Frederick Morgan

Frederick Morgan (8 April 1940, Mentone, Victoria — 16 April 1999) was an Australian recorder maker and musician. He is best known for producing numerous Baroque alto and soprano recorders and for inventing the so-called "Ganassi" style in the late 1970s (based on one specific alto recorder in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien collection), arguably designed to accommodate the high note fingerings described in Silvestro Ganassi Dal Fontego's canonical XV-century treatise "La Fontegara." Morgan began playing recorder at twelve. In 1959, he graduated from the Melbourne Technical College and joined the Pan Recorder Company, a notable manufacturer of woodwind instruments. In 1964, Fred founded The Frederick Morgan Recorder Consort ensemble, which regularly performed over the next five years and released the 1971 10228381 LP on the Melbourne-based W & G label. In 1966, Frederick Morgan performed Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto with Carl Dolmetsch and Paul McDermott String Quartet at Wilson Hall. He also participated in the Melbourne Bach Festival, alongside Tudor Choristers and The Melbourne Chorale, and toured with his second wife, harpsichordist Ann Murphy. In 1970, Frederick Morgan won the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship to study recorder manufacturing and history in Europe; he spent the next three years traveling across various museums and private collections. In 1973, Morgan met the renowned recorder virtuoso Frans Brüggen (1934—2014), who purchased one of his instruments. (When Brüggen toured Australia with his Orchestra Of The 18th Century in 1985, he picked Morgan's recorder, instead of any of his antique instruments, for superior acoustics.) Fred Morgan opened his first workshop in Amsterdam in 1978, returning to Australia two years later and settling in Daylesford, Victoria. He died in a car accident in 1999; Morgan's atelier continued working, now supplying unfinished bodies (instead of complete instruments) to other notable recorder makers, like Nikolaj Ronimus and Jacqueline Sorel.