Storyteller Guitar

By Doug Larson

Every object around us contains the history of all the people and places that brought it here. But rarely is that history explored. In this book, instead of breaking an object apart to reveal those stories, they are told by building the object a guitar named Storyteller from scratch.

The text and illustrations reveal the rich lives of the people, places, and projects that breathed life into it. The stories range from people who were pioneers in landscape restoration to those involved with automobile manufacturing. The places include the high arctic, tropical forests, and vertical cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment. The projects include stage plays, laser physics and the establishment of the first Canadian diamond mines. By bringing together these disparate stories in one musical instrument the book makes the argument that art, science, and history are part of everybody’s life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: May 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781459718296

Doug Larson

Doug Larson is an award winning scientist, author, lecturer, instrument maker, and musician. Now an Emeritus Professor at the University of Guelph, he spends his time lecturing about the union of art and science and uses the Storyteller guitar as the touchstone to this philosophy.

Book preview

stage.

Introduction

This book is more than a book about the construction of a guitar. It’s also more than a book about a guitar that is a copy of Jowi Taylor’s guitar and book called the Six String Nation. The difference is that while Jowi himself travelled vast distances back and forth across Canada to collect the parts for that guitar, in my case the parts came from all over the world and landed in one place. They were delivered by many hands over many years. It could have been any place — New York City, Paris, Vancouver — but it ended up being a small town in southern Ontario: Guelph. So this is actually a book about the stories that migrated here from the rest of the world and were then unified in the body of a musical instrument.

The goal here is to tell the stories of a guitar that took 2.5 billion years, six continents, thirty-five businesses, and sixty-eight people to build. The stories themselves are rooted equally in art, science, and history and, therefore, the subliminal message is that these apparently different parts of culture are actually part of the same human condition.

I’ve laid out the general body plan of guitars so that readers get comfortable with the nomenclature. Then, chapter by chapter, the stories behind each part are presented so that they come alive. In fact, the entire guitar is composed of a network of stories all rooted in the town where it was built. But just because the instrument was built in one town by one person does not mean that the stories only have local interest.

Like cities and towns everywhere, what appears to be local to the residents has spiderwebs of connections reaching out across the landscapes of time and space. Arctic tundra and lush tropical forests are represented, but so are businesses that started in Guelph, grew up in Guelph, and died in Guelph — never to be heard from again. Some of the pieces that make up the guitar are large with small stories while some of the pieces are small with large stories. They were what they were and in many ways the stories — as brief as some are — told themselves. For some of the individual pieces I could have written a whole book. I made the decision to cut them short for practicality. But the stories are still there and anyone who wants to can flesh them out on their own.

Both the instrument and this volume are storytellers. When asked repeatedly about the goal of the project I kept on saying that the instrument was a storyteller or talking stick in an aboriginal context. Soapbox might have been the appropriate name if the European or Western industrial tradition had been followed. But soapboxes or speaker’s corners give people opportunities to rant, so those types of labels just didn’t fit. But the name Storyteller did. In a way, I stole the idea for its name from Tom King, one of Canada’s — indeed, the world’s —consummate storytellers. The guitar visited Tom early on in construction and its label carries a woodblock print that represents his written contribution to the project.

It might not seem like a big contribution. I had originally asked Tom for an artifact from his writing like a pencil stub or a typewriter key or something mechanical like that, but Tom said, Doug I only use a computer so whataya want, a hard drive? He and I both thought about this for a long time, until we realized that for a bestselling author the best contribution would be text, and it wasn’t long before Tom realized that his love of turtles would speak volumes with one image.

During our conversations about the project, and listening to the beautiful way that Tom puts words together, my attention was drawn to his 2005 book The Truth About Stories. The truth about The Truth About Stories is that it’s a great book. But more important than that, it underlines an essential truth about our species at the largest scale: the future and the past only exist (really exist) in stories. Neither is real. The future isn’t here yet so isn’t real, and the past is gone and so it’s not real (anymore) either.¹

A profile view of Storyteller, the completed Storyteller Guitar project.

Tom King and Helen Hoy at work.

Ironically, that only leaves an infinitely small chunk of time called now and far too few humans stop to think about and enjoy the now because they’re spending so much time anticipating the future or trying to rewrite the past! All other critters are different because they (apparently) lack the higher-order consciousness that allows for the concept of past or future. They may have learning and adaptation, but not much in the way of recollection or anticipation. The population biologist J.L. Harper once argued that even the word adaptation is wrongly used in all of biology because the Latin prefix ad means to do something. Evolution only works on the basis of what has happened in the past; it has no powers of anticipation or prediction. Harper argued that the correct word that should have been used for the past two hundred years is abaptation (Ab from the Latin for from). Except no one could pronounce it! The only reason the word adaptation is used is because when people look at the features of a plant or animal we see how it could be used in the future, rather than recognizing that it is all a function of the past. In The Blind Watchmaker biologist Richard Dawkins² tried to make all this clear, even if I have not!

The label of the Storyteller. Tom King used a handmade woodblock to create the Storyteller’s label.

Stories are the glue that joins the future with the past through the present. Without them we’d be nothing. With them we are everything we think, everything we hope, everything we fear, and, of course, everything we love. Stories create images in our heads. They can make us laugh, make us cry, and make us reconsider who we are. I hope this book achieves some of that for you.

When the possibility of actually finishing the instrument realized itself on May 16, 2007, I began to actively recruit support for the work, but wasn’t sure of what the project really was. At every turn and with every new performance, audiences tell me that they are drawn to the thing and its components magnetically. They aren’t sure why and neither am I. But I think it might be because the instrument and the stories are us.

CHAPTER 1

Flesh and Bone and Wooden Characters

The guitar is the world’s most popular stringed instrument. There is no shortage of them. This book, therefore, might seem wholly unnecessary for it tells the story, or rather the stories, of the creation of just one more. So why bother? Well, that’s a story too.

You see, guitars spend most of their lives in their cases. In truth, most of the time they are quiet — almost as if they are dead or asleep. They only come alive if someone opens up the case and holds them in their arms. Then they can sing — they can make people laugh and cry, think and hope, get mad and get even. They are like a virus — they live and do their thing only when they infect people with their energy. The ultimate spy, the ultimate conspirator, the ultimate friend, and, I suppose for young people, the ultimate mating device.

The life of the guitar in this story seems vanishingly short — two years — compared with how long it took to make its parts. The little perfect Canadian diamond in the headstock took over 2.5 billion years to assemble. The dawn redwood in the rosette was a happy tree growing on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic forty-five million years ago, about the same time that the little perfect diamond exploded to the surface in a kimberlite explosion. The woolly mammoth ivory in the fingerboard was running around in the Arctic at about the time the first of many glaciers carved away the mountain of debris formed from the kimberlite explosion. The ancient cedars in the body started growing on the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment 10,000 years ago, about the time the very last glaciers left Canada for good.

On and on time slipped away until it was decided that all these bits and pieces of Earth’s history, biological history, cultural history, and artistic history should come together to make a single instrument that gives motivation to tell all of their stories. But what are those bits and how do they all fit together? Luckily for me, people have been building guitars for over five centuries and there is a well known set of terms for the different body parts, even if most players don’t know them. The first goal for this part of the book is to explain the architecture of acoustic guitars and give names to all the important parts.

The Parts

All guitars that have ever been built (there are millions upon millions of them, by the way) are made of hundreds of interconnected parts. Some have names and locations that need to be explained before any of this will make sense. The Storyteller is constructed of 3,562 separate pieces obtained from sixty-eight individuals and thirty-five businesses or groups. The common denominator to all these pieces is that they were delivered to my hands while I worked at the University of Guelph. This might make the cast of characters seem local, but that’s not the case. The cast comes from all over the planet, but they happen to have resided or worked here. Guelph was simply the home base.

I have cheated a bit in counting all the parts, since the decoration around the sound hole alone contains over 2,500 individual almost-microscopic pixels of wood. Even if we round off the rest to about a thousand that still includes over 600 pieces of wood and bone for the decorated edges and back of the instrument, leaving about 400 bigger pieces. And those bigger parts break down into a bunch of categories. At the coarsest scale there are just two parts: neck and body. The neck is composed of a main shaft, fingerboard (including inlay), truss rod, frets, side bindings, headstock (including ears, headstock veneer, tuning machine heads, inlay, truss rod cover, binding, and strap button. The body is composed of three main parts: top, back, and sides. The top is formed from one piece of wood that is cut in half radially to form a bookmatched pair of extremely thin panels. Likewise, the back is formed of one piece of wood that is bookmatched. The top has a sound hole cut in it at the end of the fingerboard, and the sound hole is decorated with a rosette. To protect the top from being scratched and abraded by aggressive use of a pick it has a pick guard.

Exploded view of a guitar.

The top and back are reinforced with braces. The top also has a bridge plate underneath the bridge and saddle. Bridge pins hold the strings against my bridge plate, and the strings themselves rest on the saddle at one end and a nut at the other end, near the headstock. To protect the edges from bumps, the top and back are inlayed with purflings (on the top and back facies) and bindings (on the side facies).

To make the back pretty, and to hide a major glue joint, it is reinforced with a backgraft on the inside and decorated with a backstripe on the outside. The sides are cut very thin and are also bookmatched from one long piece of wood that is bent. They are glued to the top and bottom by kerfed linings. A headblock attaches the neck to the body and a tailblock supports the endpin and jacks for the electronics.

The label tells everybody who made the instrument. It gets played in either the standing or sitting position and is supported by a strap with holes at either end. The strap for Storyteller is formed of two pieces of leather joined with a buckle. The instrument is stored in a case lined with fabric and padding. The outside of the case is fitted with protective bumpers and feet.

The Source

The instrument was conceived in a classroom at the University of Guelph. I had the idea that lecturing was more effective if people cared about the stories embedded in the lectures. The stories would carry the dreaded content and music made the stories more memorable. I decided to put the instrument together so that it would be the embodiment of a whole bunch of unforgettable stories that would otherwise just be content to be spewed back during final examinations. The idea was that kids who picked up and played the guitar would not be able to forget the stories. Perhaps a crazy idea, but universities are supposed to be filled with crazy creative people who just try things to see what works.

Universities are funny things and they do funny things to people who work around them. People love them and hate them at the same time. They love them for providing education and training (these are not the same thing), for providing new ideas, inventions, and products that make life better, but they hate them for the (incorrect) perception of five-hour work weeks, endless summer vacations, high salaries, and the worst thing of all: tenure! Cities — especially small cities that host universities — also have dual opinions about their universities. The university and its students can have the effect of taking over the town during the school year — leaving police and public works departments with annoyingly repetitive calls for less drunkenness, less debauchery, and less noise. At the same time, the same students and their instructors add immensely to the cultural fabric of the city in a way that is different from similar sized cities that lack a university.

CHAPTER 2

The Thefts

I guess I’ll start with the theft of an idea. Theft may be too strong a word but in both science and music participants have their favourite performers whose work they try to emulate. The act of emulation can end up making work look, sound, or function like someone else’s. It’s not actually plagiarism — it’s evolution — so I’m not ashamed. Culture (memes in the context of one of Richard Dawkins other books The Extended Phenotype) itself evolves by exactly the same rules of natural selection as genes. Good ideas spawn good idea babies. Bad ideas die.¹

Three people provided me with the motivation to complete this project: the first is mathematician Jacob Bronowski, the second is artist Cathy Gibbon, and the third is CBC writer and producer Jowi Taylor, who put together the Six String Nation project.

Jacob Bronowski did not invent the idea that our species must use art and science together to understand, interpret, and manage our lives. And he didn’t invent the idea that dogma is dangerous. But in his book and television series The Ascent of Man, he was able to show that knowledge of any thing requires all of the tools and ideas be brought to bear — not just some. Those who claim that their methods offer access to perfect knowledge are being perfectly ridiculous or frightfully dangerous, or both. Humility, when combined with joy, offers scientist and artist alike the ability to use their cultural skills to help construct, edit, or interpret beautiful, important, and precious things. This is true for the great theories of science, the great advances in architecture, and the tremendous productivity of agriculture. Bronowski was the one to teach people that:

Jacob Bronowski at home. Image courtesy of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, used with permission of the family of Jacob Bronowski.

Catherine Gibbon. Painting and photo by Lorne Toews and used with permission of the artist.

Jowi Taylor holding the Six String Nation. Photo: Doug Nicholson, used with permission.

the only dogma to defend to the death,

is the dogma that dogma must die.

Cover of On the Edge: Artistic Visions of a Shrinking Landscape. Used with permission of the author.

From Jacob Bronowski I learned that those who support art and science as separate solitudes actually know neither. They cut themselves off from gaining access to approaches to learning because they just don’t get it.²

Cathy Gibbon’s 1995 book On the Edge: Artistic Visions of a Shrinking Landscape, showed how the truth of the Niagara Escarpment could never just be captured in science.³

Cathy is an artist working in Dundas, Ontario. I met her while I was a graduate student at McMaster University. I had been trained as an ecologist and from the mid 1980s had been working all along the Niagara Escarpment. In 1988, while Cathy and others were using art to bring attention to the need to preserve the essential features of the Niagara Escarpment, I was trying to do the same using science. During that hot summer a number of events led to the discovery of ancient trees near Milton, far exceeding ages of trees elsewhere in the region. A year later my lab discovered that the cliffs of the escarpment supported the most ancient and least disturbed forest ecosystem in eastern North America. To this day, the antiquity of this forest draws awe — the trees include ones that germinated as long ago as 688 C.E. (common era), and some that are so beautiful in their contortions that they take your breath away.

Eight-hundred-seventy-five-year-old cedar tree growing on the Niagara Escarpment. Photo: P. Kelly.

Cover of The Last Stand. Used with permission of the authors.

So when Cathy — the artist — decided to write her book about the escarpment, she asked me — the scientist — to write the forward. At first I wondered why she had asked, but the more the two of us talked about the project the more I understood the unity of art and sciences. It all came sailing back to Jacob Bronowski. Incidentally, when Peter Kelly and I wrote The Last Stand (2007), the definitive book about the ancient forests of the escarpment, we asked musician Sarah Harmer to write the forward.⁴

This brings me to Jowi. There’s a full chapter on him, but another story has to be told so that the link between Jowi and me can be fully understood. There is this thing that some people have that differentiates them from their peers. They are not always aware of it, nor are they always happy with it when it’s revealed to them. It turns out that Jowi and I share part of this thing. We both like to take materials that appear to be out of context and valueless (i.e., garbage) and make things from them. The Storyteller and the Voyageur (which is the name of the guitar in the Six String Nation project) both are expressions of this. Both projects assemble artifacts of history and make something out of them.

So with the ideas of these three people stolen and locked away in separate compartments in my brain, this project began. But as you will see, the recruitment of the materials actually started a long time ago with Gord Miller’s free wood.

Gord Miller’s Free Wood

In 1977, I was twenty-eight and had been at the University of Guelph for only two years. One of my friends, Gord Miller, was a student conducting his master’s degree in