Inner Music: Not Looney Tunes
The Use of Trees
A tree can be made into many things--too many things,
unfortunately, more things than our ever-diminishing forests can bear--but surely a violin is a fine
expression of a tree's death--fine enough, at least in the hands of a skilled musician, to do justice to any dying.
My violin can sound mournful, it can grieve, or it can celebrate, all by virtue of thin
planks of wood from maple and pine trees placed in tension with strands of horsehair and strings of
synthetic cat gut. The whole, once again, proves itself greater by far than the sum of its
parts. When I play the violin, I imagine the source of the wood, the tree, resurrected, and I'm judged by
each stroke of the bow as well as by the strokes of the sawblade that cut into the wildness of the forest.
Let us hope that the bow strokes soften a little the whine of the saw in the silence of the trees.
(photograph
taken in July, 2003)
|Same Summer Musings, Part 8|
