Two Horizon Flutes

On occasion a client asks me if I would consider making them a guitar or a bouzouki, or some other stringed instrument, and I always cheerfully decline.  My rationale has been that I'd rather produce one sort of instrument extraordinarily well than lots of different instruments that are all pretty good.  And harps promise to offer me scope and challenge for my creativity for decades to come.

Why then, has Timothy Harps suddenly started offering flutes?

Well, it started as an idle thought, and has become, over the course of a year of extensive experimentation and testing, something like a mild obsession.  I'm sufficiently excited enough over this new instrument to bend my own rule about dividing my focus.  I think that in many respects the two enterprises complement each other beautifully.

I was standing in my shop a year ago, ruefully examining my carefully stored off-cuts from harp-making.  Harps are large, irregularly shaped instruments, and frankly I generate a fair amount of odd shaped pieces of wood that are too small to be used in further harp construction.  Now this is really lovely, instrument grade, air-dried hardwood, and it struck me as a lamentable waste that much of it ends up in my woodstove instead of being used to its fullest potential.

And the thought occurred to me: I wonder how hard it would be to make a flute?

I spent a month or two doing  research online about flute construction and the sorts of flutes that are currently available.  In particular I loved the simplicity and pure voices of Irish whistles and wooden
 flutes.  However, equally attractive to me were the gorgeous, wide bore wooden flutes of the indigenous peoples of North America, with their rich haunting tones.  An idea began to take shape; an idea of marrying the best qualities of both traditions of woodwind construction to produce a unique, new sort of flute, equally suited to Irish seisun playing and to meditative solitary performance.

Now, after a year of experimentation, I am utterly delighted to present the flute we've developed.  We named it the Two Horizon flute because half its heritage is found in the British Isles, and the other here in North America.