Transcriber: Rhea Tsania Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Last year, Covid times,
I made a violin from scratch.
Now, I’m a professional violin maker,
so you might think I make all of my violins from scratch.
That’s not exactly true.
Actually, it’s quite an international affair.
Usually what happens is I get onto my computer,
and I order the very best Bosnian maple and Swiss pine from Germany.
I get ebony parts and fittings from India.
I get resins and dyes from all over the world.
Then I make my violin.
This time I went very basic and very local.
All of the materials in the violin came from within 25 miles of my house.
The five different woods that I used, they all grew right here in Sonoma County.
I made glue out of beef tendons,
I made varnish out of walnut oil and pine sap.
I made dyes and pigments out of grape skins, mushrooms, acorns.
In the end, the only things that didn’t come from around here
were a little bit of metal and the modern strings.
So why go to all this extra trouble?
Well ...
I wanted to learn more about my craft
and in particular about some of the things,
the basic processes that used to be common knowledge 100 years ago.
I also wanted to go local.
I wanted to learn more about this area
and connect a little more with the community.
So I used the redwood violin project
as a way to paint a sort of snapshot portrait of the county,
and the portrait featured some of the things
that helped to create and define a community -
so things like our history,
the environment, trade and commerce, and the arts.
The medium for the portrait
was a series of over 70 short videos that I made and shared online.
The video showed the entire process of making the violin
from collecting and refining all of the materials,
through all of the steps and building it.
I also did interviews with the skilled local people
who got involved in the project.
So in all, there are about over two dozen different raw materials.
All of them had to be refined or processed in some way.
When there was something that I didn’t know how to do myself,
I went out and found a local expert who could.
So we had sort of mini-supply chains developing.
So take for instance, the little tuning pegs -
those started out as manzanita trees.
The wood was harvested by a guitar maker who gave it to me,
and I brought it to a wood turner, Kalia.
She turned the pegs on her lathe,
and she finished those pegs by polishing them with beeswax
from a local beekeeper, and the beeswax had been diluted
or dissolved in turpentine that I made myself by distilling pine sap.
Lots of instances were like this.
So I used products from several farms, from butchers,
a distillery up in Healdsburg.
There was a paper maker and a calligrapher,
and some local marquetry specialists inlaid an image of a tiger salamander,
a local endangered species, into the back of the violin.
So one of things that really defines a community is its history,
and because I wanted the violin to represent Sonoma County,
I tried to include materials that had some sort of local significance.
This environment, this area, is sometimes known as the Redwood Empire
because the original economy was founded on the redwood logging industry.
So, the top of the violin is redwood,
and similarly, for the back, neck, and sides,
those are applewood from the old apple orchards around Sebastopol.
And I used walnut oil in the varnish because for about 100 years,
this region was a major walnut producer.
That started in the 1890s with our own Luther Burbank,
and he developed varieties of walnuts that would actually thrive in the climate.
The walnut era around here is coming to an end with John Frey,
not quite so famous,
but the last remaining commercial walnut grower in the area.
We interviewed him - he’s in his eighties now
and still working in the same farm that his grandmother started out
on Frey Road near Kenwood.
Of course, the biggest story around here recently been the wildfires,
which are becoming a major part of what it means to live in Sonoma County these days.
I very much wanted to have some token of the fires in the violin.
So, what I did was I made lye,
which is a cleaning agent that I use for processing sheep’s intestines.
I made lye out of the ashes of oak trees that had burned
in the grass fire that had just happened.
So making the violin was a lot of fun.
I did learn a lot, and I did meet some very interesting people.
In the end, though, violin is a tool for making music, so it had to be played.
I also used it as a way to highlight
the diversity of music being made in the county,
and I did that by making the violin available to anybody at all
who was willing to make a short music video.
And we got an amazing response to this.
The violin debuted with a local youth orchestra,
and one of its members, Gwendolyn,
wrote a piece specifically for the violin and string orchestra.
After that, we got everything from Vivaldi to Led Zeppelin.
We had house concerts, we had stage concerts,
we had living room jams, and kids busking in the streets.
We had Morris dancing, mariachi, zydeco -
all kinds of great stuff, very community,
just people getting together with music the way we always have done.
This is the Sebastopol Morris and you may not know this,
but they provide a very great public service:
Every year on May morning, they get up before dawn and they dance the sun up.
So here, they’ve just successfully ensured
that the sun’s going to come up again for another year,
and some joyful music and dancing broke out afterwards.
It was actually a very poignant moment for the project
because the violin is completely a product of the earth
and the things that grow out of it and the sun that powers the whole show.
It’s easy to poke fun at our ancestors and their quaint customs,
but they did seem to have had a visceral understanding
of our reliance on the environment,
and I think that’s something we’re slowly starting to get back again.
So here is the finished violin, the proud product of Sonoma County.
You can see the redwood top,
the applewood back and sides, and the tiger salamander on there.
So what’s going to happen to it?
At the moment, that’s difficult to say
because a violin can have a working life of over 400 years.
If you think back to what was going on around here 400 years ago
or even just 200 years ago,
it was a radically different place.
Who can really say what’s going to happen in the next 400?
Short term though, the violin can be donated to the youth orchestra
to help continue our tradition of community music.
Now we’ve got something very special for you:
You’re going to hear the violin,
and we have a piece composed especially for this event tonight ...
by a local composer, of course, Felix Herbst,
born and raised here, he’s now making his way in Boston.
His “Caprice for the Redwood Violin” is going to be performed for you
by another product of Sonoma County, 12-year-old Henry Miller.
So thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy this very local music.
(Applause)
(Music: “Caprice for the Redwood Violin”)
(Music ends)
(Cheering) (Applause)
Andrew Carruthers: Take a bow.
(Cheering) (Applause)