"Flute repair is tedious, time consuming and exacting," Phil Unger says. "You have to be mellow."

But there are compensations. Flutes need his special touch, but so do their players. Nurturing relationships with clients entails entertaining flutists from around the world over leisurely meals....

Joseph Schwantner studied guitar with Robert Stein. Schwantner described Stein as an amazing teacher and told many anecdotes about his lessons. He explained how compassionate his teacher was when Schwantner added ‘filigree’ to the assigned music, or when he brought in his own compositions to play instead of what his teacher assigned. Recognizing that Schwantner had a talent for composition, Stein introduced music theory into his lessons. In one lesson Schwantner told his teacher that he would love to play Dvorak’s New World Symphony on guitar; to his amazement, in the next lesson Stein had arranged all the major themes from the symphony for guitar...

For many of us, we find the musical world divided into a well established series of genres and, for the most part, these categories work fairly well on their own. It is, therefore, a gifted individual who can take the worlds of Jazz, Classical and native Venezuelan music and fuse them together so seamlessly that they might never have been apart...

Mathematics and music are inescapably tied. What is music if not the arrangement of patterns of sounds, and the composers score not much more than a formula used to represent an abstract idea? It may not take a mathematician to create a thing of beauty, but, as Ian Clarke discovered, it certainly helps...

It is difficult to classify Robert Dick - musician, or inventor? Ask him, and he is just a guy who did what had to be done, taking the next logical step in a series of movements. His fans have a different story to tell, one of a man who has taken fluting techniques further than anyone could have imagined and made his findings so readily available that anyone can benefit from his work

"It is a mystery where or when I first heard the flute, but it was the instrument I knew I would play from the very beginning. Really, my early life felt like a waiting process until I could begin flute”. Raised in Montana, USA, Rhonda Larson nurtured an appreciation for music from an early age, starting out under her grandmother’s tutelage on the piano at age seven. A quick learner and accomplished musician though she was, Rhonda had her heart set elsewhere. At age ten she began to learn the flute and, as she fondly remembers, “I began my life”.

In addition to repairs, the Flute Center offers an extensive inventory of new and used instruments. A beginner can find a used student- grade instrument (usually made from a nickel-copper alloy) starting at US$175. A vault holds precious metal professional flutes ranging from $5,000 to $40,000 (or more, depending on the price of gold)

A master player can coax creamy tones to pour like liquid gold from a flute. But a wonky key or a pad that fails to completely seal a tone hole can spoil a Midas touch. That’s where Unger comes in. Although he’s only an amateur player, the world comes to him for his skill on the flute – as a repairer, that is. He has a nerdy flair for the mechanical and a reverence for beautiful objects, but he’s also a people person who enjoys being the nexus for artists and manufacturers.