Lisa Saffer is a 47-year-old diva. She received her master’s degree from Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music in 1984, and today makes her home in Portland, Maine. In the great opera houses and concert halls of the world, she sings in many languages, her small frame launching glorious sounds that reach to the farthest […]
Magazine
In an 1840s mill in Maine, Dana Bourgeois and eight fellow craftsmen work in a shop cutting, sanding, and gluing spruce and rosewood. It’s loving work from which eight acoustic guitars are made each week. Their handcrafted instruments are treasured by serious guitarists around the world, including professional musicians Ricky Skaggs, Steve Earle, Marshall Crenshaw, […]
Magazine
Hats Off
The jazz drummer rides it, the marching band member crashes it, and the concert percussionist rolls it. What is it? A cymbal. In 1623, Avedis Zildjian created a secret alloy for making cymbals. When his family immigrated to America, they set up shop in the Boston area. Today, the oldest continuous family-run company in the […]
Magazine
Toot Your Own Horn
When Skip Healy was a child, he often visited the grounds of Rhode Island’s Varnum House Museum (with its extensive military and naval history collection) to sit on a stone bench and play his fife. Today, he’s the curator and runs a fife- and flute-making shop in the carriage house. “Fifes and pipes are the […]
Magazine
It’s No Fluke
In 1999, a brother-and-sister team and their spouses set out to create a made-in-the-USA ukulele for a reasonable price. The result? The Fluke, a small triangular four-stringed guitar-like ukulele ($189-$435). The first 10,000 of these colorful instruments were built in Dale and Phyllis Webb’s basement; now they’re using a refurbished gas station as a production […]
Magazine
Drum It Up
You don’t expect to find Caribbean music in New England, let alone a crafter of Caribbean instruments. But that’s exactly what we’ve discovered in Eric Rollnick. Eric has been creating pans (melodic instruments made from steel drums, hammered out of 55-gallon barrels) since 1992, after extensive travel and study in Trinidad and Tobago. The pans […]
Magazine
Music with Pluck
Lynne Lewandowski wasn’t thinking of the therapeutic benefits of harp music when she first started building this medieval instrument — she just wanted to try making one. That was 32 years ago. Today, Lynne’s harps, crafted to order of cherrywood and gut strings, are renowned among early-music performers. The shapes are a synthesis of replica […]
Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut Hurting economically at the outset of the Civil War, the small towns of backcountry New England swelled the Union army with new recruits. Casualties were overwhelming, with some towns losing most of their young male populations. Postwar New England experienced a deep sense of loss that transformed its […]
Magazine
Global Warming and Fall Foliage
Here in northern New England, the color comes on slowly, almost furtively. The first leaves turn — on diseased and dying trees — in late July, unbelievably, amid the suffocating lushness of high summer. By mid-August the early sumacs and swamp maples have joined in, and the slide is on despite the heat. Autumn‘s rapidly […]
Magazine
Raging Bull | Mary’s Farm
One day late last fall while I was out raking, a pickup with a noisy muffler rumbled past. In its wake, a big black beast went storming by, hooves flying, tail spinning. Head down, he rollicked into the field across the way. My dog, Mayday, barked furiously from behind the protection of the front door. […]
Magazine
Speaking My Mind
Would you cull the deer population to reduce the threat of Lyme disease? Having suffered the ravages of Lyme for 12 years and nearly losing my son to same, my opinion is a strong yes. We need more, but it’s a start. Pamela Swift, R.N., Palm Harbor, FLGet Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations […]
Magazine
Dear Yankee
Lyme Watch I think Edie Clark’s piece on the Lyme disease epidemic is one of the finest things she has ever written (“Trouble in Paradise,” July/August). Last year, I, too, had Lyme disease, for the first time at age 74, after working in an abandoned bee balm bed in Maine. Fortunately, I had what might […]