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What’s In Your Conservator Kit? with Rodrigo Correa-Salas

by Phoenix Magazine

These Hopi rattles feature symbolic cross-shaped designs and vivid natural pigments consistent with the northeastern Arizona tribe’s pottery and basketry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. by Madison Rutherford | Photography by Angelina Aragon Born into a large family of musicians and dancers in Chile, cellist

These Hopi rattles feature symbolic cross-shaped designs and vivid natural pigments consistent with the northeastern Arizona tribe’s pottery and basketry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

by Madison Rutherford | Photography by Angelina Aragon

Born into a large family of musicians and dancers in Chile, cellist and luthier Rodrigo Correa-Salas says rhythm runs in his blood. “I heard classical music from when I was in the womb,” he says. “I’ve been in love with music all my life.” In 2017, the Musical Instrument Museum recruited him to serve as its conservator, where he inspects, repairs and catalogs thousands of historical and contemporary instruments from around the world. “I learn something new every day,” he says.

Correa-Salas reinforced and rebuilt the cords, leather adjusters and calfskin base of this Civil War-era rope-tension snare drum.

A cabinet in Correa-Salas’s workshop contains replacement strings for more than 800 instruments spanning different regions, cultures and eras. “If it’s coming from Asia, it’s probably going to be silk, Europe used a lot of goat strings and Africa uses lot of vegetable fibers,” he says.

Correa-Salas keeps an assortment of organic materials – Mongolian horsehair bundles, python hide, bone glue granules – to ensure authenticity and longevity when refurbishing older instruments.

Correa-Salas uses dozens of chisels, knives, brushes, calipers, clamps and gauges to examine, clean, rebuild and restore instruments.

This funny money featuring Correa-Salas’s face was a gag gift from a colleague after he “started to ask for $5 to restore an instrument as a joke.”

Jazz legend Duke Ellington used this circa-1918 Kramer piano to compose some of his best-known works. “That piano was in his house for almost 30 years,” Correa-Salas says.

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