About us
Our Owner, David Lasocki
David was born in London, England in 1947, then grew up in Manchester. While studying chemistry at University College London, he took traverso, then recorder lessons from Edgar Hunt at Trinity College, and started researching early music at the British Museum library (later called the British Library). Then he studied the flute and traverso with Betty Bang Mather at The University of Iowa and eventually earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in musicology and a master’s degree in library and information science there. From 1985 until his retirement in 2011, David had a career as a music librarian, mostly at Indiana University Bloomington, where he was Head of Music Reference Services and also taught in the Jacobs School of Music and the Department of Information and Library Science. He founded Instant Harmony in 2010.
Since his retirement, David has been working as a freelance writer, researcher, editor, publisher, and energy healer. He is considered one of the world’s foremost researchers of the history of woodwind instruments, especially members of the flute family. His doctoral dissertation, “Professional Recorder Players in England, 1540–1740” (1983), won a national prize, as did some of his articles and books, and he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Recorder Society in 2011.
By the way, the C in Lasocki is pronounced TS….
Our Co-Owner, Giulia Tettamanti
Giulia Tettamanti was born in São Paulo, Brazil and has lived there on and off ever since. She graduated in recorder at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), received a master’s degree in musicology from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), studied Renaissance recorders and repertory with Pedro Sousa Silva at Porto in Portugal, and is writing her doctoral thesis. She is a professional recorder player who particularly enjoys performing Renaissance music, which has also been the subject of her research. She is an authority on the works of Silvestro Ganassi, a Venetian musician and artist of the sixteenth century, and on the Renaissance recorder consort.
Our Collaborators
Robert Ehrlich, author
Robert Ehrlich studied music and ethnomusicology at King’s College Cambridge and recorder at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. Since winning prizes in international music competitions in London, Amersfoort, and Munich, he has performed worldwide with ensembles ranging from the Academy of Ancient Music to the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, with which he has performed almost all the Bach cantatas with recorder at the St. Thomas Church, Leipzig.
Robert is co-author with David Lasocki of The Recorder (Yale University Press, 2022) in which his original research on the reinvention of the recorder in the twentieth century is informed by his performing and teaching experience. He has published essays on various aspects of this work in Australian, British, German, and US journals, as well as mainly German-language articles reflecting his distinguished career in music education as Principal of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig and the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” Berlin. He currently teaches in Leipzig and at the Guildhall School of Music in London.
Betty Bang Mather, author
Betty Bang Mather taught the flute at The University of Iowa for 44 years. She was one of the first flutists in the United States to teach herself and her students to play Baroque music from the instructions in early French and German woodwind tutors. In the 1970s, she gave the first annual summer workshops in traverso performance in the United States, and she wrote her book on interpreting French Baroque woodwind music, various articles on eighteenth-century woodwind performance practices, and (with David Lasocki) the first modern books on free ornamentation, cadenzas, and preludes for woodwind instruments in the late Baroque and early Classical periods.
In the 1980s, she and coauthor Dean Karns wrote Dance Rhythms of the French Baroque: A Handbook for Performance. Then she concentrated on applying historical performance clues to faithful editions of single Baroque pieces or sets: The French Noel, with an Anthology of 1725 for Two Flutes (with Gail Gavin), Bach’s Partita for Solo Flute, with Emphasis on the Allemande (with Elizabeth Sadilek), and Bach’s Overture-Suite in B minor for flute and strings (with Karns).
At the age of 96, she is as curious and inquisitive as ever—and still playing the flute.
Thiemo Wind, author
Thiemo Wind is a Dutch musicologist and music journalist. He studied at the University of Utrecht and was professionally trained as an oboe and recorder player. In the 1980s and 90s, he acted as musicological adviser to Frans Brüggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. From 1995 to 2016, Wind was classical music editor of the Dutch national newspaper De Telegraaf. He currently works full-time as a musicological researcher, with an emphasis on early woodwinds and music from the Dutch Republic. He obtained his PhD in 2006 at the University of Utrecht with a dissertation on Jacob van Eyck and Dutch solo repertoire for recorder in the Golden Age. An English version of the dissertation was published by the Royal Society for Netherlands Music History (KVNM) as Jacob van Eyck and the Others. Wind made the first complete edition of Van Eyck’s Der fluyten lust-hof in the 1980s (New Vellekoop Edition).
Wind has since published widely on Bach, Haydn, and other subjects, and given lectures and masterclasses at the conservatories of Amsterdam, Bremen, The Hague, Kraków, Salzburg (Mozarteum), and Utrecht. He contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. One of his special areas of interest is visual art from the Dutch Golden Age, related to music or not. This has led, among other things, to Instant Harmony Essays about Adriana vanden Bergh (a recorder prodigy portrayed by Jacob Backer) and the early history of Paulus Potter’s famous Bull.
Jake Feinberg, author
Jake Feinberg is a rogue journalist, broadcaster, and impresario based out of Tucson, AZ. Over the last 12 years he has been conducting long-form interviews with his musical elders and peers about the 4L’s: leadership, love, life, and lineage. From these interviews he has published five books with Instant Harmony. He enjoys spending time with his daughters Hannah and Aja, swimming, playing basketball, and watching Netflix. He lives by the quote from Ken Kesey, “our job is nothing less than saving the world.”