This summer, the Sitka Chamber Music Festival will receive a special gift: a custom violin commissioned by a Sitka couple and made from wood harvested from the Sitka area. The artist who created the instrument calls it "the soundscape of the region."
Daniel Graham has spent dozens of hours in his Kentucky shop over the past six months measuring and monitoring the moisture content of wood shipped from Sitka. After the wood is dry, it takes another 300 hours to finish the violin and it joins the permanent ensemble at the Sitka Music Festival, where the best musicians in the world play, but Graham doesn't like living here. This part.
"The purpose is the tool," says Graham. "The heart of everything is the process or the concept, and I think that when people try to determine value based on time or money, they're muddled."
While most toolmakers are concerned about the types and treatments of woods they use, Graham favors the unusual. Last year, when Sitka couple Marcel and Connie Laperriere approached her about making a violin out of Sitka wood, she was immediately impressed.
"Yeah, I thought that sounded good," Graham said. "Anything that doesn't look like a regular violin, I'm all for it." You know, I love traditions. I think tradition is wonderful. But there is something to make your vision unique and original.
The family sent Graham a collection of local trees with their own significance: a 112-year-old Sitka tree from the original Stevenson Hall building, which Marcel LaPerry helped restore, and a piece of fallen rowan on the tree. A whale. island a few years ago. Cedar, hemlock and crabapple are also in Graham's toolbox. Violinist Connie Laperrere and another Sitka couple said Marcel wanted to support the festival and highlight the beauty of Sitka's forests.
"So when Marcel started thinking about it, it made sense," he said. "If we had a local fiddle played by one of these world-class musicians, I'm sure the sound would be unique and beautiful because these forests are beautiful."
Marcel suffers from ALS, an incurable disease, and can no longer walk or speak. The violin gave Marcel something positive to focus on, he says, reading aloud as his wife wrote her answers.
"Marcel wrote here that he needs the project because he is disabled due to ALS," he said. "So he seems like a man who can handle his current situation."
Over the past six months, Graham has become accustomed to the tree. Then he began to shape, scrape, knead and bend with his hands. Once a term is created, it continues to evolve, Graham said.
"We create it and play it so people can hear it for what it is," he says.
Because violins primarily use untreated wood, Graham says, it's impossible to know exactly what the final product will look like.
"These woodwinds will be a true picture of the sound from the region they come from because they don't sound like anything else," he said. “I think some builders don't do projects like this because they don't know what it looks like. That's why I'm so interested because I don't know what it's like.
Laperriere doesn't care about sounding traditional. They are overjoyed to learn that their lover is joining their beloved forest at a festival they have supported for decades.
"I felt like the Sitka Summer Music Festival was an incredible opportunity to showcase the woodwinds of the Southeast because it's such a unique world-class event," he said. "And the combination of the two looks amazing."
The violin will debut next June at the 2024 Sitka Music Festival. When not in use, the violin is on display in the Mini Music Center of Stevenson Hall. Graham hopes to integrate this instrument into the viola he plans to build next.
You can learn more about the project and follow the violin's progress on Graham's YouTube channel.
