Wood

A good conductor can lead an orchestra with almost anything — even a chopstick. Leonard Bernstein was known to conduct a full symphony with just his eyebrows. Why, then, in this age of cheap manufacturing, are handmade, custom conducting batons still in demand?

While Scottish culture is branded by its famous Highland bagpipes, its neighbor across the water has long made a very different set of pipes that plays a much wider range of music. Our correspondent visits the indefatigable, obsessive makers of the uilleann pipes.

When a Disney film, “Coco,” spotlighted a small Mexican town where almost every shop makes guitars, it suddenly made ornate, white guitars famous. Underneath the new pop icon, however, lies a variety of much finer instruments—and a rich craft going back generations.

The Bay Area musician, instrument maker, and inventor offers us a peek inside his studio—and his unique creative process.

Craftsman and musician John Butler demonstrates some of the tools he uses to build Irish uilleann pipes—a notoriously difficult instrument to make, and to play.

Watch Brian Boggs use (and discuss) his wood rail-bender, which does the work that normally requires two or three people. After the bending, he moves the wood to “the hot room”: 116-120 degrees, 16 percent humidity. (He also uses the hot room to dry mullein and stinging nettle for tea.)

Brian Boggs, maker of fine, handcrafted wood furniture in Asheville, N.C., just can’t seem to leave a good idea alone. A lifetime of tinkering and experimentation has led to his line of innovative woodworking tools—and to creating some of the world’s most beautiful, comfortable hardwood chairs.

Nisga’a craftsman Mike Dangeli demonstrates the tools and techniques he uses to carve totem poles. These poles have served memorial purposes for Indigenous tribes for millennia.

Mike Dangeli, a First Nations artist and craftsman from the Nisga’a tribe in Western Canada, has devoted his life to preserving Indigenous history in masks, dance, song, and, mostly now, by carving ornate totem poles. The poles, a tradition that Dangeli says date back to creation, are meant to honor important moments in Indigenous history—both the treasured and the painful.