Trees, the phases of the moon, intra-actions and assemblages: Thoughts about playing my recorder
My recorder feels beautiful, I love the softness of the wood and I love the warmth that emanates from the instrument as I blow into it…the breath and the wood reacting together to create the sonorous warm sound.
I love the feeling of the holes in the instrument under the fleshy part of my fingertips…feeling the resonance of the breath and the sound through each finger that closes a hole. I love that you can bend the notes by lifting your fingertip off by degrees, it is different for each hole. You can also interrupt the sound by waving your finger over the hole to create a vibrato that gives the note character. The sound is not completely even-tempered it is there to be played with, to use your listening to tune across the notes. I love the finger patterns, from my childhood, the ease of the fingers around certain shapes and idioms that take me back in my memories to other times and places…the tatty sheet music with childlike writing of dynamics and encouraging words at the top of the page to prepare me for performances of long ago, so long that I can’t remember the performances, but the encouragement speaks to me as an adult, crossing time and space through familiar movements and feelings.
My recorder, my recorders, accompany me to times of enjoyment, social encounters shaped by shared musical experiences where sounds played together attune and blend with each other. Knowing the other players comes second, playing together comes first. The instruments, the breaths coordinating temporally to join and intra-act with one another. My bodily function of breathing coordinating and working together with this wonderfully crafted and shaped wooden tube to meet the breath and sound created by the other players in the air around us, the breath and sounds intra-acting in an aesthetic, physical, beautiful assemblage.
The maker of the recorder is also in some way intra-acting in the assemblage – and the very tree itself from which my recorder/s are/were made. My treble recorder is boxwood. Boxwood is very hard and can give a smooth surface, it was used in the baroque era for making recorders, giving a powerful and brilliant sound.

My tenor is cherrywood:

Cherrywood is lightweight which makes it ideal for larger recorders.
I found a marvellous website with information about the making of wooden recorders https://www.flute-a-bec.com/buisgb.html to discover that, of course, wood is a living material, full of sap which must dry out through seasoning. Old wisdom suggests to cut trees in winter when the plant is resting, and in the last quarter of the moon when the sap is attracted down to the roots by its tidal effects. The felled wood is then stored in a cool, dark place for between 15-20 years for the sap to fully leave the wood and for it to be ready to be carved. The patience, the waiting for the right time to work on the particular piece of wood is the work of the artist, the craftsperson, the woodworker, instrument maker extraordinaire.
The lives of my recorders have been long – before I ever get to breathe into them. The skilled hands that work on the log to turn it into a resonant sonorous instrument have years of practise and ‘knowing’ to enable them to create this perfect and beautiful object.
The natural, living tree is transformed through the process of felling, storing, carving and turning on a lathe, into a different, (re)incarnated ‘being’ – a new ‘living’ object, animated by breath, to sing melodies sometimes, it feels to me, of its own making.
I am coming to understand more about how things ‘intra-act’ and how the very essence of materials are entangled with me through thinking about my recorders, my love of them, and the sounds they make. The sounding together with others, the attuned breathing the shared temporal space that playing recorders together affords, represents a glorious assemblage of the majesty of a woodland, tangled with the patience and expertise of the woodcarver/instrument maker, my breath, and the breath of others, our fingers, and the inspired thoughts and feelings, that have found their way onto manuscript paper that we then play together. What a glorious assemblage of tree, season, moon, resting, wisdom, knowledge, skill, breath, fingers, thoughts, ideas and feelings intra-acting together in an encounter, in a sounding of time and space.
Reading that has inspired this thinking:
Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: being and becoming. Routledge.
Taylor, C. (2016). ‘Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: posthumanist research practices for education.’ In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (eds.) Posthuman research practices in education. Palgrave Macmillan pp. 5-24.