?Strike up the band!? is something middle and high school students in the public education system expect to be doing much more of now that some 60 brass and woodwind instruments have been repaired and put back into the system.

Lack of maintenance, wear and tear, and Bermuda?s punishing climate all combined to produce the pile-up of over 100 trumpets, cornets, tubas, baritone clarinets, French horns, trombones, saxophones, flutes and more facing Matthew Stohrer when he arrived on the Island recently to undertake an intense programme of overhaul and repairs.

A specialist in repairing woodwinds, and particularly vintage saxophones, both at Sam Ashe Music, a Manhattan musical instrument dealer, and privately, Mr. Stohrer was here at the invitation of Wendell (Shine) Hayward, the education officer for the arts at the Department of Education.

?As of this year, the Ministry of Education and Development has embarked on year-long instrumental programmes in the middle and senior schools, and in order to facilitate them you need instruments,? Mr. Hayward said. ?With budgets being what they are, we couldn?t provide brand new instruments to all of the schools, so I thought we could repair instruments that were already there and put them back in circulation.?

Given that Mr. Stohrer was only ?on loan? from his employer for one month, he wasted no time setting up his impressive array of delicate tools and other equipment in a former classroom at the old Berkeley Institute and getting down to work.

Surrounded by tables stacked with cases of all shapes and sizes, each of which contained an ailing instrument to be examined and assessed, his first step was to set aside all those which were either beyond help (in which case they would either be retained for spare parts or ditched), or too time-consuming or cost-ineffective to repair. Step two dealt with the rest ? the easier ones first, the more difficult to follow.

Normally used to restoring vintage saxophones, many of them very valuable, as well as professional musicians? instruments, the expert technician nonetheless treated his new ?patients? with equal care and attention.

?I have such a passion for this work,? Mr. Stohrer said. ?Musical instruments are really beautiful to me. Mechanically, they are works of art that produce another work of art ? music, which is extremely important to me. The fabric of my life, in fact. Getting to work with instruments, and be the person who facilitates music being made, is really all the reward I need to do what I do.?

Small wonder, then, that in the US the 26-year-old can easily spend 40 or more hours on a single instrument, and his work is so impressive that he is regarded as ?somewhat of a rarity? in his field.

?To the best of my knowledge, I am the youngest technician working in New York City, and probably one of the youngest head technicians anywhere. What I do is old-world rather than high-earning,? he said.

Passion may be one aspect of his career, but patience is definitely another, and Mr. Stohrer has plenty of that too.

?My work is extremely meticulous and time-consuming. In fact, the US Government rates musical instrument repair in the same category as watch repair and medical instrument technology. What we do is pretty much the same. We work with very tiny mechanical parts.?

To reach this Brooklyn resident?s level of expertise also requires years of study, training and experience, in addition to being a musician, which he is ? principally a reed wind player, but who can also play every instrument he overhauls to some extent. ?You are trying to take metal and make it produce beautiful music, which it doesn?t always want to do, so you need a knowledge of acoustic metallurgy, and you also need to be a musician in order to do it properly. The breadth of knowledge is great, and it takes a long time to get good at it,? he said.

?When I do an overhaul, a large part of my time is spent working with the customer trying to get the sound they want, which can be a long process. You are trying to speak in definitive terms about tone ? all of the physical qualities. Acoustics is one of the least understood. There is a lot involved.?

Since woodwind and brass instruments are made from many different materials, they are subject to various environmental problems. Brass bodies, for example, can corrode, as can the steel screws and rods which hold them together. Rust will also bind up keys, particularly on valve instruments such as trumpets, tubas and French horns, which must then be cleaned out, polished, and refitted so there is no air leakage and very little friction in order to play well again.

When it comes to brass instruments, Mr. Stohrer favours good sound over cosmetics, since removing and replacing lacquer to restore a bright shiny finish can lead to things fitting improperly.

?It?s better to leave the instrument looking nasty but physically intact,? he said. ?At the end of the day appearance means nothing.?

Turning to the Bermuda schools? instruments, the technician said he found many more problems than he would have expected, the biggest of which was a lack of servicing.

?A lot of them were long overdue for servicing. With the woodwinds it was pads and corks, while the brass instruments had dents and seized up keys, so since I only had a month, I had to pick my battles. I couldn?t spend 30 hours on one instrument, no matter how much I would have liked to.

?I had a mountain of instruments to fix and make work in the shortest possible time, so my main goal was to get as many of them back in circulation as I could. It was a very different style of working, and I learned a lot about that.?

So dedicated was Mr. Stohrer, in fact, that he worked right up to his day of departure, taking but one day off to explore the Island with his wife.

?Bermuda is just a beautiful, beautiful place and really a lot of fun ? after I got used to driving on the left,? he said.

?Everyone was really nice and helpful, and it has been a really great experience. I started off with a suitcase and a bunch of books and tools, and it ended up with 60 repaired instruments.?

Paying tribute to Mr. Hayward for his vision in making the overhaul project reality, Mr. Stohrer said he was leaving all of his tools and equipment behind for the Ministry to have, in anticipation of an instrument repair shop being opened.

?We have a couple of technicians on-Island to whom we can and will make this shop available,? Mr. Hayward said. ?Matthew has been sharing some of his expertise with some of us.?

Meanwhile, the education officer for the arts is appealing to anyone with old or unwanted instruments to donate them to the public schools.

?All of our schools now have fully-fledged music programmes, so instruments are always welcome,? he said, at the same time assuring that a portion of the students? tuition included the proper care and maintenance of their instruments.