In the past few weeks, I’ve been turning to music as a way to think about how culture shapes our relationship to the natural world – or perhaps, rather, how nature shapes our culture. 

After attending a concert of a string quartet, I started thinking about the connection between wood and music, and, by extension, between trees and people.

In the previous episode, I talked to violin maker Brian Skarstad who taught me, among other things, that: 1. each violin, viola or cello is unique; 2. the individual pieces of wood used to make the instruments contribute to this uniqueness; 3. as such, for those who spend a lot of time with these instruments, they start to seem almost like persons.

The latter puts me in mind of my earlier musings on animacy. From Robin Wall Kimmerer, I learned that, in Potawatomi, as in many other Native American languages, nouns are marked as animate or inanimate and that non-human animals, plants and even stones are often marked as animate. In other words, they are spoken of as persons.

If violins were common in Potawatomi culture, I’m pretty sure they would be marked as persons too.

To further explore this wood/ music, tree/ human relationship, I speak with violist Judy Nelson who recently retired from the New York Philharmonic after 36 years.  

I visited her at her rambling Victorian outside of Hudson, New York, where she showed my daughter and me her garden, pointed out the spot where her resident heron usually hangs out and sent my daughter to “the best” reading nook, so she and I could chat.

We discussed the relationships musicians have with their instruments and what happens when a viola won’t “speak.” 

Violas and other instruments in the violin family are made almost entirely of organic materials, and, in the past, exclusively so, down to the glue made from animal hides and the strings made from guts. They are temperamental; they demand a particular style of playing; they are “happy” some days and out of sorts others. 

Listening to Judy talk and tell her stories, I couldn’t help but think that these instruments are in some way an embodiment of the relationship that is at the heart of my inquiry, between humans and the natural world; their wood cells vibrating and producing the music that gives voice to the most complex of human emotions.