About me
I can’t remember when I started playing the recorder. As far as my memories go back, I’ve always done that and there are pictures of me as a three year old girl ‘playing’ recorder. In my family playing music was evident and initially I got piano lessons, against my will. After a while I was allowed to switch to the recorder but then inevitably, like everybody else, also I felt the point of wanting to ‘upgrade’ to the flute. That’s what everyone did, finally a real instrument!
A series of coincidences, call it luck, brought me to a new, young recorder teacher who happened to know all about early music performance practice and that’s when it happened. I wanted to go to music college. To study recorder.
I went to the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, where during my years of studying, it was also possible to take part in the side subject Recorder Making, with Fred Morgan. Call it luck again. I’d always been interested in crafts and I participated in the course, continued by my teacher Ricardo Kanji.
After finishing my studies, Ricardo and I have had our recorder making studio in the Hague. When he returned to his country Brazil, I continued the work ‘solo’ and now I have been doing this beautiful profession for thirty years.
Recently I‘ve taken up teaching in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge Woodwind Makers. It turns out that many players still do not know their instrument well or don’t know how to make simple adjustments themselves to make their instrument work better. My courses therefore focus mainly on increasing knowledge and gaining experience improving existing instruments
