Shape of Maple & Spruce

Leaf 105 – Reflections

 

This poem only really works through its reveal at the end; hence I have placed its title as a kind of postscript. I recommend scrolling down and giving the poem a read first, before returning to read the introduction which follows.

 

The poem was primarily born out of two experiences: The first was a visit to the house of my stepfather’s cousin, Bill, when I was a boy. He had a room upstairs in his house which was a very neat and tidy looking workshop – a very specialised woodworking workshop – where he made violins for a hobby. Bill showed us all his tools and explained to us the processes involved in shaping and seasoning the wood, and how he went about putting the various component parts together. It was a long and slow, measured and methodical procedure which took a great deal of time and patience. Listening to Bill and learning about his hobby was both fascinating and inspiring – I wished I could have a hobby which was both all-absorbingly meticulous and rewarding in its deeply devoted sense of craftsmanship and skill. Clearly making violins was a very specialised sort of carpentry, requiring genuine artistry.

 

The second experience occurred many years later. I was listening to the radio while in my kitchen, when a piece of music by Jascha Heifetz came on. I instantly stopped dead what I was doing and listened, entranced. What caused me to arrest everything and simply immerse myself in the music was something in the sound of the instrument he was playing in this recording, which had been made several decades before I was born; because weirdly I recognised the instrument. I am a huge fan of contemporary violinist, Akiko Suwanai, and in addition to owning several of her albums on CD, I have also heard her playing live on several occasions. What I’d recognised in the Heifetz recording was the same violin which Suwanai plays – the Delfino or Dolphin Stradivarius, made in 1714.

 

It struck me as remarkable, partly because the sound of this particular violin was – for me at least – instantly recognisable despite the extreme difference in the recording quality, and the different playing-styles of the two musicians. I can’t remember now if Heifetz was playing a piece of music which I’d heard Sunwanai playing on the same instrument, but it is very possible (Tchaikovsky perhaps?), and maybe this was something which aided my recognition – because all my life I’ve been told I’m tone deaf. Every time I tried to learn a musical instrument when I was a kid, I never got very far. I am hopeless at playing music, but this doesn’t stop me from enjoying listening to it.

 

At my junior school, when I was aged between seven and twelve, they always used to play us a piece of classical music as part of our weekly assemblies, and so my love of this kind of music may well have been seeded then. The two experiences described above also later led me on to read a book about Antonio Stradivari and all the theories as to why his violins in particular, along with those of some other contemporary craftsmen made at Cremona in Renaissance Italy, are still held in such high esteem as the paragon of violin-making. I’d long been pondering these elements, but it was a writing prompt on Bluesky (#Sensewrds No. 77: to write a piece inspired by, but not using the words: lyrical, sliver, velvet), which finally helped to bring an idea into fruition. And so, in this particular poem, I have tried to combine all these elements of musical inspiration. Creating a poem that, hopefully, is just as well-crafted in its use of words to conjure images, sensations and sounds that resonate with conceptual echoes and repetitions in the reader’s mind, which I hope might continue to linger and resonate long after reading.

 

 

Paper-like curls piling up and falling

softly from the woodworker’s plane,

releasing sweet scents of fresh-cut

maple and spruce; a finger gently tracing

the nap of the grain, soft and smooth

like silk or suede; well-seasoned wood,

methodically and pliantly bent and bowed

into a sinuous shape; layered, lacquered

and varnished in mellifluous accumulation;

of warm resin and soft beeswax, rubbed

and polished; wood slowly and steadily

assuming a sonorous shape and form;

a shape and form already seen and heard,

silently-voiced in the violin-maker’s soul.

 

A poem on the Dolphin Stradivarius, 1714

 

 

The Dolphin Stradivarius, 1714 (Nippon Music Foundation)

 

Jascha Heifetz - Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35: I. Allegro moderato (1947)

Akiko Suwanai - Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35: I. Allegro moderato (2001)

Photograph credits: PickPik & Nippon Music Foundation