Linsey has been making musical instruments since 1971 when he started making bamboo flutes. This led to making a range of renaissance flutes from wood. An Australia Council grant in 1976 enabled him to travel in Europe measuring early woodwinds in museum collections. He then set up a workshop in London for 2 years making renaissance flutes and also began making reed instruments, especially gaidas (bagpipes) from Macedonia and Bulgaria.
On returning to Australia in 1979 he continued exploring Eastern European folk instruments, concentrating on gaidas. In 1987 he began designing and making an instrument called a tarogatino, which eventually developed into the saxillo (a single reed conical bore instrument inspired by the Hungarian tarogato). It is like a mellow soprano saxophone (wooden, with no keys). This has gradually developed over the last 18 years.
Linsey has also since 1973 run hundreds of community workshops in instrument making. This began with flutes and panpipes. In 1988 he invented the “Humarimba” a marimba (or large xylophone) suspended from the belts of two of the three players. Since then the humarimba has become a mainstay of Linsey’s work in Community Music (the highlight being a project in 1995 called “The Big Marimba” where 400 people built 320 metres of marimbas (with 2400 tuned marimba bars) that crossed the Brisbane River attached to the Victoria Bridge as part of the Brisbane Biennial Music Festival. The humarimba is still a vital part of Linsey’s Community Music work.
Since 1980 Linsey has also specialized in making musical instruments from various house and garden objects such as the garden hose panpipes, the watering can clarinet, rubber glove bagpipes, carrot flutes and clarinets, chair flutes, broom clarinets etc. These instruments have featured in many of his shows such as Out of the Frying Pan, Knocking on Kevin’s Door, Playpen, The Art of Food and Making Jam.
More recently he has designed hybrid wind instruments (see “Hybrid winds” article) called clarinis (narrow bore clarinets) made from aluminium, wood, bamboo and glass. Working with glass artisan Arnie Fuchs, Linsey has also developed glass bass clarinis such as Rosella and Mrs Curly.
There is also the Foonki which is a reed instrument which uses a plastic membrane (such as a garbage bag) as the reed which Linsey has been developing since 1999.
Read Linseys Hybrid Winds article (pdf format) |
