, which he opened in 2015.
Pantazelos’ Greek heritage informs some of his restoration work, as he still repairs bouzoukis, but also works on other ethnic instruments, including the oud, of Turkish and Arabic origin, and the mandolin of Italy.
The oldest instrument he’s ever worked on was a mandolin he thinks was created in the 1700s, repairing it to “museum standards” and even making sure it was still playable. Pulling off the ebony and ivory from an old piano, Pantazelos said it was a challenge in finding the right materials.
“It had staves made out of ivory, and there were parts that were broken and missing and of course, ivory is not legal anymore,” he said. “It was fascinating to work with bone and ivory, and bone and ivory are pretty much identical in a lot of ways. Working with bone is an interesting challenge in terms of trying to bend it and work with it.”
Pantazelos’ luthiery craft is “as scientific as possible.” He has worked on several restoration projects for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Musical Instrument Museum in Arizona, sometimes leaving in old pieces of the instrument for conservation’s sake.
Pantazelos joined Datev Grekorian, an Iranian oud player, at the Makers and Players workshop Saturday afternoon with Will Woodson, a player and maker of uilleann pipes, and other musicians.
Maggie Holtzberg, folk arts and heritage manager at Massachusetts Cultural Council, moderated the workshop and has curated the folk craft area’s programming since 2007, choosing themes that resonate and expose audiences to new artistic concepts.
Ahead of this year’s festival, Holtzberg said she was searching for a theme that would interest audiences after two years of pandemic delays and cancellations, settling on the interesting art of restoration and creation.
Alongside the artisans, four different musicians performed each hour on a variety of instruments, including the hardanger fiddle, Norwegian fiddle, oud, bouzouki, Puerto Rican tiple and cuatro — two stringed instruments resembling guitars — and Irish uilleann pipes.
“Sometimes people talk about Western music and world music, but in fact, everything is world music, everybody has a culture and tradition,” Holtzberg said. “That’s the perspective we’re taking in this area, including the very earliest indigenous musical instruments.”
Andre Strongbearheart Gaines, from Grafton, beat on his handcrafted hand and water drums and displayed his paddles, jewelry and a feather box made of old wood from a cedar swamp.
Gaines is part of the Nipmuc Nation, an indigenous tribe for which he creates instruments and crafts regalia using the same methods, carried down for tens of thousands of years.
“I’m a traditionalist, a cultural steward for my people, and so it’s important for me to teach traditionally old ways of things,” Gaines said at the festival. “We’ve been invisible for a long time.”
Boston-based Carl Smith and Justin Petty were also featured beside the Merrimack Canal, drawing a crowd with their steel pan performances of modern songs, including the 2017 hit “Despacito.”
This was Pantazelos’ fourth or fifth time presenting his craft at the festival, but he has attended as an audience member since the early ’90s. He feels fortunate to have such a wide array of folk acts and artists in his own backyard.
“Show me something that is more important than arts and culture in human life and activity. … Art and culture are probably the most important spiritual activities that we have as a species,” Pantazelos said. “We’re lucky that here in Lowell, we have it right in our city.”
Originally published at https://www.lowellsun.com on July 31, 2022.
