The Author

FOHNIKK was developed by Martin I. Ritter — pianist, organist, composer, and a builder of businesses in the musical instrument industry across more than four decades. The system is the meeting point of those two lives: the trained ear of a musician, and a builder's instinct for structure.

His musical life began with a gift. At fourteen, his grandfather Wilhelm Herget gave him an electric home organ, with lessons at Musikhaus Fischer in Schorndorf — and within a short time the boy was on stage at the house's Christmas concert, playing before a thousand people. It was soon clear the electric and jazz organ could take him no further. His place was at the classical piano.

At fifteen he received one, and with it a teacher: Ms Diegel of Schwäbisch Gmünd, of Lithuanian origin and exacting standards. Under her he moved at remarkable speed — within a year he was performing Bach, Chopin, and Debussy at her school's concerts — and alongside the piano he took up the church organ, the liturgical discipline set beside the jazz player's freedom.

After a year and a half she told him, in effect, that she had taken him as far as she could, and arranged for him to play for Professor Robert-Alexander Bohnke in Tübingen. He remembers the day exactly: the twenty-third of December, just past his sixteenth birthday, alone on the train with his repertoire in his hands and his heart in his mouth. Bohnke accepted him as a student, and it meant the world to him.

The world he stepped into that day was extraordinary. Bohnke was the son of a composer and a concert violinist, and after losing both parents as an infant he was raised in the Berlin villa of his grandparents of the Mendelssohn family — a house where chamber music sounded most evenings, where the greatest musicians of the age came to play, and where, by the Professor's own delighted recollection, Albert Einstein could be found among the evening's violinists. Bohnke's teacher, Vladimir Horbowski, stood in the Berlin circle of Busoni and Rachmaninoff, and what came down through that line to the boy of the Remstal was a discipline he would carry for the rest of his life: understand a work completely — its architecture, its logic, its soul — before attempting to master it.

He still remembers that Robert asked him to call him Robbie — a wonderfully warm gesture from professor to student. And he remembers the room itself, vividly, to this day: two grand pianos, one kept closed, one for the lessons; Robbie settled in a very comfortable chair to his left; and behind them, near the entrance door, a wall of books and records — among them a letter from Vladimir Horowitz, with a signed autograph. It was an atmosphere he will never forget.

Some lessons ran late into the evening, and he remembers with affection how Robbie, settled deep in that comfortable chair, would sometimes nod away while his student played — yet at the slightest irregularity, the smallest mistake, he would wake at once and show him what to do. The ear, it seemed, never slept.

The many lessons with Robbie fundamentally shaped his life and his working style, and they do so to this day. He keeps the finest memories of those hours — of what he learned, and of the man himself. Years later he sent the Professor a tie patterned with tiny pianos; back came photographs of Robbie proudly posing in it, and Martin was deeply touched. He studied with him until the age of nineteen, practising several hours a day.

At nineteen came the choice. Despite his love of music, Martin chose commerce — an apprenticeship at Radio-Musikhaus Barth in Stuttgart, one of the largest music houses in Germany, where an exceptional young pianist and organist was placed, naturally, in the organ department. From there a career unfolded through the great names of the industry, and reached its summit in a creation of his own: his eponymous brand of instrument bags and cases, which changed how the world sees the protection of musical instruments — no longer mere utility, but design, identity, and care for the instrument as an object of love. From a standing start, it reached musicians in more than thirty countries.

And through all of it, the piano never left him. There were few days on which he did not play, a grand piano stood at the centre of each of his homes, and even at the height of his business years he returned to regular lessons with a British teacher in England — because for him there is no age at which one stops advancing.

Today his creative life is broader than ever. He composes for solo piano, two pianos, and orchestra; he writes for chamber ensemble and voice; he creates sound installations conceived as sonic cinema — music built for the listening imagination. He writes stories, and he is at work on his autobiography. His artistic world is gathered at www.osentium.com, and the full account of his career in the industry can be found at www.martin-i-ritter.com.

FOHNIKK carries all of this within it: the ear formed at the organ and the piano, the discipline formed under great teaching, and a lifetime spent thinking about how musicians and their instruments meet.