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From Discarded Lawn Chairs to Carnegie Hall: The History of Woodstock Chimes

A lucky find

A trip to the landfill proved very inspirational for Woodstock Chimes® founder and CEO Garry Kvistad. While teaching at Northern Illinois University in the early 1970s, Kvistad had the opportunity to enroll in a course that taught techniques for making instruments. Not having a budget for his new hobby, he took a trip to the local landfill and hunted for scraps that he could craft into instruments. He discovered a pile of discarded lawn chairs and used their aluminum tubes to create his first metallophone, a percussion instrument similar to a xylophone but made with metal instead of wood.

Cultivated creativity

After playing the metallophone on tour for a while, Kvistad began wondering what other types of instruments he could create, particularly ones more people could play or enjoy regardless of their musical training. In 1979, his fascination with the Scale of Olympos - a 7th century B.C. Greek pentatonic scale modern pianos can't play - prompted him to craft a wind chime out of aluminum lawn chair tubes that could play the notes of that scale. He cut and tuned the tubes to match the exact frequency of the scale. This experiment laid the foundation of the just intonation tuning process he would employ when making wind chimes in the future.

Success that sticks

The Chimes of Olympos® attracted a fair amount of interest when Kvistad exhibited it at the Cincinnati Craft Fair. When friends and acquaintances continued asking for his hand-made wind chimes, professional musician Kvistad shifted his focus from building and tuning percussion instruments for other musicians to making wind chimes out of his home. He continually cleaned out the local hardware store's supply of 1-inch aluminum tubes to respond to the growing demand for these beautiful-sounding chimes.

Appreciation for Kvistad's precision-tuned wind chimes spread, and he was featured on NPR's All Things Considered in early 1980, followed by an appearance on the Today Show in 1983. By the late 1980s, Woodstock Chimes were being sold in all 50 states and distributed internationally. Two custom sets of Woodstock Chimes were commissioned for a special performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra commemorating the 100th anniversary of Carnegie Hall in 1990. Woodstock Chimes moved into its current 108,000-square-foot facility in Shokan, N.Y., in 1999. What started as a trip to the landfill and a creative experiment had grown into a major success story for the field of music.

Woodstock Chimes today

Today, Woodstock Percussion Wind Chimes are available in over 50 different styles, many of which are tuned to scales or melodies from various musical cultures. Woodstock Chimes are precision-tuned using a sophisticated computerized tuning process in order to achieve supreme tonal quality. The frequencies at which the different tubes vibrate are integrally related, thus producing the purest musical intervals. This unique tuning process sets Woodstock Chimes apart from other wind chimes in the industry and is one reason why Woodstock Chimes continue to be best sellers. From the first Chimes of Olympos, to those made today, Woodstock Chimes ring with a tonal purity you can appreciate the first time you hear them, and every time thereafter.