Pipe Dream

Back in the days when David Faubion was a college kid playing a cheap set of panpipes at bus stops in Portland, Ore., he was gripped by an anxiety as haunting as the flute-like tones of his instrument: What if he should leave his panpipes on the bus?

Would a stranger alert the bus company? Would a stranger recognize these hollow tubes as the instrument of Pan, the impish Greek god composed in equal parts of man and goat? Would he realize the heights this odd-looking thing could reach, the spiritual depths it could stir?

To ease his fears, Faubion, a theater major without a rigidly planned story line for the rest of his life, took up the 7,000-year-old craft of panpipe construction. He sold them through a couple of music stores in Portland and at street fairs along the Pacific coast. Surprising himself as much as anyone else, he became one of the few people in the U.S. to make a living off panpipes--and the only person ever to move to Ventura County for its bounteous supply of a bamboo-like weed called arundo donax.

Marauding across stream banks and through dry riverbeds, arundo grows into impenetrable thickets 30 feet high, choking out other plants in its path. Come rainy season, toppled arundo clogs raging rivers, causing them to overflow. To ranchers, farmers, gardeners, and the entire public works establishment in Southern California, arundo is a relentless epidemic; to Faubion, it’s the raw material of music, and it’s ripe for the picking in Ventura County.

One recent morning, he hauled long-handled clippers and a battery-operated saw into a sycamore-shaded grove of arundo on an Ojai ranch.

“I’m its only natural predator,” joked Faubion, 45, a pale and whimsical hunter in shorts, sandals and blue socks.

He kicked at a fallen stalk, pointing out the moisture stains that marred it. He skirted a cluster of poison oak, reminded a visitor to watch for snakes, and lopped off a two-story-high reed bound for a nobler destiny as a set of baritone pipes.

Three wholesalers market Faubion’s instruments and instructional books to music stores across the U.S. Over the years, he’s sold thousands in sizes from baritone to sopranino at wholesale prices ranging from about $10 to $100. A Swiss company offers sets for as much as $3,000, but Faubion harbors no hopes of making millions in the panpipes game.

“Panpipes have always been popular on the street level,” he said, “but the critics hate them. Pan himself is a god that not everyone is crazy about. He’s the vagabond. He’d be the god of the homeless. Panic comes from Pan.”

No major U.S. orchestra has a first-chair panpiper. In movies, cowpokes sitting around the dying fire don’t play mournful ditties on their panpipes. But the instrument has its passionate disciples.

“There’s something so elemental, so pleasing about it,” said Brad White, a celebrated player in Honolulu with a number of panpipe CDs to his credit. “It pulls you back to a different time. It was probably discovered by someone listening to the wind blowing through the reeds.”

White is an accomplished flutist who, at 50, is dedicating the rest of his career to spreading the panpipe gospel. They’re not just novelty items, he said; a panpipe virtuoso can do justice to Bach, can play the most complex flute concertos, can create the most ethereal sounds in the musical spectrum.

So far, however, White’s panpipe evangelism has fallen on deaf ears. For reasons nobody can pin down, the U.S. is not panpipes country.

“Until I went to Europe, I was lost,” White said.

In Ventura County, Faubion works alone, following what he called “the intended path of the instrument maker.”

It started in the early 1980s, when he fled Oregon’s rain by hopping on his bicycle and heading for the panpipe-rich Andes.

He never made it. Struck by a car, he was laid up for weeks in Paso Robles. He spent the next few years on the Central Coast, working at a music store and seeking materials for the perfect panpipe.

He roamed Southern California for arundo. The area around San Luis Obispo was too hot and dry for it. San Diego had declared war on it. Los Angeles had plenty, but subdivisions and industrial parks made it inaccessible.

Five years ago, he wandered into the Ojai Valley, where the byways and creek sides were thick with arundo. He stayed.

His workshop is a dimly lit steel self-storage unit the size of a monastic cell. Its counters are crammed with the tools of the trade: saws, brushes, string for lashing the tubes together, an electric meter for tuning them. On the shelves, reeds piled in neat stacks dry out. On a music stand, a book is open to a piece by Vivaldi.

Squinting through arundo pieces to gauge the thickness of their walls, Faubion speaks of the subtle differences that can alter musical hues and shades and “breathiness.” Each year he makes more than 800 sets of panpipes, lashing together nine to 18 pipes for each, depending on the desired pitch.

From time to time, he tests out one of his finished instruments, grasping it with both hands and lifting it to his mouth like a musical corn on the cob. His guidebooks tell new players that the first step is to “shape your lips into a peaceful smile,” and that’s exactly what he does. The tones echo lyrically through the walls and down the steel corridors, into storage units piled high with everything but panpipes.

Most of his pipes end up in the hands of folk-music buffs who want something a little different.

“Not everyone just plays clarinet or guitar,” said Andy Shapiro, vice president of Barclay Music in New York, which distributes Faubion’s panpipes as well as a full line of clay ocarinas, Pyrex flutes and finger cymbals. “There’s a market for all kinds of esoteric instruments.”

In the U.S., the market for panpipes spiked in the 1980s when recordings by Georghe Zamfir, a great Romanian piper, were hawked as relentlessly as Ginzu knives on late-night TV. Panpipe purists derided Zamfir for stooping to show tunes, but Faubion tried to catch the sudden wave of interest in panpipes by adopting “Kristopher Faubion” as a professional name.

“I thought it had an Eastern European appeal,” he said.

Now that Zamfir’s star has faded and the music of the Andes is hot, Faubion has no plans to change his name to something more Peruvian.

He’s settled into his panpipe niche as Kristopher. The reeds of Hawaii are attractive, but he plans to stick to Ventura County as long as people around the U.S. require panpipes and the arundo in the Ojai Valley grows tall.

“It’s a jungle out there,” he said.