Remembering Eric Herz. Lumix M4/3 14mm

Those of you who follow my sporadic journal, will have noticed that from time to time I will reminisce about people, places and artifacts from past chapters of my life.  Part of it, I suppose, is that those entering the second half of their seventh decade, want to consolidate the previous chapters as they look to the future, realizing that more time has passed than there is left.

A few days ago, I recalled my time working as an apprentice harpsichord maker in the workshop of Frank Hubbard in the early 1990s.  But before that, I apprenticed with one of the other well-established harpsichord makers in Boston: Eric Herz.  Back in April of 2014, I went to visit the building which used to house Eric's workshop in the back streets of Cambridge, MA, and described it all in some detail.  Eric, and his approach to instrument making, was entirely different from Frank Hubbard.  Where-as Frank was an academic, approaching everything he did from an historical perspective, Eric was a tradesman who also happened to be a professional musician.  His approach was always pragmatic and practical: how to make instruments built to the highest possible standards of craftsmanship, but in the service of reliability and longevity.  Despite Eric's insistence on efficiency in everything that was done in his shop - in this business money is always tight, and he was a hard taskmaster -, there was also a great deal of humanity.  I had the feeling that I was part of his extended family when I worked there.  Perhaps some of that was because we both played the flute, and, in fact we sometimes played music together.  And perhaps it was somewhat cultural too: a recognition of common roots.  
I lost touch with Eric after I left his employ in 1988, hearing a few years later that the business had closed and its holdings sold off.  To my surprise, in 2002, I received an invitation from his son, to attend a memorial service.  For the Blip, I have placed the invitation, and the program for the service on top of the page which describes Eric's shop in Wolfgang Zuckermann's 1969 book, The Modern Harpsichord, Twentieth-Century Instruments and Their Makers.  This work, sometimes irreverent and amusing, remains an important record of the harpsichord revival, the craftsmen, and their different approaches to that craft.  
Eric was a man shaped by, and traumatized early on by his inclusion in a particularly brutal period of history.  I remember him with fondness and warmth.