If You Think This Instrument Is Hard to Play, Try Building One

Summary

Jim Phelan, who owns the Laubin oboe company, has a neat white mustache and sparkly hazel eyes that make him look like a mid-management Santa. Recently surveying his small, busy workshop 60 miles north of New York City, he called it his “island of misfit toys.”I wasn’t sure whether he meant the work or the workers. At a computer-guided lathe, a burly, bearded man who plays bagpipes in his spare time turned blocks of a tropical hardwood into sexy little batons and flared bells. At a desk beneath a task light nearby, a key maker who just completed aircraft maintenance training worked intently on what looked like rubber buttons. Elsewhere in the bunkerlike space, elves in strappy aprons fiddled with silver, springs, loupes, cork, wax, feathers, fire.With its collection of oddballs doing oddball things amid a dense canopy of oddball tools, the workshop felt more like a family hardware store after a twister than a sensible instrument manufactory. I found it hard to believe that anything as beautiful and persnickety as an oboe ever escaped its chaos until the operations manager, who also sells real estate, grabbed an instrument from the desk of a finisher and tossed off a test run of sweet, gorgeous Bach.What then seemed hard to believe was that anyone was ever willing to live without such a sound, and thus without the bizarre, expensive machines that make it. The haunting Act II theme from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” and the jaunty peeping of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” do not come cheap; Laubins start at $13,200.And yet American classical culture and the artisanship that produces it have been in steep decline for decades. Orchestras disband, school music programs get the ax, instrument makers shut down or move offshore. Within that shrinking niche, oboes may be a niche too far. When Phelan bought the essentially bankrupt Laubin in 2022, any sane accountant would have declared the business unrevivable.Phelan, 74, is not that accountant. He’s had decades to hone his fai...