The Music of Wood

We’re playing an outdoor gala, a fundraising event where our small chamber orchestra is seated under an old oak tree, far from the bar and the buffet table. We are true background music while the attendees mingle, laugh, and enjoy the summer evening air. It’s pleasant enough, most of us have played this music hundreds of times. We’re getting paid well and at some point we get to hit the food table.

A few guests approach us and smile as we play Mozart. One waits politely until we finish and asks if we could please play an aria that Luciano Paparazzi sang. We look at one another, containing eye rolls. Our concertmaster for the evening apologizes and tells the nice man we’re not doing any opera excerpts that Pavarotti may have sung, so sorry. I file Luciano Paparazzi away for potential use someday. (I guess maybe now is the time.)

The posh donor crowd is 100% white and the hors d’oeuvres are all bacon-wrapped. We play for them as though the music means something, though we know we’re just there for ambience. We are professionals, though, it certainly means something to us. The next inebriated, bow-tied donor to approach us asks if we would please play the Taco Bell Canon. Rich they all are; erudite and musically educated, they are not. For our next selection, the strings do play the Pachelbel Canon in D. The guy smiles and waves his glass at us in thanks. While the winds rest, I take in the beauty of the setting. I think about the trees, the gorgeous grove we’re in, the big oak that’s shading us. All of those string instruments, violins, violas, cellos, basses – are made of trees, of course. Spruce, maple. My own oboe was once the part of the trunk of a tree growing in Mozambique or maybe Senegal. It was chopped down by some guys who shipped it off to France and tossed it in a shed for twenty-five years until some other guys came along and made it into this oboe, those clarinets, maybe some piccolos or the chanters of bagpipes. The tree was an African Blackwood, or Mpingo (in Swahili), renamed Grenadilla by the Portuguese explorers who “found” it.

I’m glad this isn’t a real gig. I play the notes along with my colleagues, thinking my thoughts about why we never talk about stuff like this. Most of us can’t wait until they unleash us on the leftover hors d’ouevres. We play pleasantly enough for the donors who are much louder now that enough wine has been consumed. They’ll be sitting down to dinner soon and we’ll be relieved of our musical duties. We will put away our instruments., our tools of the trade made from forests and metal. What if we’re just thugs, humming our notes out on our respective trees without the slightest thought that maybe the trees would have been better off if we hadn’t felled them for our art?

I’m in this weird reverie as I’m getting ready to play the Albinoni Concerto for Two Oboes (F Major, Opus 9, No. 12) with Catherine Henchley. We’ll stay seated, it’s not a concert, it’s a no-one-really-cares-and-no-one-is-really-listening thing and I’m surprised to be completely free of performance anxiety. I still want to do my best because that is what we always do. I put thinking aside so I can play my part, but there are those leaves flapping gently in the breeze above my head. I remember a 5^th grade project where we had to go around the neighborhood collecting leaves and identifying them. I glued my leaves down neatly, imprisoning them forever on black construction paper and sliding them into plastic sleeves which then piled up inside a big binder notebook, which I still have. At the end of the project, I was overcome with sadness about taking the leaves away from their trees. I told this to Mrs. Berger, our teacher.

“Why, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Trees have millions of leaves. They’re not going to miss one or two.” She took my binder and tossed it on top of my classmates’ and that was that. I looked it up. Oak trees have about 200,000 leaves. Taking one shouldn’t matter. But I felt it for weeks. My oboe is a different story. It was part of an entire tree, cut down for me to be able to play the Albinoni Concerto for Two Oboes with a person I don’t like very much. For bagpipers to play Scotland the Brave and for piccolos to play that infernal part in Stars and Stripes Forever. How many instruments did my Mpingo tree make and where are they all in the world right now? Mpingo/African Blackwood has been officially endangered (or “threatened” or “near threatened”) for years. What made it ok for Europeans to harvest these trees to make their woodwinds? Why is it any different to take wood for furniture or houses or paper? I look down at the oboe in my hands. You can see the wood grain in the middle joint and the bell. It’s beautiful. The only thing I can think to do is to make it sing now. To try and honor its life.