Wayne Hankin demonstrates the fingering of a crumhorn, a double-reed pre-classical instrument. Like many such instruments they were made in families of different sizes that could be played in consort. Mr. Hankin admits that they have been derided as “musical umbrella handles,” but is not ready to consign them to history’s junk pile. Photos by Joseph GresserNEWPORT — If Wayne Hankin had lived 500 or so years ago he would have been the most sought after person in any community—the village iPod.

“When a musician came to town, that person’s presence was as vital as the Internet.  These guys were like roving newspapers, they were highly respected,” Mr. Hankin said of his musical forebears.

Even today, playing an array of musical instruments that went out of fashion hundreds of years ago, Mr. Hankin’s talents are in high demand.

His career has taken him on an international journey with stops in Baltimore, Berlin and New York City.  It also includes years of touring with the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil.

Now it has brought Mr. Hankin to Newport, or at least helped to pay for a tidy bungalow overlooking Lake Memphremagog where he sat, Friday afternoon, talking with a visitor about his latest accomplishment, the creation of the concert film — 7 Solos.

Mr. Hankin traced his route to Vermont from his birthplace of Baltimore, Maryland.  He lived there with his mother, who was an opera singer.  Mr. Hankin said she chose to confine her career to Baltimore so as to raise her family.  He said his father was also musical and played in big bands, but added that he never heard him play.

His mother held him back from playing music, Mr. Hankin said, and he started late.

He said he now disagrees with her decision and believes that children should play instruments as soon as they can hold them.

“You should start children as soon as possible,” he said.  “They learn by example.”

If children see people playing musical instruments they will copy them, if they see people smoking cigarettes they’ll try that, Mr. Hankin added.

Mr. Hankin said he started singing in school, but became captivated by early music when he first heard it.  He said he got hold of some recordsMr. Hankin relates his story in his Newport living room. The glass sculpture in the foreground is the award he was given for winning the prize for best documentary short film at the World Music and Independent Film Festival in August. from Europe, and when he heard the pre-classical instruments he wanted them.  When he was in high school he managed to get three or four of the instruments, Mr. Hankin recalled.

By the time he was in college he was well on his way to building a collection that now numbers 300 or 400 instruments.

Mr. Hankin said he has never studied a modern instrument, only early ones.  He doesn’t play any viols or violins, but those he has mastered include the hurdy-gurdy, hammer dulcimers and bowed psalteries, in addition to the whole range of pre-classical wind instruments.

After college Mr. Hankin spent six years in Europe, where he honed his professional skills working in Berlin recording studios.  That is where he truly became a multi-instrumentalist, Mr. Hankin said.  Studio musicians were very generous with their knowledge, he said.

“We all picked up things from each other and passed instruments around,” Mr. Hankin recalled.

When he got back to the United States, Mr. Hankin began his career as a freelance musician.  He said got work in many shows because of his ability to play so many instruments.

“Unfortunately, when they hire me someone else loses a job,” he said.

Mr. Hankin said one of his recent jobs, accompanying The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Pilobolus co-founder Martha Clarke, called for him to play on 20 instruments.

He also served as music director for the composer, director and choreographer Meredith Monk for 15 years.  That, he said, opened the way for him to become a conductor as well as a player.

After years of freelancing, Mr. Hankin went on the road with Cirque du Soleil for four and a half years.  That was the job that allowed him the luxury of buying a house in Vermont.

“No one will give a mortgage to a freelance musician,” Mr. Hankin noted wryly.  He said he liked Vermont from the time he went to college in New England, and finds the state’s location between Montreal, where his girlfriend lives, and New York City, where the work is, to be a convenience.

Coming off the road after his long tour with Cirque du Soleil, he realized his publicity materials were out of date, Mr. Hankin said.

“I no longer looked like my photographs,” he recalled.

Mr. Hankin also realized that the world had changed and that he would have to provide prospective employers with more than a photograph and a compact disc.  Nowadays people look for a YouTube clip, he said.

The end of this train of thought was the creation, with cinematographers Jonathan Levine and Philippe Floyd, of 7 Solos, a 34-minute exploration of Mr. Hankin’s artistry.

The film is also a journey through musical tradition and Vermont’s natural and human landscapes.

Although excerpts from 7 Solos can be found on the Internet, it is a film that merits viewing in its brief entirety.  It is based on a concert program that Mr. Hankin had already performed extensively, in which he performed pieces on seven instruments.

Mr. Hankin calls these, and the other instruments that he has mastered, pre-classical, because their origin and period of popularity date earlier than the period, starting in the seventeenth century, that most people associate with “serious” music.

For reasons both technical and aesthetic, such instruments as the hornpipe, the trump, and the hümmelchen did not find favor with composers such as Bach, Haydn and Beethoven.  But Mr. Hankin demonstrates in his playing the capacity of these instruments, however simple, to make profoundly affecting music.

Mr. Hankin said it was easy to travel with the seven instruments featured in the film, because they all fit in a small case.

In addition to the three mentioned earlier, the instruments featured in the film are the four-hole clay flute, the baroque alto recorder, the double pipes, and the bone flute.  For most people, only the name of the recorder will be familiar.

When Mr. Hankin appears on screen with the trump, almost everyone is likely to identify it as the instrument commonly known as the jew’s harp.  The hümmelchen, likewise, is just a small set of bagpipes.

Most people think of a hornpipe as a sailor’s dance.  The instrument is exactly what its name implies, a pipe with a bell and a mouthpiece made out of an animal’s horn.  A vibrating reed creates the pipe’s plaintive sound.  In his program notes, Mr. Hankin calls the hornpipe an ancestor of the clarinet.

The bone flute, similarly, is carved from a piece of an animal’s leg bone, although it does not require a reed to make its sound.

Another whistle-type instrument, the double pipes are two separate instruments blown together, but held one in each hand.

Finally, the four-hole clay flute, in its modern incarnation, is known as the ocarina, although Mr. Hankin prefers the more historically accurate name.

In his film Mr. Hankin finds a different Vermont location to accompany each solo.  The first is played among the small forest of upside-down trees that stand as a legacy from the Phish concert in Coventry five years ago.

Mr. Hankin said he was particularly pleased to have filmed at the site, when he noticed that many of the trees have since been removed.  The film, he said, now preserves a lost part of Vermont.

In his second scene, Mr. Hankin dons a renaissance cap and motley tights as he plays his four-hole clay flute amidst the fall colors of Smuggler’s Notch.  He said he chose the location and the costume to evoke the paintings of Maxfield Parrish.

The Haskell Opera House in Derby Line played host to Mr. Hankin and his film crew.  There he played an Italian leaping dance, the saltarello, standing on the stage in Canada and looking out at the empty seats in the U.S.

Mr. Hankin traveled to Bennington to the Old First Congregational Church.  The building’s architecture complements Mr. Hankin’s solo recorder piece.

In a more playful vein, Mr. Hankin appears and disappears at the deserted Fellows Gear Shaper plant in Springfield while playing a sprightly tune on the trump.  The rhythmic character of the instrument is picked up and amplified by camera work that bounces from place to place around the factory grounds.

A more somber winter scene was filmed at the Rock of Ages quarry in Barre.  There Mr. Hankin, completely swathed in a black-hooded robe, plays a 13-century melody on the double pipes.

The film’s concluding scene features the bone flute, played in a familiar setting that underwent an electronic transformation in the film.  Mr. Hankin said he wanted to film in the Bread and Puppet Museum in Glover, but did not want to use it simply as a backdrop.

While the film doesn’t have a narrative thread, other than that provided by the juxtaposition of musical styles, it would lessen the impact of the film to say much more about the final scene.

The film has been well received, and in fact was recently declared the best documentary short film at the World Music and Independent Film Festival in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Hankin said, “I see the award as a victory for Vermont.”

The creation of a single film has not left Mr. Hankin satisfied.  His ambitions are much larger, and extend to finding a way to rebuild the waning audience for classical music.

The problem is that many people have no way of understanding what is happening in a long piece of music.  Explanations before or after the performance do no good, because it is too difficult to remember them and connect them with the appropriate moments in the music.

Therefore Mr. Hankin wants to make a film that actually teaches people to follow a score, without them suspecting what he is up to.  Mr. Hankin is confident that he will be able to get the film made, but was reluctant to go into detail about how his method will work, or even to reveal the piece of music he plans to use.

He was happy to talk about another project, which takes his musical expertise in a very different direction.  Mr. Hankin said he has been working with the medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on a way of using the trump to help people who have had their larynx, or voice box, removed due to cancer or other disease.

Mr. Hankin demonstrated how a person can plunk the instrument’s striker and form words with the tongue and vocal cavity.  The result sounds astonishingly similar to the high tech devices that many patients use to regain speech.

He acknowledged that the trump is unlikely to come into wide use in the U.S. or other wealthy countries.  But in the third world, such an inexpensive solution could be very helpful.

Mr. Hankin said he hoped to see projects started in India and Ghana.  An enterprising Vermont blacksmith might find a profitable sideline in turning out the instruments, he suggested.

These ideas reflect Mr. Hankin’s restless curiosity.  Several times during the conversation he spoke of his regret that various groups treat pre-classical music as a dead end.

In his own composing and his ability to extend what was once considered a safely buried part of the past into new areas, Mr. Hankin insists on claiming a place in the village square for his music.