As a saxophonist in high school, Josiah Sytsma ran into a common problem: His instrument wasn’t working the way it should. His band teacher directed him to a local Tennessee legend in woodwind repair: “Wil” Grizzle, a kind-hearted, story-filled army veteran who had been studying and working on instrument restoration for decades.
Sytsma remembers entering Grizzle’s shop as a “bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kid who just wanted to learn stuff.” He asked Grizzle if he could stick around the shop and “bother him.” Grizzle allowed it. So began Sytsma’s apprenticeship as a woodwind technician.
Summers studying with Grizzle would serve Sytsma well. As he moved around the country in pursuit of his bachelor’s degree in music education and master’s in composition, he ran a woodwind repair business out of his apartments—including during his time at Peabody pursuing a DMA in music composition.
Sytsma now lives in Georgia while he works on his dissertation, but at Peabody he was part of a vital ecosystem of instrument repair, maintenance, and customization. Just like the people who play them, instruments need regular checkups to ensure everything’s running smoothly. That work spans straightforward, annual maintenance to more in-depth diagnostics. And as Sytsma intuited during his first visit to Grizzle’s shop, it’s a realm of craftsmanship that’s as infinite as playing music. Behind every virtuosic performance is a weathered luthier fretting over the resonance of a violin body, a technician obsessed with creating a bespoke mouthpiece, or a skilled colleague who stepped up for a last-minute repair.
As the latter, Sytsma picked up work mostly via word-of-mouth, or by acting as a sounding board to his students’ parents. Taking an instrument in for repairs can feel like “going to an auto shop,” he says. “It’s easy for people to take advantage.” He noticed that instruments would sometimes come back from a shop and “nothing had been done” on the list of services. He started providing diagnostics and quotes to parents, encouraging them to shop the quote around.
Time permitting, Sytsma took on repairs and overhauls himself, focusing on saxophones as well as flutes, clarinets, and “the odd oboe.” He made a point to prioritize transparency. “There’s a lot of stuff I can’t do because I just don’t have the equipment,” he says. But he knew how long work should take: In a fully equipped shop, for instance, roughly four overhauls in a week is standard. That’s knowledge that comes in handy when students are sometimes told repairs might take months.
Speedy overhauls are top of mind for Micca Page as each academic year approaches. A violinist herself, Page manages Peabody’s orchestral instrument collection and the hundreds of rentals made to its students each year. Getting all those instruments ready to be bowed, strummed, plucked, struck, and blown into for hours on end each day can be “kind of nuts,” she says.
“This summer, I took 76 instruments to Baltimore Brass Company, and 13 or 14 violins to Perrin and Associates [Fine Violins]”—two of the more respected instrument repair shops in the region. That’s a lot of instruments—but a tiny fraction of the entire collection.
Page estimates Peabody’s rental collection includes roughly 1,300 orchestral instruments; during the school year, somewhere between 800 and 900 are out on loan. Most of the rentals are made to music education majors who want to gain facility on instruments they’ll be teaching to others. They also go to young students at the Preparatory, as well as to majors who simply can’t afford to own all the variations on their instrument—at least not at this point in their careers. Peabody provides, for example, clarinetists with E-flat and bass clarinets; oboists with English horns; and violinists and violists can check out the instrument they don’t own for their own practice or for gigs.
While the bulk of the school’s collection comprises the usual suspects in strings, winds, and brass, there are a few surprises. Those include a few high-end violins dating from the 1700s and a variety of Baroque instruments—some of which require gut strings made from the intestines of animals rather than nylon and steel strings used for modern performance.
There’s also an electric bass and pitched water glasses. “The composers like those,” Page comments. “And we recently got a shruti box,” she adds, “which is kind of like a hurdy-gurdy.” (Both are drone instruments: The shruti box originates from India and operates by pushing air through a system of bellows.)
Page estimates Peabody’s rental collection includes roughly 1,300 orchestral instruments; during the school year, somewhere between 800 and 900 are out on loan. Most of the rentals are made to music education majors who want to gain facility on instruments they’ll be teaching to others. They also go to young students at the Preparatory, as well as to majors who simply can’t afford to own all the variations on their instrument—at least not at this point in their careers. Peabody provides, for example, clarinetists with E-flat and bass clarinets; oboists with English horns; and violinists and violists can check out the instrument they don’t own for their own practice or for gigs.
While the bulk of the school’s collection comprises the usual suspects in strings, winds, and brass, there are a few surprises. Those include a few high-end violins dating from the 1700s and a variety of Baroque instruments—some of which require gut strings made from the intestines of animals rather than nylon and steel strings used for modern performance.
There’s also an electric bass and pitched water glasses. “The composers like those,” Page comments. “And we recently got a shruti box,” she adds, “which is kind of like a hurdy-gurdy.” (Both are drone instruments: The shruti box originates from India and operates by pushing air through a system of bellows.)
It’s impossible for one person to track maintenance needs for that kind of inventory. Page mainly relies on students and teachers to tell her if an instrument needs some extra TLC.
“I’m OK with all the strings, but winds and brass were a huge learning experience,” she says. “I still have to keep notes about who needs a strap, which reeds go to which instrument.” When she started the job, the sheer number of instruments certainly felt imposing. “I’d go into a storage unit and be like, ‘I didn’t know we had all these.’ It’s wall-to-wall violins.” So there’s been “lots of inventory processing,” she says. “I’ve been trying to [arrange] piecemeal repairs on as many of those as I can.”
While the task can feel never-ending, Page savors the perks of the job, such as meeting repair technicians, “usually people who’ve been in the field for a long time,” she says. “It’s them in a warehouse with tons and tons of instruments. They all have a lot of stories and specialized knowledge.” Some other highlights include finding items in cases that belonged to the people who donated instruments—such as handkerchiefs and old notes—and the smell of the old Italian violins. “That might be a weird thing to say,” Page reflects. “But the old wood is really nice—the cases all have their own unique smells.”
Occasionally, a repair will take her by surprise. There was the time a Preparatory student stepped through a violin. Luckily, it was the least expensive kind the school owns—“what we call ‘violin-shaped objects,’” Page says.
Otherwise, she’s gotten better at anticipating repair needs across instrument families. Winds and brass need to stay oiled; climate is critical, especially during the dry winter months, when wooden instruments are most likely to split a seam.
Then, there are the dreaded bow bugs: “little mites that eat the horsehair on bows that are not regularly used,” Page describes. The larvae “come off the bow like a powdery substance. . . . The entire time I was a practicing violinist, I had no idea bow bugs were a thing.”
Even instruments that operate the way they’re supposed to pose concerns. Meredith Qiang Fuller, a doctoral candidate in tuba performance, has worked with technicians to modify the valves on her tuba in the hopes of addressing a playing injury.
“Instrumentalists are doing small, repetitive motions over and over again,” she says. “That fine motor work can lead to playing injuries,” which come from “the amount of time, the intensity, as well as the discrepancy between the musician size and the instrument size.”
The tuba, for example, is pretty big. “Tubas have really big piston valves,” Fuller says. “They have to go an inch or two downward. It takes pounds of pressure.” After her injury, which resulted in shakiness and weakness in her hand, that kind of forceful, repetitive motion was simply “not sustainable.” At her worst, Fuller could only crank out two or three 10-minute sessions a day.
She sought help from the physical therapists at Peabody’s on-campus clinic to treat performer injuries—the Johns Hopkins Rehabilitation Network Clinic for Performing Artists—and she also decided to address the problem head-on by modifying her tuba. With the help of a logistical grant from Peabody LAUNCHPad, Fuller hired technicians at Baltimore Brass Company to replace her piston valves with rotor valves, which decreased the weight and distance needed to depress the valve. They also added attachments to other valves and a secondary thumb paddle—all of which would allow Fuller’s hand to be in as “close to a natural hand position as possible.”
At the time of our conversation, Fuller is 18 months into her recovery and things are looking brighter. Between the modifications made to her tuba, occupational therapy, and additional training with a musician injury coach, she’s up to playing two or three 45-minute sessions a day.
“I find I still have limitations,” she says, but points out that the non-ergonomic positioning is just how tubas have traditionally been made. “I feel like the people who suffer from it are the smaller individuals. Sometimes that’s women, which is unfortunate, being minorities in the brass world. I always advocate for people to modify the instrument. Get a pillow or a block to put the tuba up. It’s so large that you end up molding to the instrument instead of having it come to you.”
At the time of our conversation, Fuller is 18 months into her recovery and things are looking brighter. Between the modifications made to her tuba, occupational therapy, and additional training with a musician injury coach, she’s up to playing two or three 45-minute sessions a day.
“I find I still have limitations,” she says, but points out that the non-ergonomic positioning is just how tubas have traditionally been made. “I feel like the people who suffer from it are the smaller individuals. Sometimes that’s women, which is unfortunate, being minorities in the brass world. I always advocate for people to modify the instrument. Get a pillow or a block to put the tuba up. It’s so large that you end up molding to the instrument instead of having it come to you.”
That’s an invaluable perspective in a field where practitioners regularly work themselves to the point of exhaustion and injury: Sometimes the key to nailing a tricky passage lies within the instrument. And, as in Fuller’s case, it’s just worth it: All of her work, she says, has “definitely added to my longevity as a player.”