UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2005

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A Fruitful Partnership

A New Kind of Farm a New Breed of Farmer

Dear One Absent This Long While

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A Fiddle True to its Roots

–Faye S. Wolfe




	Though the graceful katsura tree that once stood here on the Amherst green is now gone, its song plays on. Five Colleges Asian arts professor Lloyd Craighill fashioned the back of this fiddle from a scrap of the tree’s sapwood. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

THERE'S A JAPANESE LEGEND THAT the original katsura trees came from the moon. Returning to Amherst in 1877 from a stay in Japan (nearly as exotic a locale in those days), William Smith Clark, first sitting president of Mass Aggie and a botanist, brought home an array of plants and seeds, including those of Cercidiphyllum japonicum. One grew into the tall, graceful katsura that stood until last year before the Old Rectory of Grace Episcopal Church on the Amherst green. The church’s removal of the tree with the heart-shaped leaves—it was decaying inside—broke many hearts, although its progeny still grow around town. And in another form, the katsura still fills hearts with song.

Using a scrap of its sapwood, Lloyd Craighill, a retired Five Colleges professor of East Asian art who lives in Amherst, carefully fashioned a fiddle. It’s a United Nations of an instrument, made of Bosnian and Bohemian maples, Sitka spruce, and Asian ebony. The beautifully grained katsura forms the unusual one-piece back.

Last fall, the fiddle made its debut in a concert honoring Emily Dickinson; the musician who played it, Linda Greenebaum, described its sound as “dark and mellow.” The poetic theme leads back to Clark. Historian Ruth Owen Jones ’86G has postulated that he was the mysterious “Master” whom Dickinson addressed in passionate, unsent letters (see UMass Amherst, Summer 2003 - http://www.umassmag.com/Summer_2003/Dear_Master_478.html). Clark was certainly a neighbor and, like the poet, loved plants.

In his arranging of such Dickinson poems as “What Is Paradise?” for the concert, Craighill wrote the music so that the fiddle and the voice “would talk to one another.” If Clark was the Master, the conversation was long overdue; in any case, the katsura fiddle rings true.
http://www.gracechurchamherst.org/

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