Tracing the life of tonewood as it moves from mountain forest to concert hall.
words & photos :: Laura Keil
In a mature, cedar-hemlock forest, the uppermost branches of a lonely Engelmann spruce pierce the canopy. Its needles have browned, its lower branches are bare. It is standing dead. Yet inside its bark lies something magical: straight white grain, strong enough to bear harsh pressure, both qualities necessary for tonewood and exactly what luthier David Carson is looking for.
Carson, owner at Mountain Voice Inc., measures the butt of the tree (76 centimetres are needed for a cello), and once the tree is cut he examines the grain, hoping for straight, even lines with few knots—qualities more common in old, dense forests where spruce forego lower limbs as they reach for sun in the shade of giants.
Carson’s dad, Gordon Carson, a lifelong logger and musician, first learned how to identify tonewood when a friend of his requested violin wood in the late ‘70s. From there his reputation and business grew by word of mouth until his son David took over in 2019. The operation, still located on Mount McKirdy, is powered by micro-hydro on a nearby creek. Stashes of tonewood for piano soundboards and guitars, as well as cello, violin and viola tops, are all over the property.
“A squirrel loses track of 70 per cent of its caches,” David Carson quips, as he walks through a field punctuated by stacks of wood. “We’re not quite that bad.”
Aging the wood is important. The change in temperature, humidity and airflow helps season it. “You can either improve the tone by playing an instrument or you can leave it out to age naturally,” Carson says. “Many luthiers are looking for older wood because it puts them that much further ahead.”
“Many luthiers are looking for older wood because it puts them that much further ahead.”
Tapping to hear the wood’s tone is an immediate sensory connection to the tree’s innate ability to carry sound. Even a rough-cut board has resonance. In an age when music has gone increasingly electronic, wood still holds its own. Why do luthiers, musicians and tonewood seekers obsess over grain and density and more elusive aims like “flame” and character? It all begins with a tree. And a vision.
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It’s a cold February evening in Valemount, BC, and up a long-forested driveway guests follow music-note signage to the home of Ann McKirdy-Carson and Gordon Carson. The house, overlooking a great swath of forest, was built for its acoustics, and entering is almost like stepping inside a hollow tree—wooden floors, ceilings and walls, with railings curved like the natural arch of a tree’s unique limb.
This is the first time professionals will play a cello and piano made from the couple’s tonewood in this space, and in the double-height living room cellist Martin Krátký and pianist Paul Dykstra get ready. Krátký repositions the cello and looks over at Dykstra. For Krátký, this moment began a year and a half earlier when he tested a cello at a convention. That instrument wasn’t a fit, but Montreal luthier Lucas Castera offered to build one for him. Krátký was asked to choose the cello’s top, which serves as the instrument’s face and is a key element in the sound. From photos, Krátký looked at the grain spacing and straightness and selected a piece of Engelmann spruce from Mountain Voice.
“You want tight-grained, you want fairly regular, but not so much that it’s boring,” Krátký says. “So [mine] even has some bear-claw-like character—when the wood curves a bit on its own. You see the tree, the way it’s been growing. It’s just really alive, that piece of wood.”
Before Castera began work on his instrument, Krátký described his ideal sound: rounder, with a flame or vibrancy in the upper harmonic spectrum. And Castera set to work.
In his dimly lit workshop, side-lit so he can spot imperfections in the wood by shadow and silhouette, Castera uses planes, scrapers and curved chisels called gouges to shape the wood in three dimensions. All of it counts: the curvature, the thickness, the arching. It’s both an art and a science. Much like a sculpture, an instrument is as much about what you take away, creating the ideal open space and wood thickness for the sound to match the customer’s desires. Once shaped and glued, the instrument is tanned under UV lights and varnished.
When Krátký first saw his cello in person, the aesthetics struck him immediately. Castera, he says, is a master of varnish. “It was just really beautiful,” Krátký says. “And a lot of it is that spruce top.”
Much like a sculpture, an instrument is as much about what you take away, creating the ideal open space and wood thickness for the sound to match the customer’s desires.
Castera incorporated caramelized honey from his family’s farm into that final layer. His varnish—composed mostly of linseed oil and balsam fir pitch harvested himself from the bubbles on tree bark—is made the same way it was 300 years ago, using local products. “I like to use what is already part of my life,” Castera says.
Once the instrument is in the client’s hands, the luthier holds his breath. In the small world of instrument making, a luthier cannot afford unhappy customers. Even though the cello was commissioned and Krátký liked it, he was still given the opportunity to test it for a month before committing.
The following winter, on McKirdy Mountain, the ears of friends and music-lovers pick up the pleasing resonances of the local wood. McKirdy-Carson is radiant. “It’s super-gratifying,” she says. “The trees are singing to us.”
“The trees are singing to us.”
There’s a Japanese word, shin shin, that can refer to snow falling quietly and steadily. It’s ironic perhaps to name an instrument—which is used to create sound—after this phenomenon, but when Castera asked Krátký for a name, this is the word that surfaced.
Outside the house’s windows, snow falls gently. It collects on the crowns and branches of trees, a silent reminder of the natural forces—sun, wind, rain and shade—that drive the growth of the towering spruce trees that give their voice for music.
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