When Fred Holmgren needs a thingamajig he doesn’t already have, he steps into his Wendell home-based workshop and rolls up his sleeves, a practice he observed during his childhood in Montclair, New Jersey.
“My father was a chemist,” said Holmgren, “and in the old days, chemists had glassblowing skills in case a necessary piece of glassware didn’t come to hand easily. I’d watch over his shoulder as he made some gizmo, and if he needed to mount it onto something, he’d make that, too. Thermometers mounted on plywood, stuff like that.”
Similarly, Holmgren’s career requires him to be inventive. As a professional trumpet player, he’s made his living touring the U.S. and Canada with baroque groups.
Baroque music emerged around 1600 from the Renaissance period; it predated the classical music era, which began about 150 years later. The baroque natural trumpet is remarkably different from the modern trumpet.
Holmgren, 77, can play many types of trumpets, having taken up the modern variety at age eight. He later trained at Oberlin College in Ohio. As a young adult, he joined the Army as a musician “to avoid being sent to the jungle. I was in the Army band for about three years,” he said. “Two years, nine months, and seven and a half hours, to be exact. The less said about that, the better. I got in on the ground floor of the baroque scene thanks to a guy I knew; I was in the right place at the right time.”
At that time, “the early music business in the U.S. had been all lutes and harpsichords,” said Holmgren. “No woodwind or brass.” When that changed, he became one of the first professional baroque trumpet players in the nation; he regularly played the biennial Boston Early Music Festival and spent a great deal of time on tour buses.
Being on the road had some drawbacks, but one of those tours resulted in a delightful outcome: “I met Cathy in 1981. Nothing like sitting next to someone on a bus every day for three weeks to allow you to get well acquainted.”
Canadian-born Cathy Stanton was the manager of that tour; the rest is history. This year, the couple celebrates their 43rd wedding anniversary. Stanton, an author and anthropologist who teaches at the college level, studies and writes about food systems, farm history, and urban and environmental policy and planning, among other things.
Holmgren’s skill sets include not only performance but repair, which is fortuitous, because musical instruments require frequent first-aid. He had a longstanding annual stint in California where performances included Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s B Minor Mass, Handel oratorios, Beethoven symphonies — all on original instruments.
During his college years, Holmgren did an internship with a brass repairman, so he was able to fix his own instruments and ended up fixing those of other players, too. He then took it to another level by enrolling in three rounds of a one-week course on building baroque trumpets from scratch.
“Here’s how it worked: eight or 10 people showed up to a workshop in Indiana on a Saturday, and one week later, each one left with a hand-built baroque natural trumpet,” he said. “Most of the participants knew nothing about metalworking, and it’s unbelievable that no one got hurt in the process. The instructors were amazing. When I think of those mostly unskilled people flashing torches around for a week, it makes my blood run cold.”
Baroque trumpets began being imported to the U.S. from Europe in the late 1970s. “The instruments available were of mixed quality,” said Holmgren. “I do things to make them friendlier on stage.”
His workshop is a galaxy of woodworking and metalworking tools, doodads, tanks and all manner of odds and ends. An air-acetylene torch here, sheets of metal there, and items like a mandrel, a cylindrical tool which aids in shaping metal. He has soldering tools alongside different types of hammers: wood hammers, steel hammers and leather hammers.
It can seem messy, but Holmgren’s pursuit is clear: “I do things to trumpets to make it so that they’ll agree with everybody else.” The fact that it’s not easy to play such trumpets on pitch has given Holmgren one of his many life’s missions.
He’s also a piano tuner, a skill he learned at the North Bennet Street Industrial School in Boston, the oldest trade school in the country. There, he also studied furniture making and how to make violin bows — a specialty that led to another side gig.
“Bowmaking requires tiny chisels and planes that are very hard to find. Once I figured out how to make my own, I was able to pay for the course by making tools for other bowmakers,” he said.
That launched Holmgren on yet another high-level skill. Today, he continues to make a wide variety of tools.
Working as a piano tuner can be interesting; Holmgren has enough vignettes to fill a book. He was once asked to tune a piano under extremely odd circumstances.
“I was invited into a normal-looking house by a normal-looking person and shown into a normal-looking room with one bizarre detail: the piano was built into the wall,” he said. “Nearly everything was hidden: pedals, cabinetry, the music desk–only the keys stuck out of the wall. At that point, the only thing I could do was to exit very quickly.”
These days, Holmgren plays with the Concord (MA) Orchestra, a group through which he became acquainted with a violin maker.
“A violin bridge is curved to allow for the fact that the top strings vibrate a little less than the lower strings,” he said. “Anyway, this violin maker wanted to know if there was a way to make a tool to cut that curvature without a lot of fooling around.”
Fred Holmgren figured it out and made a tool for the fellow. It’s just what he does.
Eveline MacDougall is the author of “Fiery Hope” and can be reached at eveline@amandlachorus.org.