Sitka’s chamber music festival will be getting a special gift this summer: a custom violin, commissioned by a Sitka couple and made out of wood salvaged from around Sitka. The artist who is crafting the instrument calls it an “audio portrait of the region.”
Daniel Graham has spent dozens of hours over the past six months weighing and monitoring the moisture of wood shipped from Sitka to his Kentucky workshop. Once the wood is dry, it will take him about 300 more hours to build the violin that will join the resident collection of instruments of the Sitka Music Festival, where some of the world’s best players may perform with it – but Graham doesn’t like to dwell on that part.
“The point of it is the instrument,” Graham says. “The point of it is the process or the idea, and so I think it kind of muddies the waters sometimes when people try and associate a value based off of time or money.”
While most instrument-makers are exacting about the species and treatment of wood they use, Graham embraces the unconventional. When Sitka couple Marcel and Connie LaPerriere reached out to him last year about crafting a violin from salvaged Sitka wood, he was immediately excited.
“I was like, yes, that sounds fantastic,” Graham says. “Anything that doesn’t look like a regular violin, I’m for it. You know, I like tradition. I think tradition is beautiful. But there’s something to be said for doing something unique and kind of authentic to someone’s vision.”
The family shipped Graham a collection of local woods, each imbued with its own significance – 112-year-old Sitka Spruce from the original Stevenson Hall building, which Marcel LaPerriere helped renovate, and a piece of mountain ash from a tree that fell on Whale Island a few years ago. Cedar, hemlock, and crabapple are also in Graham’s toolkit. Connie LaPerriere says she and Marcel, who commissioned the violin along with another Sitka couple, wanted to support the festival and also highlight the beauty of Sitka’s forests.
“So it just kind of made sense when Marcel started thinking about it,” she says. “If we could have a violin that was local, and have it played by some of these world class musicians, I’m sure the sound would be unique or beautiful, because these woods are beautiful.”
Marcel has advanced ALS, a terminal illness, and can no longer walk or talk. His wife, reading his answers aloud as he types, says the violin has given Marcel something positive to focus on.
“Marcel is typing in here that, as he became disabled by ALS, he needed a project,” she says. “So this seemed like one that he could kind of tackle under the current circumstances.”
Over the past six months, Graham has been slowly acclimatizing the wood and drying it out. Then, he’ll start hand-carving, scraping, sanding, and bending. Once it’s built, Graham says the sound will continue to evolve.
“We’re gonna make this and then it’s going to take people playing it to really make it sound like what it’s supposed to sound like,” he says.
Because the violin uses mostly nontraditional woods, Graham says there’s no way to know exactly how the final product will sound.
“It’s going to be a real audio portrait of the region that these woods come from, because they’re not going to sound like anything else,” he says. “I think some makers don’t really take on projects like this because they don’t know what it’s going to sound like. That’s the reason I’m really interested in it, because I have no idea what it’s going to sound like.”
The LaPerrieres aren’t concerned about having a traditional sound. They’re excited to hear a violin that joins the forests they love with a festival they’ve supported for decades.
“It just seemed like an incredible opportunity to showcase Southeast wood, along with the Sitka Summer Music Festival, because that’s world-class too, and unique,” she says. “And the combination of the two just seems kind of amazing.”
The violin will debut at the Sitka Music Festival’s 2024 series this June. When it’s not in use, the violin will be on display in the Miner Music Center at Stevenson Hall. Graham hopes to eventually pair the instrument with a viola he plans to build next.
You can learn more about the project and follow the progress of the violin on Graham’s Youtube Channel.
