When I was 14, my dairy-farming father repurposed his airplane building skills and channeled them for the first time into building a violin. Remarkably, no-one thought any of that was weird.

Regular blog readers will recall a piece about the day my mother ran away from home in the late 1970s. She did that to get Dad’s attention. Despite his ability to ignore many social cues, her message was received: less time in his home-built wooden two-seat airplane that Mom wouldn’t fly in, and more playing a partner role to her. But what could he do at home that would replace the full-on preoccupation of flying, tweaking the plane, building a second plane - metal this time - and hanging out at the hangar with other aircraft-obsessed men?

Well, he pulled apart the violin he’d brought from England 30 years earlier and copied it. Then he found suitable wood and built a fiddle from scratch. And then he tackled another. And then another. And then a cello. And then a viola. And finally, finally a bass. And he took a few violin lessons to better understand the playing end of things. And he talked to everyone who’d ever played, owned, or even thought about a stringed instrument. And he talked to everyone else about it too. And 26 years later, he died while talking on the phone to a bass maker with a cello client in the basement. By then, he’d built 185 instruments for people in Canada, the US, South Africa, Italy, England, Wales, India, and Denmark and had self-published a book, So you Make to Build a Double Bass, for which my mother still receives royalty cheques.

With a father with characteristics that point strongly towards being on the Autism Spectrum, you find ways to connect where you can. Listening to him wax on about his obsession-du-jour was not enough for me, just as it wasn’t enough for two other siblings who learned to fly in the 1970s when he had airplanes on auto-repeat. At age 24, with a grade 9 conservatory piano diploma but zero experience with a fretless instrument, I asked my father for a cello and found a teacher. Knowing when Dad was delighted was a bit of a crapshoot but I think he was. I worked my way through a few of his instruments until he built one that really felt right for me. The body of a stringed instrument bears a label with the maker’s name, the year, and a unique number. Mine is #57 and was birthed in 1995 in the workshop of the house my father built for my parents to retire in outside London, Ontario.

After a couple of years of playing alone or duets with my cello teacher, I graduated to ensemble playing. Within just a few years, I played in four amateur orchestras, countless organized and ad hoc chamber groups, and in a trio playing weddings with my sister and my niece. My sister and I also attended the CAMMAC summer music camp for adult amateurs for several years. When I moved to Victoria, BC, for law school, I needed a musical outlet and found the Civic Orchestra. Civic was amateur but was littered with retired professional musicians. I also got a few paid gigs in chamber groups. Through the law school, I spent four months in Belgium on a volunteer co-op term at the European Commission. But I was much more motivated to play music on that trip. I rented a flat in a house owned by an amateur cellist and her bassoonist husband; joined the Bruocsella Orchestra, a full orchestra composed primarily of expats (largely Brits); and attended “Violonecelle 2004” - an all-day all-cello extravaganza, that concluded with 77 cellists playing Pachelbel’s Canon in six parts. A stunning experience! When I returned to Toronto from BC, I picked up where I left off with several groups. I even acquired a second Chandler cello strung with gut strings and joined a baroque chamber group.

Oh yes indeed - I am Peter Chandler’s daughter when it comes to full-tilt involvement in my passion! Until his 2007 death, my father and I chattered happily about playing and instruments: I felt a part of his world. I joined him on bass-related excursions - one to Roy Thomson Hall to record the measurements for him as he copied the basses owned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra bass section; another to the estate sale of well known instrument and bow-maker, Joseph Kun, at Toronto’s Waddington’s auction house. Dad beamed while bidding on well-aged quarter-cut instrument-worthy wood ready to have its flame unlocked by his craftsman’s hands. That night he basked in the memory of meeting all of Canada’s big-time luthiers, some of whom he already knew personally and others, only by reputation. Then he plotted how he was going to ship thousands of dollars worth of wood home and pack it all into his workshop. We were both silent on the issue of how my mother was going to view this unexpected expenditure. Instrument making provided bonus income to their retirement so while extravagant, he knew it wouldn’t affect their budget in a significant way. Kun’s widow had benefited from his purchase. He died leaving much of the Kun wood unused, moving the problem into a new widow’s hands. I kept playing for a couple of years after he died but while my sense of belonging in Toronto’s rich community of amateur players was part of my reason for playing, so was the connection it provided to Dad.

And then came Jack. And the house, dogs, garden, and partnership in the law firm - all things that happened between 2011 and 2018. There was no room for music. And so I stopped.

My cello sits in the apple-red hard case Dad bought for my flight to Brussels. Despite the downsizing I undertook to move to Chandlerville, I could never get rid of it. It’s the tangible evidence of my genetic legacy from Dad, one of 185 wooden siblings he produced in the last third of his life.

So to all those who thought cello-playing defined my extracurricular life, au contraire. It was just a symptom. It’s obsession that’s drives me and I’ve moved on to writing!

(above: a moment of levity as I played #57 graveside at the 2007 burial of my father’s ashes; below: with Toronto’s Counterpoint Community Orchestra, 2009 (look how dark my hair was!!); at a cello workshop in Sooke, BC, 2006; working beside my cello, 2023; painting of one of my chamber groups, 2005)

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