Cardboard kit builder gets thousands of instruments to children
By Ashley Ernst
David Magnuson grew up in a home that didn’t have musical instruments.
“I’ve always been a music lover, a collector of records … but I never felt I could play an instrument,” he said.
When he moved to his first apartment, his neighbor played mountain dulcimer.
“He said, ‘Do you want to play it?” Magnuson remembered. “I said, ‘I can’t play anything,’ and he said, ‘You’re wrong.’
“And in two minutes my life absolutely changed,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the wondrousness of the dulcimer. The dulcimer was immediately rewarding.”
Magnuson eventually started his own business making and selling harp and banjo kits. He started buying Backyard Music cardboard mountain dulcimer kits from David Cross, and in 1990, the two decided to team up.
“I did a lot of festivals for Backyard Music,” he said. “I was the worker. I was the bee. I set up the booth at a lot of folk festivals.”
Magnuson traveled to festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival, where he met a young boy who came into the booth with his dad.
“He really loved the dulcimer, but he didn’t know how to play it, and he wouldn’t try it. We talked him into playing it, and his face just changed.”
The boy ended up going home with a dulcimer and every year after that would return to the booth to play a song for Magnuson.
“It was one of those wonderful moments,” Magnuson said of watching the boy progress as a musician.
Backyard Music started in 1980 as a side business for music teacher turned computer programmer David Cross. His goal was to get inexpensive but playable instruments into the hands of young players. When Cross died in 2019, Magnuson continued his vision.
Teachers such as Hays Hendricks, a third and fourth grade teacher from Parish Episcopal School in Dallas, have bought hundreds of dulcimer kits from Backyard Music.
“I have them play dulcimer because it’s easy to be successful pretty quickly, and because the fretboard is a perfect visual representation of the major scale, showing whole and half steps,” she wrote in an email interview. “It’s also a novelty! Parents are always intrigued to see what a ‘dulcimer’ is!”
Hendricks has a classroom set of dulcimers for students to use. “Typically, the third graders make their own toward the end of the year. Those go home and can be used for home practice when the students return in the fall of fourth grade.”
Normally, fourth graders transition to playing recorder in the spring semester, but during COVID, both grades played dulcimer the full year.
Her advice to music teachers, “Do it! Don’t be intimated. Get some parent volunteers and have fun. There are plenty of books for beginning players. Find one you like and use it. I assembled my own curriculum, but that’s absolutely not necessary to be successful.”
Today, Backyard Music is housed in Magnuson’s backyard in Willamantic, Connecticut. He lives in a restored farmhouse, and his shop is in an 1890s barn.
That music can be made from just about any material, Magnuson said, “totally changed my opinion of myself as a musician. When I learned you could make music out of just about anything, I realized I could play music.”
That anyone can make music from just about anything has been one of the foundational premises of Backyard Music.
Purchase fully assembled, painted dulcimers from Backyard Music or build your own.
Find video tutorials for building Backyard Music cardboard mountain dulcimer, harp, and banjo kits at backyardmusic.com and on YouTube at www.youtube.com/@BackyardMusicSounds.
This article was first published in Vol. 48 No. 3 (August 2022). It has been updated and edited for online publication.