Sounds from another world

By Ali Bronsdon/Leader Staff

Deep in the Jocko hills, at the end of a long, windy, bumpy dirt road, high above the fertile valley, you will find a man named Ken Light hard at work in his Amon Olorin studio — immersed in the enchanting echoes of the Native American flute.

Despite the rustic backdrop and his humble demeanor, Light has been a giant in the world of contemporary Native American flute making for the past 22 years.

"When I started, it was pretty much a lost art and my flutes set the standard for what Native flutes are supposed to be; both in craftsmanship and their musical capabilities," said Light, who is proud of his leadership position in what he calls the "Renaissance of the Native American flute."

"Just in the last year I have reached another level of evolution in my instruments," he said.

The beginning

Light had just finished a graduate thesis in environmental education and accepted a job at Two Eagle River School in 1985 when he ran into an artist named Tony Shearer who would eventually introduce him to an old Lakota flute.

"That was when I first saw the real thing," Light said. "When I heard the sound… I realized inside of that was a whole bunch of important stuff in terms of living in America. It, I thought, carried a really old voice that spoke of being in harmony with the world - with the natural world and with the things that are important now.

"We are going into a new era - a new political era - an era of people needing to get more involved in understanding how we interact with the world and with the natural world. The outer world has changed so much."

The tradition

According to Light, flute music, in the old tradition, was made to accompany the vocal music they already had. Some of the tribes like the Sioux and the Lakota used flutes for courting. The young men would play for the ladies in that particular culture. In other tribes, flute-circles were an integral part of ceremony.

"It's a unique musical tradition from North America - it didn't spring out of western music," Light said. "It's what was here based on a real simple design."

Most of Light's flutes are a traditional six-hole design, which he originally replicated after museum pieces. Carved from only the finest blocks of Western Red Cedar, Light has made about 3,500 custom Native American flutes to date.

"Every one that I've made has been an evolution of the previous one," he said. "Everything I do with the flute is a very refined technique."

His six-hole flutes play 15 notes - a complete chromatic scale with the exception of the bottom two.

"They are traditional tunings, but because I have worked with them for so long, I have managed to maximize the performance potential in a relatively simple design. What is there is very sophisticated, but it's simple," he said.

Light says the physics of a flute is fairly straightforward. There is a chamber that resonates. When all the holes are covered, the whole tube resonates, thus playing the lowest note. As you open the holes up, the chamber shortens and the notes rise higher and higher.

"What I've done is said, 'Okay, here's what the design will do.' How much performance can I get out of a traditional design without re-inventing the wheel?"

According to Light, in the old days, flute-makers didn't lay anything out with a ruler, but instead used anatomical measurements. Flutes were the width of an arm; holes began a hand's-length from the whistle and were the width of a thumb apart. Tunings were entirely dependent on the musical ear of its maker.

Today's process, Light said, takes about a 10-days. He says it takes four days just to apply the oil and beeswax finish by hand.

For Light, the subtleties are what make his flutes truly superior to the rest. Such thin-walled construction and a uniform cylindrical chamber are characteristics not achievable by beginner or even intermediate flute makers. He accents some of his instruments with beading or elaborate hand painting by his wife, Anja, and buys an entire deer hide each year from Arlee resident Agnes Kenmill for the functional straps, which hold the custom-designed spacer in its place on top of the air hole.

"I wanted my work to be a contribution to an ongoing tradition in Native American culture," Light said. "I want people to say, "Ken Light came along and tried to learn what the traditional flutes were like and tried to apply his work in a contemporary way to that tradition."

The evolution

"Traditions always evolve," Light said. "They take that story that they learned from their father and they add something to it."

Light has never been a follower and his most recent innovation involved two rigorous years of design, material experimentation and hunting for money to fund it all. His goal: to make the mystical sounds of a traditional cedar flute accessible to everyone. The result is a precise replica made out of instrument-grade ABS-resin (the same material used to make plastic recorders), which comes in two tunings and breaks down into a compact, light-weight package.

He calls the PF-Series "a backpacker's special."

"You know, take it camping, throw it in a river; it's totally indestructible," he said. "The thing was that when you're playing the flute, the music had to be there. And it really is."

The original idea was to make flutes for beginners or for classes of students who must all have identical-sounding instruments.

"That comes from being a teacher," he said. "If you know something, the fun part about it is to try to teach other people some of the things you've learned so they can go in their own direction with it.

"The music is so personal and people are expressing parts of their selves that don't come out in any other way. That's what these instruments do," he said. "That's what the tradition is all about - a way to express yourself."

Because Light was able to achieve such exceptionally clear acoustics, he says he now has lots of professionals recording albums and performing live with PF flutes.

"People say just because it's plastic, they relate that with junk," Light said. "It was a means to an end and it's really worked out well."

The magic

With a resonance that can evoke chills at first listen, the Native American flute carries a message that can be felt deep inside. Somehow, Light says, that music helps people to "understand better who they are and why they are here on this earth now."

"I make magic flutes," he said. "The sound of them is magic. That's what I first got into. I recognized that there was something very, very special about that sound that you don't get out of anything else."

Light says he derives part of his passion from the artistic challenge of making something beautiful - indulging himself in a simplistic beauty. Perhaps the larger part comes from the understanding that because the flute is a musical instrument, it's not just an object.

"Almost any woodworker can make something that looks pretty nice and call it a flute," he said. "Not many people know how to make that magic sound.

"There is a mystery about these things. We only have a limited ability to understand things on a rational level with our intellect - beyond that is an understanding of things that is intuitive. That is where art is - that other world."