‘People are really curious’: Saskatoon’s Weldon Gray reinvents ancient instruments

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In 2023, to celebrate Gray’s accomplishments and showcase the wide variety of instruments he has brought to life over the years, a group of Saskatoon musicians decided to put on a concert where everyone would play one of Gray’s rare instruments — harmonies bridging centuries, continents and traditions passed down the generations.

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As the concert date drew closer, Gray turned to multidisciplinary musician Anna Bekolay with a one-of-a-kind request.

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“Weldon asked me, ‘so, which one are you going to play?’ ” Bekolay recalls. “I didn’t know. So he said, ‘well, you play the violin, you know how to hold a bow — you can play the psaltery.’”

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As well as the violin, Bekolay regularly performs on piano, voice, and recorder.

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She had never even touched a psaltery.

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And — as far as there could be such a thing as ‘an ordinary psaltery’ — this was no ordinary psaltery, either.

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“The psaltery is an umbrella name for a lot of different instruments,” Gray explains. “It’s an instrument that the Greeks used to play: You’d set it in your arms, and they’d do poetry and play strings. And then people started to make them differently and started bowing psalteries. I found two pictures of a giant psaltery that was actually taller than the guy playing it, and in the 1300s, men were about 5 foot – that was a big man. So I figured, it’s probably about five feet tall.”

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The giant psaltery Gray asked Bekolay to play is one of the only instruments of its type that exists anywhere in the world today.

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“It looks like a little cathedral,” Bekolay describes. “I got it a few months before the concert and I played around with it, teaching myself how to play it. The bow is very different from a violin bow — it’s based on a more ancient style, so you can’t adjust it; it is what it is. And the sound dies away very, very slowly. You can’t go fast, or you end up with mud.”

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While he was building the psaltery, Gray had a loose idea of what the instrument would sound like.

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“Any time you get a piece of wood that’s big and hollow, and you make a note, it’s going to sound good,” he says.

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After hearing how good she sounded at the concert, Gray told Bekolay she could keep the psaltery — worth about $8000, Gray estimates — under two important conditions.

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“One, you’ve got to play it,” he told her. “Two, you can’t sell it. I don’t want somebody getting it who’s going to stick it in a closet. There’s a lot of instruments in closets, not being played; I want it to be used.”

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Since then, that’s exactly what Bekolay has done. She continues to experiment with what kinds of sounds the instrument can make and regularly composes new music for the psaltery, and occasionally brings it to performances in the Saskatoon area where she shows off all its rich, long chord progressions.

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“It’s all about looking for the possibilities within the instrument,” she says. “I get a lot of questions about what it is — people are really curious about it.”

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As for Gray, he says the instrument couldn’t be in better hands. From the first time he heard Bekolay play, he knew this was the right artist for the instrument.

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“I was absolutely thrilled,” he says. “It gave me goosebumps, listening to my instrument being played by such a musician. She’s making beautiful music with it.”

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