Sculpting Beyond Sound
The Baton Rouge cellist and educator Dennis Parker crafts whimsical sculptures with once-loved instruments.
“I guess I just enjoy the act of transformation.” Such a statement bears a certain profundity coming from Dennis Parker, a classically-trained musician credited with transposing works like Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola” and Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for the cello for the first time.
But when we spoke, the Yale-educated cellist was not talking about his lofty achievements as a musician. No, he was referring to the repurposed violins, plungers, pianos, discarded wood, ceramic cows, and cello strings in his shed.
A self-taught woodworker and sculptor of thirty years, Parker’s portfolio includes birds made of violins, lamps made from clarinets, cello backpacks, and a series of cockroaches made from just about everything you can imagine (scrap metal, cut up basketballs, and yet another violin). His desk at Louisiana State University, where he has served as the School of Music’s Haymon Professor of Cello and String Chamber Music since 1988, is an upright piano turned horizontal and covered over with glass.
“I guess I just enjoy the act of transformation.” —Dennis Parker
“Really there is no limit to what might go into these things,” Parker said. “Just about any piece of junk can somehow be rearranged or repurposed.” Trinkets and tchotchkes are gleefully sourced from thrift shops; spare wood rescued from the roadside on garbage day—all to be brought home to Parker’s shed and given a reimagined life.
“For the most part, I do this for catharsis,” he explained. “Just to wind up in this shed where I love to spend time for a certain number of hours at the end of the day, cutting things up and trying to make myself laugh a little bit.”
Music weaving its way into his practice was only natural, he said. “My mother is a pianist; my father is a violinist. I’ve been around instruments since the day I was born, and have always been inspired by their shapes, by their sounds, by their smells, just everything about them.” He emphasized he can’t stand to see unloved instruments sent to the incinerator, and frequently rescues them from music shops, thrift stores, and bored teenagers. “I try to give them a second life, using their parts and their shapes, which inherently are very beautiful.”
“When you do something like this, you can kind of look at it at the end of the day, and say, ‘Hey I sort of like that, and I can leave it alone. I don’t need to be critical of it. And if no one else likes it, there’s no problem.’”—Dennis Parker
The two worlds of music and sculpture collide in other ways, too. The weekend he performed Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote in 2018, he went home and created an eclectic effigy—incorporating various metal scraps, a tiny seashell, the scroll of a string instrument, and a glass eyeball—named for the poem’s chivalric namesake. “And just the suggestion for the title of that unbelievably marvelous piece of music was enough to make me want to pay some sort of homage to it in an artistic way,” Parker said.
More often, though, the materials themselves inspire Parker’s process—which combines intuition, whimsy, and impulse in joining disparate objects into a three-dimensional story of sorts. “I always try to find humorous ways to draw these things together,” he said. The “Antique Barbie Juicer,” for instance, is an antique juicer with a Barbie head attached, her hair held back by a claw clip. A violin’s body attached to a fishing pole is called “To Practice or to Go Fishing. That is the Question.” One of his music boxes is adorned by a white ceramic mule, with a price tag of $1.99 still attached. It’s titled, “Cheap White Ass Music Box”.
Then, there are the roaches: “People probably look at me like I’m some sort of freak,” Parker laughed. “Like, ‘Why the hell are you making cockroaches?’ I’ve made hundreds of them. But working in Louisiana in a shed, you have to learn to be almost oblivious to these cockroaches flying in and out the door. Over time, they’ve actually become kind of an inspiration, like we are cohabitants of Louisiana.”
A stark opposition to the strict, perfectionist world of music performance—Parker’s sculptures, he said, offer him an outlet that is purely creative and fun. “When you do something like this, you can kind of look at it at the end of the day, and say, ‘Hey I sort of like that, and I can leave it alone. I don’t need to be critical of it. And if no one else likes it, there’s no problem.’”
Even so, he admitted that he never really considers his sculptures “done”. “Very often, I’ll go back to a piece I made ten years ago and redo it. Most of these things are sort of works in progress. Always, you know? Like, forever.”
See more of Parker’s work at dennisparkerland.com and on his Instagram @dennisparkercelloetc.
You can also see examples of his work as a cellist and educator on his YouTube channel, including his recent project, "Vivaldi Virale—Double Masked: The Four Long Seasons," the first ever transposition of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" for cello.