Editor’s Note: In preparing Tom Siwe’s article, Custom Percussion Instruments, for publication, I tried to locate the instrument makers he had mentioned in the article he had published in Illinois Music Educator in 1968 — an article I found in one of Harry Brabec’s scrapbooks because his custom percussion instruments were mentioned in them. Michael Udow was also listed as a supplier, and after finding his email address on the Web I contacted him to see if he was the same Michael mentioned in Tom’s article. I was delighted to learn he had purchased some of Harry’s “Claws” in the seventies, and used them throughout his career. He wrote:
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Thanks for your note. I’m so glad to know that your husband was the one who made those claws mentioned in Tom’s article. Amazingly I had just sold mine on eBay three weeks ago as I’m slowly retiring from active playing, though I am in China right now on tour.
“I think I purchased those claws in 1970, my junior year at Illinois when Tom joined the faculty. Perhaps he’s the one who sold them to me, or maybe I ordered them directly from you folks; I don’t recall. But Harry’s claws served me well over the years as a substitute for brushes in numerous large ensemble settings such as the New Orleans Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera, etc. They were also very useful over the decades in interesting contemporary music chamber settings.
“I had a pair of the thinner claws and one that was a bit heavier gauge rod. They had nice wooden handles and the rods were bent at the ends, so I usually played on the bent curved edge so as not to mark the cymbal with the pointed ends.
“I did make bass drum mallets for awhile until about 1974, but then I got too busy. I just sold the several pair that I had left. However, my website, Equilibri.com, features a line of innovative percussion products made exclusively by my company, Equilibrium, in Dexter, Michigan.”
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MICHAEL UDOW was principal percussionist of the Santa Fe Opera from 1968 to 2009, when he retired. Through the years, he has designed and manufactured innovative percussion instruments and accessories used by major orchestras, service bands, and percussionists throughout the world. The above message was written while Michael was on a two-month concert tour to Asia involving master classes, clinics, and multiple-week residencies at major conservatories in Seoul, Korea and Tokyo and Kagoshima Japan, Shenyang, Beijing, and Shanghai, China, and Taipei, Taiwan. Throughout the tour, his compositions were being performed by both professional and conservatory ensembles.
