Katrina Cruess

Katrina Cruess ’12, ’15 has made a career of helping flutes sound sweet.

In March 2025, she opened Sweet Sounds Flute Repair in Bedford, New Hampshire, after 12 years of working at two of the custom flute makers that have made the Boston area a mecca for professional flutists, William S. Haynes Company in Acton and Burkart Flutes and Piccolos in Shirley.

A flutist who played piccolo and trumpet in the UMass Lowell Marching Band, Cruess majored in music education as an undergraduate. “I love kids, I love music, and to be able to teach kids music would be so fun,” she says. But before she could earn a master’s degree and teach full time in the public schools, she had her own child—a boy who was born over spring break of her senior year.

As she finished school and began casting about for a flexible job, Cruess’s high school flute teacher told her that Haynes, the granddaddy of Boston-area custom flute makers, was hiring. Cruess arranged for a tour and immediately applied for a job as a “finisher.” Soon, she was assembling handmade custom flutes with a starting price of $10,000.

“I would polish everything in the shop, assemble the keys, put in the pads, put in the springs and adjust everything until it played perfectly,” she says.

Cruess’s manager at Haynes was supportive when she decided to complete her master’s degree in music education, but she still had to finish two custom flutes each week. During her final months, she was in a classroom student-teaching from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. every weekday, working at Haynes from 4 to 8 p.m., saying goodnight to her son at 8:30 and staying up until midnight to complete the flutes and her lesson plans. “It was the hardest I had ever worked,” she says.

In 2021, Cruess took a job as a finisher at Burkart. Then last year, she gave birth to a daughter and decided to go out on her own. Now, she can clean and repair flutes while her daughter plays and naps in the same room and greet her son when he gets home from school.

“Even making brand-new flutes, you always have to problem-solve, and I really love that. Like, this flute is a mess,” she says, demonstrating how she uses cassette tape to check a flute’s pads for air leaks. “But it’s going to be super-fun to figure out how to make it play again.”

Cruess’s UMass Lowell connections continue to pay off, as her friends and former professors refer business—and bring in their own instruments. “You can’t run away from flute players,” she laughs. “They all go to the same companies.”

She plays every flute, to her daughter’s delight, to make sure it sounds sweet before she returns it. Her customers leave with a sweet taste in their mouths, too, thanks to the chocolate-making skills that Cruess learned during the pandemic: “When I give back a flute from repair, I give them a square of chocolate.”