Article by Ernest Chau

Forrests

Ernest Chau

A local business and its place in the modern classical music scene

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long Berkeley’s University Avenue, an old blue canopy drapes over the sidewalk, shading a set of glass double doors. Walking through that entrance, along with the

ring of an electronic bell, one is immediately warmly greeted by a reception of glass cases, each neatly stocked with the physical showing of musical jargon. All of the goods vie for the client’s attention- from shiny, slender tubes known as bocals, to a colorful assortment of threads colored like candy, to heavy brass mechanisms called gougers and profiles, likening themselves to gold bars. Behind this area is a labyrinth of various rooms and floors, containing instruments, private lesson studios, and an instrument repair shop, among other things.

Those instruments, as well as all of the smaller products, can be brought to the front, but are also often packaged up in cardboard boxes to be sent out of town...

This is Forrests Music, and they hold a prominent position in the local Bay Area of California, as well as in the nation’s musical economy. They cater particularly to a rare breed of musicians, known as double reed players, who use instruments in the bassoon and oboe families. Those instruments tend to be lesser known of within common knowledge, as opposed to more oftenly referenced instruments like violin or piano, which tend to be the ste-

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reotypical depictions of classical music as a whole. Despite this lack of exposure, bassoon and oboe play pivotal roles within the orchestra, providing much needed color to your classical pieces and movie soundtracks.

But that unique customer base isn’t the only facet that keeps Forrests relevant today- they are also still alive as a music business with a physical store, which proves difficult in an era with growing access to music-related products through the internet.

Something that makes double reed players particularly unique is their affinity (and need) for various tools. In order for their instruments to make sound, they blow into a piece called a reed- two blades of thin cane, bound together at the end that gets inserted to the rest of the instrument. This is similar to the reed on a clarinet, or the strings on a viola- however, while those vibrating components are always bought, oboe and bassoon reeds are often

hand made by individuals. To better serve this clientele, Forrests sells a wide assortment of tools for making and/or adjusting reeds. Cynthia Benhke Hanson, current co-owner of Forrests, notes from her time working that out of the variety of tools, the most customer attention has always been directed at the knives. Knives on display range from hollow ground to

beveled, but even those don’t encompass all the blades presented. Other edges are housed in cane splitters, or metal tracks to precisely remove material from the reed blades. But the knives, threads, and other goodies are just one part of the store’s services- the building’s second floor houses various lesson studios for local studios, space for people to come in and

try instruments before purchasing or renting them, and a full workshop where previous owners and technicians Marilynn Day and John Goebel do their meticulous work.

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Upstairs W

The studio itself is filled to the brim with tools just like the ones sold in store. Day is mostly working in making reeds to various stages, whether it’s prepping cane to be turned into working reeds by customers all the way to ready-made reeds for customers to use in their own playing, all while in the company of her dog, Dawn. Goebel, on the other hand, works mostly in fixing/ tuning up instruments. Long time customer Brenda Schuman Post, an oboe player and teacher currently working across the greater Bay Area, raves about Goebel’s creativity, and puts heavy emphasis on his expertise. “He doesn’t play the oboe, he’s a bassoon The establishment began with Dutch and Kathryn Forrest- which player, but he’ll notice things about the way that you’re playing explains the name- as a general music, as Dutch was a local music director. From there however, Forrests morphed it’s way into the realm as though he was the teacher,” of double reeds, as they grew more acquainted with other talents like Post mentions.

Bill Sheik, a renowned musical technician, and Ray Duste, the prin-

“He’ll be the comment that helps you understand why something isn’t working, and then it has nothing to do with what he’s done in terms of the repair.”

- Post -

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cipal oboist of the San Francisco Symphony at the time. Aside from their technical know-how though, the storefront’s employees are the epitome of hospitality; they’re extremely sweet and caring, and nowhere near what the stone-

Workshop

faced stereotypes suggest. “I mean, it was always in service to the oboe playing community,” Post muses. She would continue to assert various words that described the store and it’s employees, showing that they were particularly loving, nurturing, creative, and most notably, in service. This environment, being as warm and unique as it is, brings in a roster regulars as well- sort of like a cafe, but with the passionate exchange of musical conversation instead of coffee cups.

“I call them the frequent flyers,” says Hanson, along with a chuckle.

Shifting to a broader view however, climate around classical music and it’s businesses definitely has evolved in it’s own way; When looking at this macro-metamorphosis, it’s hard not to see a dire looking downward trend. In Classical Music isn’t Dead by William Robin from the New Yorker, Robin discusses the good old days of the Amer-

ican classical stage.

“Granted, classical music has lost the central position it held in American culture in the mid-twentieth century, when the NBC Symphony Orchestra blared through home radios and Presidents regularly shook hands with conductors on television.

But let’s remember that the art’s exalted status was as much the result of global politics as of middle-class tastes. America, an ascendant superpower with its own dark history of oppression, found classical music a useful tool for convincing the world of its cultural prowess.”

He makes it doubly clear that classical music had a much greater limelight, given the context of America’s place on the political stage, however he isn’t ringing any death knell for the scene at all. Sure, classical music’s popularity may have declined, but the community certainly exists and in great passion, through music students, professionals like Post, and obviously businesses like Forrests.

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Hanson herself still plays in a multitude of ensembles in her local area, as a bassoonist and contrabassoonist- and all of them assert that live music still has a prominent role to play. “I can see that,” Post explains, as she talks over playing her music to live, close up audiences.

“I can feel it on an emotional, interactive level, but I can also see it, that’s never gonna happen virtually.”

Those ideas don’t extend out to everyone, as shown by articles like Requiem: Classical Music in America is Dead by Mark Vahoenacker, which garnered responses both professional (i.e Robin’s aforementioned, and aptly named rebuttal) but also appalling immature, like Andy Doe’s Mark Vahoenacker, I Have a Bone to Pick With You on his blog, Proper Discord. From these three sources alone, it’s clear to see what a flashpoint classical music is on the internet. There are both valid and ridiculously misleading statistics that Vahoenacker brings up in his supposedly objective piece, that Doe criticizes line by line, along with an overdose of profanity. This is only one example of how the internet’s wide reach is a defining feature of classical music in this new era of connectedness.

That connectedness doesn’t only affect classical music in a wide, overarching way- it also has effects that are much closer to small, brick and mortar music business like Forrests; particularly, the rise of e-commerce and services like the International Music Score Library Project (also known as Petrucci Music Library, or, most commonly, as IMSLP). The latter internet service, brought about an easily accessible hub for music for public domain works, up-and-coming musicians to post their works for publicity, and various echelons of recordings for public listening. Paid recordings or sheet music is also often readily available on e-commerce websites; but what does that mean for physical storefronts like that of Forrests? Well, taking Forrests as a knife, IMSLP and similar resources were like automatic reed profilers- they wouldn’t totally knock the knife out of relevancy, but it certainly reduces the need for the knife greatly. And talking to Hanson, the internet resources that have surfaced certainly have brought local business to a new situation. Listening to the ease at which Hanson listed off stores that have closed down solidified how prevalent this was- with a fair few being solely for sheet music and others heavily

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relying on these sales, hearing of these physical stores that faltered so suddenly was, at least to some extent, sobering.

So how does Forrests manage to stay relevant, considering how much the musical ecosystem’s growth impacted similar stores? “You have to work as a team,” Hanson states. But arguably more importantly, she explains,

“You have to have a kind of passion to stay alive.”

- Hanson “You have to have a kind of passion to stay alive.” This passion manifests in a wide spectrum of forms, however one of the prominent examples of their tenacity is how they use the internet to their advantage; through it, they have developed a wide reaching web presence and a trusted identity as the double reed specialists, despite not being a larger corporation. They host their own website through their own sets of PC’s, and through their website (which you can visit at https:// www.forrestsmusic.com/) they’ve gained a similarly ubiquitous presence for shipped goods. With their particular expertise in double reeds as well, they’ve filled a much needed niche within the greater classical music community. On top of taking web and phone orders from all over, Forrests also maintains attendance at large tradeshows.

In fact, when first arranging interviews, Hanson was preparing to make her way over to the Texas Music Educators Association Conference, or TMEA for short. She explains how it helps attach a face to the name of the business, which helps sustain a customer base far away from California, but it also highlights the meaning of hospitality and how even those “people-skills” that Forrests staff have are still able to permeate into the much wider markets- it’s not like you get to meet Jeff Bezos before ordering a blender off of amazon.com, you don’t often get to have that connection.

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Beyond that though, it’s clear that the support base for general classical music is still wide and stable, which helps support music all over. Some members of this community, show their passion in more non-conventional, almost belligerent ways like Gregory Pepetone’s Classical Music’s Last Sanctuary, in which he not only glorifies music, but also criticizes the current state of the world in regards to classical music, asserting that, “There are no Shangri-Las in this world, no sanctuaries where the treasures of art, intellect and spirituality are safe from the depredations of modern life.”

In this sense, Pepetone’s passion both enforces the fire that continues to help keep the lights on at businesses like Forrests, but also enforces the stereotypes associated with classical music like how proponents are old and tradition-bound. There is some basis for this; classical music has had a reputation of

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consistently drawing in audiences that were older, that Vahoenacker states and Hanson concedes, however the youth base for that art is certainly significant. Take Molly’s words from the book My Music, a compilation of interviews centered around what music means to various people.

Despite only being in fifth grade, she plays piano and flute, and speaks about her music in bubbling excitement, even when only asked to describe herself.

She would explain her opinions about the differences between flute and piano, as well as how her friends also play a variety of woodwind instruments… This is only one example of the younger generation being a part of the greater scene, but many more can be found in youth all aroundobserve the prolific increase in college music programs and interdisciplinary studies, the widespread music education even before that, and a multitude of youth orchestra programs, es-

pecially in the greater Bay Area where Forrests is located. This combination of growing interest in general orchestral arts as well their particular expertise in double reed instruments help set the stage for Forrests to flourish- and beyond that, media like movies and television series are popular today, in part thanks to orchestral soundtracks that help move audiences without them noticing. Just like the tools they sell, Forrests are a reliable resource and asset for musicians across the nation, working behind the scenes to help artists express themselves as freely as possible. It’s clear that their staff utilize this scene and their own talents extensively well, and because of this, Forrests holds a pivotal supporting position within the greater American music ecosystem.

And no, they won’t be stepping down any time soon.

Works Cited Crafts, Susan D., et al. My Music : Explorations of Music in Daily Life, Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

ProQuest Ebook CentralW, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mountainviewhs-ebooks/detail. action?docID=776723.

Doe, Andrew. “Mark Vanhoenacker, I Have a Bone to Pick with You.” Proper Discord, 7 Feb. 2014, properdiscord.com/2014/01/24/mark-vanhoenacker-i-have-a-bone-to-pick-with-you/.

Hanson, Cynthia Behnke. Personal Interview, 26. March 2020.

Hanson, Cynthia Behnke. Personal Interview. 17, April 2020.

Pepetone, Gregory. “Classical Music’s Last Sanctuary.” American Music Teacher, vol. 44, no. 4, 1995, pp.

26–27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43539007. Accessed 31 Mar. 2020.

Robin, William. “Classical Music Isn’t Dead.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 29 Jan. 2014, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-fat-lady-is-still-singing.

Schuman-Post, Brenda. Personal Interview. 29, March 2020.

Vanhoenacker, Mark. “Is Classical Music Dead?” Slate Magazine, Slate, 22 Jan. 2014, slate.com/culture/2014/01/classical-music-sales-decline-is-classical-on-deaths-door.html.

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Ernest Chau is currently a Junior in highschool, and attends Freestyle Academy as a Design student.

Outside of Freestyle, Ernest is also an oboe player who has been playing since fourth grade, and plays for the California Youth Symphony . He loves studying biology and hates math: he is currently intending to study both music and biology after highschool. In his spare time, he enjoys playing video games, listening to music, making overly pretentious pour-over coffee, and playing around with Adobe Illustrator.

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