Features
A Guitar With a Guelph Twang
Ecologist-cum-luthier's current project strikes academic overtones - call it an ‘integrative biology' guitar
BY ANDREW VOWLES
 |
| A fish fossil, shell, ancient stone, windfall wood - they're all part of Prof. Doug Larson's made-in-Guelph guitar. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Start with chunks of wood salvaged from windfall trees. Add a tiny fish fossil, pieces of stone, shells of turtles and mussels, bits of ivory and ancient cedar — even mink penis bones — and what have you got? It's a made-in-Guelph guitar, one that its maker hopes will play music and tell tales.
For the past year, Prof. Doug Larson, Integrative Biology, has collected and crafted seemingly disconnected items into an acoustic guitar meant to evoke stories connected to U of G research and scholarship and to area history.
Glancing at pieces of the partly assembled guitar laid out on his basement workbench at home in Guelph, he says: “This is an instrument to talk about history. It's not just a guitar but a great storytelling device.”
An ecologist by day, he is an after-hours musician and amateur luthier whose current project brings his total of handmade “Larsons” to about 40 instruments. Like those earlier one-of-a-kind models — most of them still close to hand in his rehearsal and recording space beside the workshop — this new guitar is made of numerous items collected and stored away by this inveterate packrat.
But there's something different about this one. Most of its parts relate somehow to U of G, including items collected from several colleges on campus. Even for the pieces he's gathered from around the city or beyond, Larson traces their roots to Guelph scholarship in biology, physical science, social sciences and the arts. Call it an “integrative biology” guitar.
Or call it a Guelph-made version of the storied Six String Nation guitar. That instrument — built by Nova Scotia luthier George Rizsanyi from 60 pieces of Canadiana ranging from Pierre Trudeau's canoe paddle to Lucy Maud Montgomery's house — was brought to Guelph last year by CBC radio host Jowi Taylor to help christen U of G's science complex atrium.
Larson had organized that visit and a downtown concert featuring the Six String Nation. From there, it was only a short leap to making this new instrument, one with academic overtones.
Every part on Larson's workbench comes with an anecdote. He crafted the back and neck of the guitar from a chunk of a sugar maple tree that fell about a decade ago behind McNally House, former home of the dean of the College of Biological Science. Larson says that tree had been planted nearly a century ago by an OAC gardener.
The instrument's front sound-board is made of Norway spruce, salvaged from a tree that blew down last year on Johnston Green. That tree also had century-old roots, having been planted as part of an earlier planned arboretum for that part of campus.
For a woodworker, windfalls really are windfalls, Larson says.
Other pieces came from colleagues who sent wood from damaged trees: black walnut from a Brantford relative of Gord Miller, Larson's former graduate student and now environmental commissioner of Ontario; American mahogany rescued after a hurricane 10 years ago in Florida; and rosewood from trees felled by hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. (Those last two pieces came from botanist and collaborator Jack Fisher at the Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami.)
Larson made interior braces for the instrument's back from an American beech tree at Cruickston Park in Cambridge, where he's done extensive fieldwork with students for most of his tenure at Guelph. Heel and neck blocks on the front and the instrument's bridge plate came from butternut and plum trees from retired professors.
Other parts include American chestnut — evoking the American chestnut recovery project involving U of G botanist Brian Husband — and yew from the Parkwood Estate in Oshawa, former home of U of G Library benefactor Sam McLaughlin.
Larson could fill an hour's lecture talking about the guitar's decorative touches alone. Its purfling, or ornamental border, includes inlaid pieces of modern and ancient cedars that relate to his studies of ancient dwarf cedars. Normally he doesn't use ancient cedar in his guitars, but “I can't have all these stories to be told without the ancient tree story,” he says.
The decorative rosette around the sound hole is made from ultra-thin slices of bundled wood strips dyed with coloured inks and glued into place. They form a multi-coloured design containing a repeated “G” motif all the way around the sound hole. Also in the rosette are inlaid strips of metasequoia or dawn redwood — one from a Guelph tree planted by retired phycologist Joe Gerrath, the other from a tree that grew tens of millions of years ago in what is now the Canadian Arctic.
From integrative biology professor Ron Brooks, Larson got turtle shell scutes that he's glued together into a comma-shaped pick guard for the instrument's soundboard. Unlike so-called “tortoiseshell” pick guards made of plastic on commercial instruments, “this is real turtle shell” — or at least the translucent keratin that covers the bony plates on a turtle's shell.
Ornamentation and evolution meet in the guitar's fingerboard, which Larson is still fashioning separately from the neck piece. The frets are marked with rectangular pieces of stone and bone inlaid with epoxy into the wood. Among them are a piece of sandstone containing a fossil fish from the Axelrod Institute of Ichthyology, ancient pieces of slate from Chalmers United Church and limestone from Johnston Hall, part of a snapping turtle's backbone, deer bone and a bit of mussel shell.
As for the tiny penis bones he received from a zoologist whose class dissected minks last year, Larson plans to set those in the neck of the guitar.
Most recently, he came away from the OAC dean's office with a real prize. That leather desk blotter embossed with the OAC crest (and stained by numerous coffee cups) will make a dandy guitar strap.
Larson is still looking for U of G parts, particularly items that represent research and scholarship in academic units. (The guitar's only store-bought parts will be the strings.)
Still unnamed, the instrument may be completed in time for Larson's annual “Botany of the Guitar” lecture on campus in the spring. But maybe not. Having spent hours and hours on the project already, he is reluctant to rush to the end.
He has no idea how the instrument will sound, particularly because it contains some kinds of wood he's never used before. But it's what the guitar says, not what it sings, that will matter, he says.
“This is the most challenging and fun woodworking project I've ever done. Even if it doesn't sound good, it's going to be pretty. It's going to totally rock.”
Larson also plans to write a book about the project, including the stories and scholarship it evokes.
“It's an object as a lens to history. You see history through it.”