Origins
During his experiment in asceticism and living deliberately at Walden, Thoreau famously questioned technological developments as a reliable measure of human progress. He noted, “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract us from serious things. They are an improved means to an unimproved end.” Choosing the emergence of the telegraph as a particular example, he writes querulously, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The telegraph, however, reemerges in a wholly different light in his rhapsodic journal entry of September 22, 1851:
Yesterday and today the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly. I heard it especially in the Deep Cut this afternoon, the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid. I put my ear to one of the posts, and it seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music, labored with the strain—as if every fiber was affected and being seasoned or timed, rearranged according to a new and more harmonious law. Every swell and change or inflection of tone pervaded and seemed to proceed from the wood, the divine tree or wood, as if its very substance was transmuted. What a recipe for preserving wood, perchance—to keep it from rotting—to fill its pores with music! How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit this music!
Thoreau’s description of the “telegraph harp” effectively summarizes the functioning principles of all stringed instruments: a vibrating wire or string amplified by resonant wood. More significant, the idea of wood fiber from the tree being seasoned and then transmuted by vibration captures the essence of mature tonewood endowed with acoustical brilliance.
A lifelong flute player, Thoreau would likely not dismiss musical instruments as “pretty toys” meant to distract us from life’s important meanings. He celebrated the correspondences of nature’s songs and the most moving human ones. The master foresters, who have a rare instinct for finding the best tonewood trees, will place an ear against a broad spruce trunk and knock on it to detect “divine” musical potential within. The early autumn winds portend the precise winter moment for cutting.
Whenever musicians, luthiers, and foresters talk about great stringed instruments, they often use rapturous, even anthropomorphic, language that can elevate a telegraph pole to an aeolian harp. A single note from a great Stradivarius can rivet an audience. Violinist Rose Mary Harbinson once commented that the power of a sustained pitch on a Stradivarius “can take the audience by the throat.” Cremonese “golden age” instruments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were—and are—known to possess their own personalities. They could project even in a large concert hall. The spruce that voices these personalities reportedly came from trees in the Val di Fiemme, the Paneveggio forest in the Italian Alps that foresters sometimes refer to as “a cathedral of trees.”
The violin family of instruments, the piano, and the guitar evolved through a vast if sketchy network of influences from Africa, the Near East, and Asia. However, the refinement of these instruments—at least as Western Europeans understand refinement—occurred most notably in Northern Italy in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries with the famous Cremonese masters Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri, supported by papal, royal, and aristocratic commissions. Centers for luthiers and instrument making burgeoned in Europe, many associated with specific forest areas that offered rare Norway spruce and figured maple tonewood. Skilled artisans crafted these tonewoods into masterpieces that are still being played by some of the world’s most accomplished musicians. Some are on display in museums, where they are also played to maintain their responsiveness while affording audiences an opportunity to hear the individual voices of these instruments.
So where does your stringed instrument come from? Thoreau wrote, “Every swell and change or inflection of tone pervaded and seemed to proceed from the wood.” Your stringed instrument comes from a forest growing in strictly defined environmental conditions, and luthiers and musicians will tell you the wood is still living, responding to warmth or cold, humidity or dryness, making it at times unruly. For top-quality instruments, even the varnish is an elastic and breathing skin.
How a stringed instrument acquires its unique, even mysterious personality provides a complex story that includes numerous musical traditions, the works of composers and musicians who contribute to those traditions, the inventiveness and innovations of luthiers who strive to perfect an instrument’s voice, and finally the foresters who select and cut the music trees. Most important of all are the rare and vanishing forests that produce old trees and the wood that rejoices in transmitting music.
Jeffrey Greene is the author of five collections of poetry, a memoir, four personalized nature books, and a book of mixed genre writing. Read more.
This material has appeared in an introductory chapter titled "Origins" in Masters of Tonewood: The Hidden Art of Fine-Stringed-Instrument Making, Greene, Jeffrey. pp. 5-8. © 2022 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the University of Virginia Press.