The Somogyi school

Ervin Somogyi builds and teaches in Oakland, California, and the apprenticeships served in his workshop have become a defining route into the responsive, modern fingerstyle voice. Jason Kostal came by way of a voicing class, a two-week interview, and a thirty-month apprenticeship; Tom Sands — Somogyi's first British apprentice — passed the same two-week trial before two years in California and a return to North Yorkshire. Leo Buendia, a performing musician who began building in his hometown of Buenos Aires, arrived for a forty-month apprenticeship. Michihiro Matsuda and Ray Kraut carried the training into distinctive personal directions, Kraut by way of the Roberto-Venn school. The room's reach is unusually long for a single workshop: Singapore-based Ho Zen Yong builds as Hozen and Avenir; Lars Rasmussen returned to rural Sweden carrying both a Bourgeois apprenticeship and time in Somogyi's shop; Mario Beauregard, invited to study after a master class, carried the voicing vocabulary home to Québec and has trained builders of his own. Michael Bashkin studied with Somogyi and Harry Fleishman before opening his Fort Collins, Colorado shop in 1998. Michel Pellerin's 2011 voicing class marks the school's lighter outer ring. What binds the territory is not a house style but a way of listening — tops voiced individually, by hand, for response.