The shaping of music, origin and identity

1.

A few weeks ago I held an unfinished acoustic guitar, still missing a neck, strings and fretboard, made of Birdseye Maplewood. This marked my first time ever holding a guitar-in-progress, and my first time ever seeing and learning about the existence of this uniquely beautiful wood pattern. Transfixed by its beauty, I entered a luminous spiral of memory, ideas and imagination. Here I’d like to jot down the thoughts that went through my spiraling head, unfinished guitar in hand, and what I learned later from the little journey this experience inspired.

What grabbed me right away was the simple thought that when you hold and play the guitar, you rarely think of wood, or the origin of the guitar itself beyond the brand and manufacturer. The two substances come to you as one; a unified idea, a finished product disjointed from the pasts and transformations that shape it. This guitar and all other guitars are experienced as slight variations from the prototypical guitar: a guitar, however cool it may be, is still a guitar. A continuity of understanding prevails, and your brain gets to be lazy and process all this stuff in the background, validating previous encounters with other guitars, hiding away particular histories and inconsistencies. And this is mostly great news for us, since you get to move on to more interesting things, like actually playing the guitar or writing a song. But now, having held this unfinished guitar, I could see that beyond this known object with a known shape lies into the beauty and magic of how stuff becomes something and the history of those transformations, which can only enrich future encounters.

Before moving on, here’s the brief backstory that preceded this experience and these spiraling thoughts. I went to visit the workshop of a custom guitar luthier in Burlington, Vermont, only a short car drive from where I live (and a long way from where I was born…more on that later). The visit was arranged by my friend Tom, and our guide was Adam Buchwald, founder and principal luthier at Iris Guitars. His studio makes wonderful guitars from uncannily wonderful tonal woods. Adam walked us through the process of how this happens; how these woods, and some glue and lacquer and knobs and strings, become rare and valuable musical instruments.

2.

Rómulo was born in 1878 in Longarone, a small mountain town in the Dolomites with a tumultuous history. The history of this place is truly something: it got its start when it was established as a municipality by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806. This is a time before Italy became Italy, as the Italian peninsula was still a fragmented region of not-so-friendly-to-each-other states.

Italy remained fragmented and at war with neighbors and foreign empires until the Risorgimento, Italy’s unification movement, ended in 1861, less than two decades before Rómulo was born, after Italian forces (and their allies) defeated the Austrians (and their allies) in battles waged in and around Longarone. For one more bit of historical set and setting: Rome, that mythical city with a history spanning 28 centuries, become Italy’s capital in 1870, a meager eight years before baby Rómulo came to life.

Unsurprisingly, Rómulo grew up hearing stories about his hometown being constantly at war; wars featuring German, French, British and, of course, Austrian imperial forces. Wars waged before borders were drawn and countries founded and established. In his parents lifetime, Longarone went back and forth between Austrian rule and what would later become unified Italy, with many occupations and invasions from the aforementioned European armies.

In his own lifetime, and to the best of my knowledge, Rómulo Feltrín never returned to his place of birth, which remained saddled with tragedy and chaos. In 1963, the town of Longarone was destroyed by a flood after the Vaiont dam – which, at the time of its construction, was the largest in the world – collapsed upriver, unleashing a megatsunami that killed 1,917 villagers. If you visited today, you wouldn’t know any of this unless you found the tiny memorial commemorating the catastrophe, since the town has been since rebuilt. The disaster, too, is clouded in dark mystery, since the root causes where never fully understood and ended up being attributed to, of course, God’s will, while authorities of any responsibility in one fell swoop. Interestingly, documentaries and docudramas with titles like The Madness of Men, The Dam of Dishonor, or Disasters of the Century have attempted to right this wrong.

In any case, the rebuild was only physical. According to locals, those who where there before 1963 think that anyone who arrived in Longarone after the tragedy are strangers, foreigners. And remember: all of this history has taken place – is taking place – in a tiny mountain town in northern Italy: an area of 103 km² (40 square miles), and a population of 4,073. If there is this much history per capita or per square mile here, imagine the history of the Roman Empire unspooling before you. I could only guess you’d be looking at an infinite mess of infinite threads towering over mountains and valleys and expanding beyond the horizon.

Then, too, I wonder what Rómulo would say if I asked him, if I had had the chance to ask him, where are you from? What was life like back home? And talk about what place or which nation he calls home, and what identities he may or may not relate to during his time on this Earth, and how they change over the course of his life. I wonder what people like him, born in the South Tyrol/Dolomites region or any other borderlands, think of such concepts as identities, borders and nationalities, and what they have to say about matters of origin and identity.

3.

Around 1910, Rómulo (now 32 years old) arrived in a new land that is not Austria nor Italy, but New York City. Soon after finding an apartment with his wife Teresa (born in Longarone) and daughter Eufrecina, an Italian friend mentioned the opportunity to start his own business in Central America. He traveled alone to go see for himself about this so-called opportunity, and things moved rather quickly from there: within two years he sets up a new company and workshop, and settles in his new home in Guatemala City, Guatemala next to the Penitentiary Bridge, which still stands to this day.

At the time, this bridge lies at the outskirts of a small but expanding city in need of his skills. And he gets to work. He shows his new clientele, still skeptical of this odd man of European origin, what he’s capable of: he wins over their trust and business by making custom, high-quality floorings, doors, trims and other carpentry projects used in aristocratic homes and office buildings. He has re-established his old practice, and perhaps is doing better business now than ever before.

As I find out more and more about Rómulo’s life, I’ve been pondering on how he goes about finding the best materials to work with, and what he thinks of what is available in this new land. How these Central American woods differ from those in Italy or Austria. If they are better, or worse, if they are vastly dissimilar or sufficiently familiar. He’s a craftsman, he can sense quality with his bare hands. And I like to believe he’s delighted with what he finds here, in a tropical country with abundant rainforests rich with wonderful trees: Mahogany, Rosewood, Guatemalan Mora and Dragonwood, amongst many others.

He has family friends from Europe scattered throughout the Americas. They are part of the reason he ended up here, in Guatemala City, and not elsewhere. He and his friends share a history, a language, and the kinship and camaraderie of some common origin, even if its just a story they choose to hold on to. They have migrated their lives along with old grudges, perspectives and ambitions, and they must adapt to what is new and what no longer holds here.

Many years after Rómulo’s arrival in Guatemala, my own father would tell me about a wooden clock we had hanging on the wall in the house where I grew up, in Guatemala City. I asked him about it after I myself visited Selva Di Val Gardena in the Dolomites region of Italy, about 2.5 hours northwest of Longarone, and saw the remarkable arts and crafts made by local carpenters, which stirred in me something like a visceral connection with this region, and also reminded me of our old clock. As it turns out, our old clock had once belonged to an old man named Rómulo, of whom I knew very little other than that he was a woodworker.

The only other thing I knew was that Rómulo Feltrín was my father’s great grandfather, one of my ancestors.

4.

Guitars are wonderful instruments. So are the materials they come from. In the hands of expert luthiers, the quality of sound they can produce is determined by the quality of the wood they are made from. To untrained ears and hands, this matters little. But this bit of knowledge opens the door to new understandings. A new appreciation is possible and available to even the least musically inclined amongst us.

Not just any kind of wood can become a great guitar, I now have learned. The quality across tonal woods varies greatly. And some types of wood posses special, sought-after incantations, their own tonal magic. Adam Buchwald knows this. In a way, he can hear a particular sound while it is still growing in the tree, where a new guitar may begin. This skill and intimate knowledge strikes as exceedingly cool.

After all, it is this magnificent, one-of-a-kind collection of rare tonal woods, stored in a vast warehouse adjacent to the workshop, that makes up the core of Iris Guitars. Adam has collected these wood pieces bit by bit over many years, often traveling far and wide to see them in person and assess their quality, deciding whether to buy them or not when they are still far from becoming a musical instrument.

It turns out there’s a wildly varied and intricate world beyond the Mahogany, Rose and Maple woods of North America. Black Locust from Africa, Ash and Pau Ferro from Brazil, Birdseye Maple from the exotic land known as Texas, USA and perhaps a hundred others. The options and variations are seemingly endless, the potential for unique sounds decidedly tempting.

The tricky part is that Adam must strike a delicate balance with these wonderful wood pieces: just like a jeweler counts precious stones as raw materials, he can sell his company’s inventory of raw woods for a pretty penny without the troubles and costs of transformation and labor. This tension must be present to some degree, I imagine, for stockbrokers and Bitcoin traders in their manic day-to-day. His accountants remind him of these perils. Adam ignores them. As much as he loves his tonal woods collection, his mind is already set on the next guitar build: in this case, a Languedoc G2, a storied guitar made famous by Phish’s Trey Anastasio and which can set you back anywhere between $20,000 and $60,000. Phish, by the way, has its roots and origin story set here, in Burlington, Vermont.

5.

Iris Guitars specializes in acoustic guitars. Every guitar is made by hand, from start to finish, right here Burlington, in the studio Adam has just shown Tom and I. Making guitars, it now dawns on me, is a kind of spiraling activity. Even as Adam and the folks at Iris are constantly experimenting and refining their process for making them, every new guitar honors a past, a history, and there is a contradiction at the heart of their very existence.

In a rare case of precisely placed and documented origin, the acoustic guitar we know today was given its sixth and “final” string by Vicente Espinel in the 1,600s. Which is to say that the prototypical acoustic guitar shape we know today has not changed much for more than 400 years, while the world undergone many a revolution. In a way, the guitar you may hold in your hands today is older than the airplane and the bicycle, and most countries and borders as we now know them, by hundreds of years. Every new guitar forges on bringing its history forward, stretching its reach across time and space from a point of origin.

This fact, of course, also implies a world of 5-stringed guitars existed before, and even a pre-guitar world, with no guitars at all. But/and something about its magic and mystery makes us feel like the guitar as we know it today was always there, waiting to be plucked out of the background sounds of reality. Suggesting, as if by a muted distant note, that this is the shape the guitar was always meant to have. Implying, even further, that humans have stumbled upon a discovery, not an invention. Which only complicates and enlivens these matters of origin, even when histories are strung with facts and historical evidence.

6.

Another man, Jorge, was born in 1964 in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 1939 his father, a German Jew from Berlin, fled to Bolivia with his family at the age of four to escape Nazi persecution. His mother is a Christian of mixed Spanish, French, and Portuguese descent. Jorge, as a child, would celebrate the holiday season with a Christian grandfather wearing a kippah at synagogue, and a Jewish grandfather dressing up as Santa Claus for Christmas.

Jorge’s parents were both doctors, and he, too, took to the medical profession as an ENT (Otorhinolaryngology) doctor. Until his late twenties, his professional life revolved around providing treatment for diseases of the ear, nose, throat, base of the skull, head, and neck; diseases that affect the senses and activities of eating, drinking, speaking, breathing, swallowing, and hearing. So far we could say that, although his family’s cultural background is decidedly diverse and mildly chaotic, his life is easy to make sense of, easily drawn as, a rather flat, predictable straight line.

7.

Growing up, Jorge had also been interested in music. As early as age 5, he took piano lessons, as well as learning music composition and dabbling in guitar playing. It was not until later in life, at which point he had spent all his adult years practicing as a medical doctor, that he recorded his first two albums. Those came out in the early 1990s, marking the start of his recording career. We might ask, at this time in his life: when did Jorge’s musical career and influences really got started?, and if his life’s trajectory is still best represented in rectilinear.

After all, he spent many years playing below the zeitgeist’s unreliable sonar capabilities: Jorge didn’t experience any kind of mainstream success until 2004 when one of his songs, “Al Otro Lado del Río”, was used in the film The Motorcycle Diaries and won the Oscar for “Best Original Song”. Though Jorge himself sang the song on the movie soundtrack, he was not allowed to perform the song at the 2005 Academy Awards, since “he was not popular enough”; Spanish actor Antonio Banderas and Mexican-American musician Carlos Santana sang the track instead.

If identity and origin are fixed, concrete and knowable things, Jorge is a kind of cultural anomaly. In fact, he is a monumental culture unto himself, an individual in whom too many cultures, races, religions, geographies, histories and professions blend together to shape someone rather improbable, and not easily placed.

And if that’s true for him, what about you and I, or the 122.6 million forcibly displaced people worldwide? What, in fact, are the rules and exceptions when we talk about being from here or belonging there, and how well can we actually know these origins, places, identities?

8.

The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fact that a coastline typically has a fractal dimension. This “paradox of length” has been studied by prominent mathematicians like Hugo Steinhaus, Lewis Fry Richardson, and Benoit Mandelbrot

Colloquially, to say “it’s just math” infuses authority, precision and reliable verifiability to a statement or fact. And yet we have here an example of messiness and imprecision when determining the length of a coastline, which depends on the method used to measure it and the degree in which high-level spatial information is abstracted and shown at a lower level of detail. While still within the powerful oceans of mathematics, we find ourselves far away from the shores of precision.

9.

To determine a point of origin is to enter a meeting place. A place to gather and chart a path forward from the paths already traveled. Whether brought about by chance, discovery or invention, a point of origin simply marks the beginning of a new form of continuity. Our lives, words, songs and identities have this in common. Their existence is not defined by their past, even as they can’t help but carry their pasts forward. They do so by merely existing, since the origin of anything suggests the origin of something else. They are shaped as spiraling fractals.

10.

The man named Jorge I have been referring to is best known to the world as Jorge Drexler, a renowned musician with an Academy Award under his belt. His music was introduced to me by a good Guatemalan friend of mine who first heard Jorge’s music while living in Chile. My friend now lives in France…

Jorge Drexler quickly became one of my favorite musicians. A musician who, by the conventions and cannons of the day, was not enough of a musician to be allowed to play the very song he composed, played and sung at the award ceremony where he was to be awarded!

I was inspired by Jorge’s wonderful TED Talk and tried writing these words in 10 “chunks” of words following the structure of the Décima. Something about holding that wonderful unfinished guitar made me think about that talk. My experience at Iris was wonderful and improbable, as many wonderful things tend to be.

What Jorge’s music and Iris’s guitars reminded me of was that deciding who we are and where we come from is an exercise of memory and precision, just as much as its one of curiosity and imagination. Music identity, origin….these are established by the methods, attitudes and timelines with which we decide to look at them. They bend here and there in surprising ways as we get to know them more intimately. Which means they can change as we ourselves change. I recognize this can be terrifying. But it can also be liberating.

I myself did not know about my connection to Rómulo, carpentry and Longarone until I found myself a 2.5 hour car ride away from there, in my late twenties, and felt something surge from within me that made me feel curiously, spiritually, at home. Clearly there is more than cool reason at play here. My hope is that this can be a gentle nudge towards seeing that there is no science without hunches and leaps of faith, and there is no me, or you, or here or there without some big assumptions. Towards examining them and find the courage to challenge the narratives and “convictions” we’ve spun up. Because there’s always more to the story.

Living in Vermont, from where I write this, I’m often confronted with the fact that I’m not from here. But who is? And by what methods have we established that? I am open, and more excited than ever, to see my own origin story evolve as life spirals on.

Acknowledgements

To Tom, for the invitation to explore guitar making.

To A, for the insight that nothing is lost, everything is transformed.

To my ancestors, for what they are yet to teach me.