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. Entry is deliberate: Jason Kostal came by way of a voicing class, a two-week working 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 arrived from university-level classical training in Buenos Aires 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: Ho Zen Yong builds in Singapore as Hozen and Avenir; Lars Rasmussen brought time with Somogyi back to rural Sweden after his Bourgeois apprenticeship; Mario Beauregard, invited to study after a master class, carried the voicing vocabulary home to Québec, where he now teaches 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.