From old floorboards, tree roots and driftwood, West Virginia University professor Nina Assimakopoulos handcrafts flutes in the Native American tradition, then “woos the voice of the wood” into being through improvisational performance.
At this year’s World Flute Society Music Awards, Assimakopoulos received the Best Solo Native American Flute CD of 2024 award for her album “Sonic Bloom: Breath, Branch, Song.”
“Sonic Bloom” features flutes Assimakopoulos made from sources like repurposed flooring and barn walls.
“When I make a flute, I cut open a piece of wood, consider and study its grain and wonder what its voice will be. Because the wood has a voice. It remembers the wind in its leaves, the sound of rain and feel of frost. It has stories to tell,” said Assimakopoulos, professor of flute at the WVU College of Creative Arts and Media.
“I create the first hole and blow through it and hear air with no sound. I file and sand the opening, then I blow and hear a peep. I file a bit more, and suddenly a voice sings out of the wood. I’m wooing that voice into being.”
Assimakopoulos created her first flute three years ago as a gift to her river-running mentor Jim Snyder, a Preston County maker of wooden paddles who operates the company RivrStyx.
At her request, Snyder gave her one of his cherished pieces of wood so she could “return it to him in another form,” Assimakopoulos said. She then sought out someone who could teach her how to make a Native American-style flute, ultimately locating James Akins, a Columbus, Ohio, flute maker of Cherokee and Powhatan descent.
The tracks on “Sonic Bloom” were “through-composed,” or fully improvised on the spot, and no editing other than sound engineering was done to the recordings. Nor has Assimakopoulos ever recreated any of the pieces for live performance.
“I never know what’s going to come out of these instruments when I put one to my lips. In the recording studio, it was just like, ‘Here goes — what does this wood have to say?’ And then closing my eyes, taking a breath, hearing the sounds collide and bend, especially on the double drone flutes.”
Double drone flutes are wooden flutes with two chambers that can be played together or separately. As a classically trained musician, Assimakopoulos found the shift from Western flutes to Native American-style flutes, like double drones, revelatory.
The silver and nickel Western flute is a chromatic instrument that can play every note, while these wooden flutes are pentatonic, with only seven notes. Many novices give up on the Western flute without ever learning how to make a sound on it, but accessible whistle flutes like Assimakopoulos’ just require blowing into the mouthpiece for sound to emerge.
Assimakopoulos spent two sessions in the recording studio for “Sonic Bloom,” improvising 32 works in total before selecting 12 tracks for the CD and titling them. The remaining works went on her CD “Fallen Angels: Voices from the Forest,” which she recorded with Akins and percussionist Mike Vercelli, WVU professor of world music.
For each track on “Sonic Bloom,” she identified the source of the wood for the flute she’s playing. For example, the last four songs — “The Rising One,” “Weather Magic,” “Shapeshifter” and “Return of the Sun” — are all played on a flute she crafted from a fir floorboard given to her by her paddling mentor Snyder.
“Jim gave me a piece of fir that came from the steps in his home. It had 22 grains per inch. The pioneers cut this wood from virgin West Virginia forest at the headwaters of the Cheat River. They built a house out of it. Then they unbuilt the house and moved a little way down the river and built it again. Then, following the timbering industry, they unbuilt it, moved it, rebuilt it again,” Assimakopoulos said.
“Eventually this house landed in Ruthbelle, where Jim lives. Kids, grandparents, coal miners, timberers had been up and down its steps for 150 years. I turned the wood from one of those steps into a flute, and after I recorded on it for the album, I gave it away as a gift to my other mentor, Jim Akins.”
When Assimakopoulos performs live, she engages audiences in the music through themes related to nature and ecosystems, in what she calls “a genre-bending new form of music best described as eco-performance music.”
She said, “When I play these flutes in concert, I connect the environment the flutes come from to the audience through stories about the wood that I weave into the music.”
