http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/...-a-good-guitar
pic at link - Hari Sihvo, 45, will be representing Molson running the Olympic Torch on Dec. 18. (Dec. 8, 2009)
The healing powers of a good guitar
Mortal illness took music out of his life. But love and determination brought it back again
By David Hayes
CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR
Hari Sihvo, known as "the guitar guy" to many of his friends' children, is sitting in the living room of his comfortable house in Scarborough surrounded by stringed instruments. A 45-year-old executive with Molson Canada Inc., Sihvo is, like many of his generation, passionate about pop music.
He casually played in bands during his university years, and since then his home has seldom been without the sound of music. The married father of two owns a number of instruments – guitars, mandolins, a rare Vox electric bass from the '60s and an even rarer 1955 Gretsch Duo-Jet tenor guitar – and loves to host jam sessions with buddies.
When asked, "What's the first thing you played?" he picks up a particularly special instrument – a custom-designed Irish bouzouki, which is a variation on the more familiar Greek bouzouki, a member of the lute family. "I think it was The Guess Who..." he says, strumming the chord pattern for the band's hit song "No Time."
He knows the question wasn't about the first song he learned as a kid. After ongoing bouts of cancer and its after-effects, Sihvo lost three fingers on his left hand to the first knuckle and the tips of all remaining fingers and thumbs (in addition to all 10 toes). After first believing he would never play an instrument again, he has painstakingly worked around his disability.
Today he's battling a recurrence of the disease in the upbeat way he approaches everything in life and, on Dec. 18, he'll be representing Molson running the Olympic Torch along a stretch of Parliament St.
But it's to watch him laboriously form chords and make music that is a testament to the power of the human spirit and the significance music can have on our lives.
Sihvo was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, in the advanced 4B stage, in January 2004. He had his liver removed, which weakened his immune system and left his body susceptible to infections.
He later qualified for a stem cell transplant, so Sihvo and his wife, Alison, an ad salesperson, were hopeful the worst was behind them. Then, in May 2005, a severe case of Streptococcus pneumonia landed Sihvo in intensive care, where he fell in and out of consciousness as his body, beginning with the extremities, began turning black.
Frantic, Alison, who had just given birth to their twin daughters, Myah and Ella, and whose mother had recently died of cancer, watched her husband, alternately delirious and euphoric from the painkillers and antibiotics, singing songs by his favourite artists, such as New Zealand's Split Enz and its successor, Crowded House.
"I'd say, `Hari, listen to me, I need you to fight – promise me you'll fight,'" recalls Alison, a trim, 39-year-old blond with the soft remnants of a Potteries accent (she's originally from Stoke-on-Kent in England). "He'd say, `I promise.' Then one time he asked, `What am I fighting?' I told him, `You have a really, really bad infection and you need to fight. Don't forget, you have two babies at home.'"
Later, when doctors stabilized his condition and Sihvo learned that his fingers and toes would have to be amputated, he was devastated. Lying in the hospital bed facing the reality of his condition, he believed that he would never be able to play music again. Angry and depressed, he instructed Alison to get rid of all his instruments.
"He said, `I never want to see them again,'" she recalls. "He was heartbroken, hell-bent on selling everything. But as long as I've known him he's always had a guitar attached to him, like a limb. He used his music as a stress reliever. So I said, `Nope, I'll put them all away but I'm not getting rid of them. Down the road, you might want to try... '"
During his long recovery, which involved extensive rehabilitative therapy on his hands and feet, Alison found the absence of music deafening.
"Why don't you try picking up your guitar," she would say.
"I don't want to."
"But if you don't try, you'll never know."
Irritated, Hari would reply: "Ali, I'm not an idiot. You need to reach around the neck of the guitar. You need fingers."
One day, Alison went to the Ontario Conservatory of Music in nearby Highland Creek and bought him some lessons. But Hari put off going for several months. In the meantime, friends had bought him a small electronic keyboard and he'd spent $1,000 on prosthetic fingers made at Sunnybrook Hospital – but that didn't work either. "They were just clunky," he explains, adding that although he uses special orthotics in shoes, he's learned to manage with his fingers as they are. "And I'd never played keyboard before."
Finally, he went to the conservatory, where a piano teacher looked at his hands and said, "You're going to have a hard time playing a keyboard." Then he met with the guitar teacher, Virgil Donvie. He said, "One day you will play guitar again."
Startled, Sihvo asked why.
"Because I can tell it's in your soul," Donvie said, and gave him a small classical guitar with nylon strings to take home. Sihvo took it and awkwardly tried to form a simple, two-finger chord with his left ring finger, using his thumb to compensate for the other missing fingers. First he played a few bars of "No Time." Then a few bars of U2's "Bad." To his surprise, the soft nylon strings didn't hurt the tender stubs that were what remained of his fingers.
After playing with it for a week or so, he retrieved one of his favourite guitars from storage and discovered that with perseverance he could manage to play a D chord. Later he picked up his mandolin, which has a narrower neck than a guitar.
"The major chords on a mandolin are made with only two fingers," Sihvo says. "That's when I realized I could use my thumb and what's left of this finger to compensate for the lack of my other fingers."
One day, he remembered seeing the Irish band, The Pogues, in concert. One member was playing a bouzouki – a teardrop-shaped instrument, similar to a mandolin but larger, with a narrow neck and eight strings. A local guitar shop carried them, so he tried one out and bought it on the spot.
It was larger and more versatile than a mandolin and he loved playing it but, he told Alison, the teardrop-shaped body kept slipping off his lap when he sat, and because he'd lost his toes he couldn't put on a strap and stand up to play. "I just wish it was shaped like a guitar," he said.
In October 2007, with their 10th wedding anniversary a few months away, Alison had been wondering what gift she could give to her husband, especially considering everything he'd been through. A colleague at work told her about a luthier (guitar-maker) named Tony Duggan-Smith who had made an instrument for a friend. Alison arranged for Duggan-Smith to come to the house and he and Sihvo instantly hit it off.
"We talked for a couple of hours about instruments, but it was also a philosophical conversation about life and death," recalls Duggan-Smith. "It was very cathartic for both of us."
Making a custom instrument is a bit like a tailor-fitting someone for a suit. Duggan-Smith had brought over two guitars for Sihvo to try. One, with a seven-eighths size body, was perfect. But he faced other challenges. The narrow neck that Sihvo needed, attached to a relatively large body, created special bracing issues, and Duggan-Smith would need to incorporate ergonomic features specific to Sihvo's disability. Most important, it had to sound great.
Duggan-Smith invited Sihvo to his studio several times to see the progression from slabs of wood into a beautifully contoured, hand-made instrument, although toward the end Sihvo wasn't allowed to visit to preserve the surprise. The top is Sitka spruce (like the top Duggan-Smith made for one of Anne Murray's guitars) and the back and sides are North American maple. The neck is made from a piece of maple with a dramatic flame appearance in the grain that Duggan-Smith bought from a violin maker. And the fingerboard is Madagascar rosewood. The back is contoured, like that of a violin.
In the end, Duggan-Smith dubbed this bouzouki with a guitar's body a "gouzouki." When Alison presented it to her husband at their anniversary celebration in May 2008, he was ecstatic and spent much of the party playing music with friends.
rest of article in next post..
The Healing Power of A Good Guitar
