In the course of the last 200 years my ancestors were makers of musical strings, violin builders and manufacturers of woodwind instruments. My family boasts a tremendous amount of musical instrument experience and craftsmanship connected with the building of such instruments, both of which have been passed on from generation to generation and also steadily developed and perfected.
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The first member of our family who recognised the growing significance of the transverse flute was my great-grandfather, August Richard Hammig. In 1909 he set up his own instrument-making business after having acquired - as was the tradition – all the necessary knowledge and skills for his profession from his father. The incentive he felt and his ambition to make innovative improvements to the transverse flute were all-embracing and he was spurred on to do just that; he was later to receive international acclaim for his work in this field.

In the year of 1926, my grandfather, Johannes Hammig began his apprenticeship in his parents’ business, four years after his elder brother, Helmuth, had started learning the art of instrument-making in the family workshops. The turbulent times of the Second World War drove my grandfather together with his family westwards to Freiburg. The year of 1952 witnessed the founding there of his atelier for the building of Boehm flutes.

This newly-set up business in the West swiftly gained recognition from musicians of all nationalities. A great deal of links were forged in the music world and soon many of the best flautists and most influential orchestras became clients of ours, (e.g. The Berlin Philharmonic, The Vienna Philharmonic, Gustav Scheck, Severino Gazzeloni, Karl-Heinz Zöller, Roswitha Staege).

Following the retirement of both my grandfather and father in the 1990s, I took over the atelier for the building of Boehm flutes in 1996. As a result of the inclusion of my new ideas and the further developing of our flutes and head joints, I decided to rename the business in 1999 and the company then began running under the name of Bernhard Hammig.

Thanks to my good fortune of having at my disposal the combination of tradition with its handed-down skills and knowledge, a wealth of experience, expert craftsmanship and my ambition to create more out of my materials in order to enhance the quality and volume and scope of my instruments’ timbre, I can today confidently say that each individual instrument handcrafted in my workshops is to be regarded as a unique treasure and work of art.

My profession entails the carrying out of a living handicraft, a trade that brings alive its piece of art. When creating such artefacts, I concentrate not only on perfecting the form and functionality of the instrument but also on bringing to life the materials with which I work so that I can bestow upon each flute its own voice and its own individual character.