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Friedrich von Huene

2004 Lifetime Achievement Award

Friedrich Von Huene is one of the world’s leading makers and scholars of historic flutes and recorders. For more than forty years he has made finely crafted and accurate reproductions of historic instruments in public and private collections, thereby making them available to a larger public and helping to make the movements towards “historically informed performance” of early music flourish. He has also influenced a generation of younger makers. Born in Germany, he came to the United States in 1948 and served three years as a flutist in the U.S. Air Force Band in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Bowdoin College, he apprenticed with Verne Q. Powell as a maker of modern flutes. In 1960 he left Powell and founded his workshop in Boston, making historical wind instruments including baroque and classical flutes, recorders, and crumhorns. He is a past president of the Boston Recorder Society and was a founder of the Boston Early Music Festival. In 1984 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin College. He was awarded the Arion Award for Extraordinary Contributions to Musical Culture in 1992 by Cambridge Society for Early Music and the Curt Sachs Award from the American Musical Instrument Society in 2003. To date, well over 10,000 instruments bear his name and stamp.