by Mary Lash
A new
PC may be out of date before we can take it out of its carton, but the
occupation of two Ithaca College alumni who graduated over 40 years apart
bucks the trend of planned obsolescence. Burton Stanley '35, M.S. '52,
and Glen Grigel '77 happen to be next-door neighbors in Potsdam, an upstate
New York town whose population peaks at 15,000 when the state college there
is in session. Their shared profession is musical instrument repair.
Although Stanley and Grigel have both practiced instrument repair at Potsdam's Crane School of Music, their professional lives did not intersect there. After graduating from the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, Stanley taught music in high schools in Georgetown and Cortland, New York. For more than two decades the choruses, orchestras, and bands that he conducted were highly rated in competition. President of the New York State School Music Association from 1952 to 1955, he was one of two recipients of the first NYSSMA Distinguished Service Award.
In 1961 Stanley arrived in Potsdam to begin a new career as a college teacher. Recognizing a need for his students at the Crane School to learn instrument repair, he took a semester off to study the craft formally. He found, however, that as a public school teacher he had already taught himself much of what he needed to know.
After retiring from teaching in 1972, Stanley devoted his talents to band instrument repair. He helped found the National Association of Professional Band Instrument Repair Technicians in 1975, and in 1978 he published both Instrument Repair for the Music Teacher and Band Instrument Care and Repair.
For
his part, Grigel briefly taught music education but soon decided that his
real love was the feel and sound of the instruments themselves. Having
apprenticed with two master repair technicians, he is now in his 12th year
as instrument repair technician at the Crane School, single-handedly maintaining
1,200 string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. Even barring
the occasional accident, all those instruments eventually need attention
because of the effects of wear-and-tear and the vicissitudes of temperature
and humidity. Among the satisfactions of his work, Grigel says, is the
power "to bring new life to old instruments." As he observes,
"Anyone in this trade is something of a recycler."
Grigel not only repairs instruments but also adjusts them to produce a better sound or to conform to the physical characteristics of the musicians who use them. "I make a study of things that rob people of performance efficiency and cheat them of the ability to play their best," he says. For his outstanding contributions to the performance of Crane's 470 students and 45 faculty members, Grigel was recently awarded both the President's and the Chancellor's Awards for Excellence in Professional Service.
As school districts cut music programs during years of leaner finances, there are fewer instruments to maintain, and more of these instruments are inexpensive and low-maintenance plastic models. Under these conditions, instrument repair may be a dying art -- in fact, there are only 2,000 or so practitioners in the entire country. Thanks to Stanley and Grigel, however, musicians in Potsdam can rely on far more than their share.