Epic and Novel

"Have you seen how full the store is with cakes and candies and cookies?" M. said. "All for Christmas. But they're not just all in one aisle, they're everywhere...."

"I know, " I said. "They're all over. Leaping out and thwarting your well-intentioned way to the check-out... The aisles of cake closing in on you and the shopping cart--like the Clashing Rocks menacing Jason and the Argonauts..."

"Are you all right? I thought I detected a kind of cynicism in you tonight...?"

"What, me? No. Oh no, I was getting quite into that. Modern day epic in the grocery store. Maybe I sounded a bit cheesed off earlier, it wasn't the most productive of days. But this conversation's been quite funny."

"Oh, ok. Maybe it's me."

"You and your self-conscious reflection rupturing my supermarket epic... I dunno. Modern folk, eh. But are you all right?"

* * * *

We were in Fatapples in El Cerrito later that night. I was drinking an olallieberry milkshake (rather, I should say I was eating it, as the milkshake will support an upright spoon for at least half an hour) and talking to my cellist and composer friend M.

We are both prone to idealism. The subject of the Wikileaks cables came up.

"I don't understand," I said, "why there has to be so many secrets that have to be kept. If the world was different, these secrets wouldn't exist, they wouldn't have to exist if things were harmonious and honest and undesigning."

"The problem began," M. said, "when people stopped singing."

* * * *

I have often thought that if M. lived in another age he'd be a kind of Singer of Tales. He's a storyteller and an improviser. I heard him play the Kodály Cello Sonata once -- with all the melancholy of fascination for disappearing folk song.


* * * *

Tolstoy, the Tram, the Cockerel, and Twitter

7th November marks the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death. What a remarkable instance it is of patterns extending from art into life that Tolstoy--whose Anna Karenina, at the end of a novel where the railroad is surrounded by dark omens, falls, clutching her red bag, under a train --should die, of all places, at a railway station.


The pianist Alexander Gol'denveizer recorded this episode from 1896:

Once I met Lev Nikolaevich [Tolstoy] in the street. He again asked me to walk with him. We were somewhere near the Novinsky Boulevard, and Lev Nikolaevich suggested we should take the [horse-drawn] tram. We sat down and took our tickets.

Lev Nikolaevich asked me:
"Can you make a Japanese cockerel?"

"No."

"Look."

Tolstoy took his ticket and very skillfully made it into a rather elaborate cockerel, which, when you pulled its tail, fluttered its wings.

An inspector entered the car and began checking the tickets. L.N., with a smile, held out the cockerel to him and pulled its tail. The cockerel fluttered its wings. But the inspector, with the stern expression of a business man who has no time for trifling, took the cockerel, unfolded it, looked at the number, and tore it up.


L.N. looked at me and said:


"Now our little cockerel is gone..."


-- A. B. Gol'denveizer, Vblizi Tolstogo / Talks with Tolstoi, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (1923)

Tolstoy was on a horse-drawn street car towards the end of his life, but Virginia Woolf (who aided in the editing of these translations and had tried, together with her husband, to learn Russian to collaborate with their friend 'Kot') was a member of what Walter Benjamin called "the generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar”--that is, those who had been subjected to the rapid political and quotidian upheavals of the turn of the century—war, revolution, urban modernity. Never, before this generation, had “experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”

But Tolstoy died in almost modern times too. The week of his final sickness and death at the train station at Astapovo was reported with all the obsessiveness of the Twitter update: more than 1000 telegraphs were sent during that week. (For more on the death of Tolstoy as Russia's first great mass-media event, see William Nickell's marvellous new book).

* * *
Here is a recording of Tolstoy's one alleged musical composition, a waltz for piano. It was apparently written down when Tolstoy played it for Gol'denveizer at Yasnaya Polyana in 1906.

The bloggeur goes live

A rainy Saturday night with nothing better to do, so I decide to make use of the video function on my camera and record myself playing the cello... This was, by turns, a novelty, somewhat sobering, and ultimately quite instructive. And will make a good virtual postcard to send to my parents, who have never heard anything of the new hobby other than my raving about it.

The first attempt was truly terrible. None of the notes seemed joined up. And when you correct yourself while playing, it's as if you only hear the corrected version--the one that was in your head all along anyway--whereas this, oh wisdom of ages, is not what the recording apparatus hears. Nor what we hear when we listen the apparatus's recording, oh no. My first reaction was one of embarrassment. (Embarrassment has been a preoccupation of the pen lately, as well as pertaining momentarily to the cello: I've been trying to turn visceral cringe into discursive analysis to describe that awful sense of embarrassment we often experience on seeing Dostoevsky's characters conduct themselves so appallingly, careering towards inevitable breaking points in front of the motley crowds that fill the drawing rooms and dachas and--speaking of music--would-be decorous concert venues of The Idiot)

Darwin concluded The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) with a chapter on blushing, and observed that man does not blush before God, but only before his fellow men. Well, there were no fellow men (the long-suffering neighbours were away) to hear these efforts, but if I didn't blush, I certainly cringed. It wasn't that I was under delusions as to the truth of the cello-playing matter, but for just an instant I felt a touch foolish for investing so much time, so much earnestness, so much enthusiasm...to produce such fragile results! (Especially when there are things like finishing the dissertation and finding gainful employment to focus one's energies upon). But those thoughts quickly vanished, for nothing detracts from the enjoyment of the process, the small wonders it yields to me, or all the humility and dignity involved in the well-meant efforts (all of which are more of a strength-giving solace than distraction, I maintain, in the face of the finding gainful employment trials). My friends' good-natured enthusiasm when I posted the video on my facebook page was quite touching.

Forcing myself to watch the first clip again, though, I could see, for the first time really, that my arms and hands were definitely not doing the things they were supposed to be doing, the things my teacher kept on about. It hardly needs saying, but, somewhat like Olympic gymnastics or triple-axle-double-toeloop combos, this cello malarky is not as easy as it looks, folks... There are a million different things that can be just not quite right...nuances of postion, motion, tension. So I tried again, again and again...trying to correct some of the things that looked so wrong. Definitely didn't catch them all, but my suddenly oh so long arm no longer looks like it's floating around in space quite so wildly, and dropping my elbow seemed like it made for better connection with the strings. At the next day's lesson Matthew proclaimed he detected a new kind of consciousness in the connection to and control over my bow arm -- this can only be good, surely! And in the meantime, live in my kitchen, complete with wonky rhythms, awkwardnesses and general unrefinement of sound is a subsequent, marginally improved take of the Arioso from Bach's Cantata #156...

(it was not deliberate to chop my head out of the frame; as the amateur improves, so will we endeavour to improve our command of the technology)

Translations

In the world of words, I recently finished--after a lengthy period of abandonment--a short essay to accompany some translations I have been doing from Russian. Translation, before it is an activity of writing, is a particular kind of close reading, where no word can be skimmed over; every word is touched and has its shape felt, including the seemingly inconsequential and unremarkable ones which never elicit any attention. (One of the translator's jobs is to render the text's silences and neutralities as well as the ways in which its style speaks out loud, to ensure that the new text does not attract attention to specific words or formulas that are thoroughly unmarked in the original.)

In the world of music, there is a new Vivaldi sonata in my sights -- No. 5 in E minor. I've tackled the first two movements so far, and have been listening to a recording of them (by Anner Bylsma, but also this one below, with orchestral arrangement). Listening with a view (or an ear) to learning the piece myself, I've realized my attention is different. In a sense, it resembles the kind of reading that proceeds translation: it was listening not just for the overall effect, but for each note and each phrase, attention falling onto every single element. Although I lack the language or the command of music theory to explain them, my sense of musical structures is definitely growing, the more I play and the more I listen with this new kind of attention. Some notes -- ones that I'll have difficulty playing smoothly for the longest -- somehow evade being heard by me -- I just can't quite hear how they fit together, how the individual notes are making the sound I hear. Most often, though, like translation, you can understand the original, hear it, but can't quite find the way of rendering it naturally and fluently. But now it's not facility with language that's the obstacle, but facility with your hands, arms, fingers -- and the way they work in mysterious connection with the inner ear. Translating internally held impression into expression -- which underlies all communicative acts, but the coincidence of these linguistic/literary and musical activities has thrown it into new relief.

In essence, I think the illumination that came anew to me with the translation analogy is this: in translation, you have to truly read every word, nothing of the whole can be omitted or glossed over. And in playing music, regardless of whether it is learning by imitating, or individual interpretation, you truly have to hear and reckon with every single note, nothing can be skimmed over, everything is integral to the whole.

I have been shown, too, new nuances in listening. There is a series of eighth notes in the first phrase of the Largo movement -- 4 repeated Es. But all eighth note Es are not equal. I was originally playing them as statically and fixed as the ticking of a clock, but when Matthew grabbed my cello to play them, now I could hear not just the motion of the growing crescendo, but a motion that articulated connection and forwards movement... How, though, to translate this understanding into a comparable expression through my own body's movements remains slightly elusive... The mystery of the mind--body connection, mediated by the ear, continues to fascinate and mystify me.

Despite that, I can play the Largo reasonably well. The Allegro is proving trickier -- how do I convey to my body that it's my wrist that should be moving the bow on the 16th-note string-crossings, and not my arm...? On the recording, though, I love the passages that are hardest of all for me -- they are ones which give me the feeling of what I would instinctively describe as the movement of biographical time. I remember the first time I felt this profoundly in music when I was a teenager -- not coincidentally, probably, at the age when one is just beginning to become aware for the first time of life's biographical movement... (There's probably something faintly Hegelian here, but that's something to muse on another time, maybe... And hazarding a guess at what, technically speaking, is happening in these moments, I think, maybe, sometimes, at least, they are movements of repeated patterns through different keys.)

Incidentally, the piece I translated -- an experimental semi-autobiographical long essay called "The Return Home" (Возвращение домой) from the 1930s, by the Russian scholar and writer Lidiia Ginzburg, itself has very much to do with the connections between physical and intellectual experience: The sensory experience of the body is revealed, again and again -- in the landscapes she describes (the waters of the Black Sea, the mountain roads of the Caucasus, the long birch-lined roads of the north, the Neva’s embankments) -- as indissoluble from the intellectual and analytical movement of thought. And, like listening to the Vivaldi recordings, in this instance translating actually involved, to some degree, translating from senses or perceptions other than purely linguistic ones: I found myself looking at the sliver of Bay visible from my window, parched grasses under foot, and clouds of fog snagging on the Berkeley hills, in order to find the words that might give expression to the experience of faintly comparable landscapes. It's by coincidence, then, that secretly and ever so slightly underwriting this particular translation from Russian into English is a translation of summer in the Crimea and the Caucasus into summer in northern California...

Mandelshtam and Maybeck: music, wood, architecture

Прозрачной слезой на стенах проступила смола,

И чувствует город свои деревянные ребра.

Resin's oozed onto the walls like a transparent tear,
And the city feels its wooden ribs.

(Osip Mandelshtam, "За то, что я руки твои не сумел удержать," / "Because I couldn't hold off your embraces," December 1920)

Although there's not really anything at all in the poem that would suggest it, I can't help but hear the sound of a stringed instrument in the background to these lines from one of my favourite poems by Mandelshtam. (Here's the whole poem--but the translation is downright shoddy). There's a space that's wooden and resonant (the city, the Trojan horse, homes, poems, рукоделие, things made) that cries tears of resin. If there's a sound of wood weeping, its tears have formed the rosin that helps the cello's strings' sound, the sound then consoled and amplified by the crafted wooden shape that it fills and mingles with.

Hearing that sound stems from my fascination with and love for the cello's crafted wooden-ness, inhabiting the poem with my own meaning, perhaps. Another of Mandelshtam's poems, "The Finder of a Horseshoe," (Нашедший подкову) begins with the view of a forest in which the trees are seen simultaneously as the masts of ships; time and its transformations coexist; forms contain others that may be wrought upon themselves. --Which, we might say, is how music shapes time too.

Глядим на лес и говорим:
— Вот лес корабельный, мачтовый,
Розовые сосны,
До самой верхушки свободные от мохнатой ноши,
Им бы поскрипывать в бурю,
Одинокими пиниями,
В разъяренном безлесном воздухе.

We look at woods and we say:
Here is a forest, for ships and for masts;
The pink pines
Stand free to their tops of bushy accretions,
They should creek in a storm
As do lone-standing pines
In the infuriated forestless air.
(Bernard Meares' translation)

When I first came to California, one of the first things that captivated me, after the brick I had grown up inside of, was the wooden houses. For one, the wooden house feels more porous, more connected to the outside (my own apartment, alas, a little too porous; the return of the rain will renew my battle with the leaky bathroom roof). And the wooden house feels built--as if the process and the intention is more palpable--whereas my brick houses felt like they grew from the ground, or, rather, felt as if they are as present with the same kind of certainty as the ground is itself. Sometimes in California, I feel acutely aware of the ground, of things being built on the ground, of the built thing's ongoing negotiation with the ground, while in England, the matter of the building and the ground's relationship was settled long, long ago.

Where I live now is my third home in Berkeley/Oakland. And it is a house with historical foundations: it was the first house built by Bernard Maybeck, the famous Arts and Crafts architect, and the first house that he himself lived in in Berkeley. It dates from the 1890s, and it is very wooden. It has been divided into apartments and is not in perfect condition, but it retains a special character and traces of its creator.

In this picture of the house from 1902, the projecting sleeping porch (extended and refashioned) is now my kitchen. The house has gained some more in size since then too.

Charles Keeler, who had first met Maybeck in 1891, on the commuter ferry from San Francisco to Berkeley (long before any Bay Bridge!), described the house as it was in 1895:

"I sought out Mr. Maybeck at his home in northwest Berkeley and told him I had come to accept his offer to design our house. I really had no idea what I was getting into when I put myself in his hands. I found his own home was not yet complete and that he was working on it at odd times, with the assistance of Julia Morgan’s brothers. His house was something like a Swiss chalet. The timbers showed on the inside and the walls were of knotted yellow pine planks. There was no finish to the interior, for the carpenter work finished it. There was a sheet iron, hand-built stove, open in front and with brass andirons. Most of the furniture was designed and made by Mr. Maybeck himself. It was a distinctly hand-made home."

Keeler formulated Maybeck's architectural philosophy:

"A wooden house should bring out all the character and virtue of wood—straight lines, wooden joinery, exposed rafters, and the wooden surface visible and left in its natural state. A house should fit into the landscape as if it were a part of it, it should also be an expression of the life and spirit which is to be lived within it. [...] whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. [...] [Maybeck] was interested in the simple life which is naturally expressive and consequently beautiful. He believed in handmade things and that all ornament should be designed to fit the place and the need. He did not mind how crude it was, provided it was sincere and expressed something personal."

And here, in particular, is a description which places the wooden house in the company of music and poetry: (The Gothic cathedral is also a prominent architectural image in the poetry of Mandelshtam, from approximately the same period, and for approximately the same reasons; meanwhile elsewhere in his metaphorical thinking, made and used domestic utensils are important too.)

"So Mr. Maybeck proposed to build wooden houses in which the beauty of the natural wood was to be given its full value on both the inside and outside. His next principle was that whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. He called attention to the fact that, in the old Gothic cathedrals the rafters which upheld the pointed arches, the succession of pillars which gave strength to the walls, the flying buttresses that helped hold them firm were all necessary to the solidity and stability of the building. The repetition of exposed columns and rafters were like the beats in music or the metrical emphasis that gives accents to poetry. That is why Ruskin speaks of architecture as frozen music. But a room with smooth plastered walls creates no sense of rhythm and its machine stamps wallpaper is applied to relieve the barrenness of its boxlike effect. Mr. Maybeck proposed to restore the handcrafts to their proper place in life and art."

Cello & Chard

I might have discovered, tonight, the bikram yoga technique of cello practice. With the temperature still over 80F at sunset, I decide to bake, in my kitchen that's been lapping up the sunshine all day long, a Swiss chard and goat's cheese quiche--an established favourite, and quite summery, you could say, were it not for the cranking up of the oven that its preparation requires.

The recipe also nicely accommodates a multi-tasking cello-practice (and my practice is always accommodated in my kitchen):

• blind bake the crust for 10 mins :: warm up with a few scales
• pause to saute chard for 2 mins (Take care before, during and after this stage to wash hands and keep bow safely out of way of olive oil; the amateur-bloggeur lost her first bow to some wayward sardine oil. Sunflower oil, as readers of Master and Margarita well know, is capable of even more diabolical damage.)
• bake assembled quiche for 35 mins :: a couple of times through the 4th movement (allegro) of the old Vivaldi Sonata No. 3 in A minor, with special attention to syncopated rhythms and transitions between phrases (I'm prone to just stop).
  
• Ping! Remove quiche from oven!

Tonight's post, it should be added, comes with a nod
of acknowledged inspiration to Dining with Dostoevsky.

This was a particularly pleasing practice session; I got through some tricky passages more smoothly than ever. It even elicited some kind words of approval from my long-suffering neighbour who arrived home to hear strains of Vivaldi (and smell of baking) wafting out my open front door. I partly attribute its success to the staggering temperature that my kitchen must have reached during this hour -- all the better for limber limbs and faster fingers, it seems.

Music’s Room of Its Own

This month I’ve been having a holiday from my regular cello teacher, and last week I had a lesson with somebody new — the first such experience since beginning to learn two years ago. I enjoyed the lesson, and obviously, as well as the quirk of its firstness, there were differences—different energy, dynamics, approach. I wasn’t looking to find a better teacher or to make a judgment over whom I preferred — I was just curious, and in that sense both the curiosity and I were satisfied.

After the lesson, as we were chatting, the conversation turned to houses and their spaces, and R. spoke of a house (one for sale in Berkeley) with a room so large that it could be a private concert hall… He spoke of the idea with a passionate wonder that made me think his dreams had designed such a space before. My regular cello teacher, and dear friend, Matthew, has also spoken often of spatial fantasies, of a house he dreams of as an ongoing project of the imagination in which no room is too small…

This thought that the two cellists shared reminded me not just of the spaces that music fills, but of the space that music can articulate. There’s a wonderful description of this in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Sacks quotes from an article appearing in the Guardian by Nick Coleman, an English music critic, who had lost hearing in one ear:

“I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting volume as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear “buildings” whenever I heard music—three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not “see” these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them in my sensorium. These forms had “floors,” “walls,” “roofs,” “windows,” “cellars.” They expressed volume. They were constructed out of interlinked surfaces which depended on each other for coherence. Musis to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional contained, a vessel, as real in its way as a scout hut or cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces. I’m absolutely certain that this “architecture” had everything to do with why music has always exerted such an emotional hold over me…

I’ve always kept quiet about this architecture business, partly…because I’d never been entirely confident that “architecture” was what I really meant. Maybe “hearing music architecturally” was just me being inarticulate.

But I am confident now. “Architecturally” was precisely right. What I hear now when I listen to music [after losing hearing in one ear] is a flat, two-dimensional representation: flat as in literally flat, like a sheet of paper with lines on it. Where I used to get buildings, I now only get architectural drawings. I can interpret what the drawings show but I don’t get the actual structure. I can’t enter music and I can’t perceive its inner space. I’ve never got much of an emotional hit from technical drawings. This is what really hurts: I no longer respond to music emotionally.” (Sacks, Musicophilia, 159-60.)

This week I also heard other kinds of music fill a particularly beautiful space — the Mather Redwood Grove in Berkeley’s Botanical Gardens. A chance discovery led us to a small concert there by Petracovich and Walking in Sunlight (both pretty great -- natural and honest, gentle and strongly felt).

After walking up to the gardens in the afternoon sun, entering the shady peace of the redwoods was like slipping into a cool, still pool. There truly is something sacred about the redwood trees—transforming all the space below them that their massive height spans into somewhere that feels both perfectly still, but charged with fecundity, ferns breathing fog, motes of life dancing in the sun…

One last thought, which I would not usually mention, as it sounds a little crazy, but seems to belong here with trees and ideas about spatial and textural components of emotional experience: A couple of weeks ago I was walking in Berkeley, in a tree-lined street, not thinking about anything particular (and definitely not under the influence of anything), when suddenly my gaze fell, lightly but with odd intensity on the bark of the tree growing by the road. In that moment, I felt like I had an acute experience of the texture of the wood’s bark, which somehow, and for inexplicable reasons, was suddenly and deeply moving, as if those sensory impressions had completely bypassed rational, conscious or language based ways of perception and cognition…It was as if the sight of pure living texture translated itself into something simultaneously tactile and emotional.

Why bother?

“For my part,” said Deronda, “people who do anything finely inspirit me to try. I don’t mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”

“But then if we can’t imitate it?—it only makes our own life seem tamer,” said Gwendolen, in a mood to resent encouragement founded on her own insignificance.

“That depends on the point of view, I think,” said Deronda. “We should have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our own performances. A little private imitation of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it, and most of us ought to practise art only in the light of private study—preparation to understand and enjoy what the few can do for us…”

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

Performance Report!

Yesterday I played the second two movements of the Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 3 in A minor (see/hear below, previous post) and Saint-Saëns' The Swan at the group class / very low key recital that my cello teacher hosts every couple of months. I’ve always been the most novice present on such occasions, but am gradually gaining in credibility and respectability each time. Nerves certainly made for some shaky moments early on, which threaten to uncork general panic and have everything disintegrate, but were eventually overcome. As adults who pursue lives and careers where we use and cultivate our particular skills and strengths, our sense of self probably depends, to some degree, on our valorized competence in specific fields, both professional and personal. So we tend not to find ourselves in situations any more where we publicly (or semi-publicly) struggle with something from far outside those fields that is quite difficult for us. (Doing the long jump on school sports day is safely banished to the past.) But as well as the pleasure of the music itself, it is powerful to find myself doing something of which I had never thought myself capable. (Inspired in part by this sentiment, I'm hoping to volunteer as an adult literacy tutor in Oakland this year; perhaps the "Pen" part of the "Ongoing Composition" can report on this in future.) I have also never felt particularly possessed of physical gracefulness, but in playing The Swan, albeit far from perfectly, I do somehow feel able to command and communicate something approaching that.

I feel nervous about playing the cello in front of these friendly fellow-students not because of their judgment, but because I’m afraid of disappointing myself. And though I’m hardly aiming for a performance career, however well and however much pleasure I gain from playing when I’m alone practicing in my kitchen, or in my lesson, there’s a sense that this only becomes real when you play and other people listen. Or when you play with other people, which is why my threshold for being thrilled here is quite ridiculously low. We began the group class with the six of us playing a simple Schumann chorale—an arrangement into 4 parts of the first piece I’d played in my beginner’s book. Such beautiful harmonies, something grave and sacred, yet so simple. And a choir of six cellos prove that no other instrument is necessary.

In the end, in the second half of the Vivaldi allegro movement (which was probably, in some ways, the hardest of all, at least from the sheer number of notes point of view), I felt more confident in playing and keeping going than ever. This may have had something to do with the fact that on Thursday I had played more than ever before on a single day — practicing both before and after a lesson. And something happened which never had before: afterwards, and especially when I went to bed that night, I could feel the music and the motion in my hands…in the same way you might feel like you’re still on a boat the night after a ferry crossing. I’m sure that’s thoroughly commonplace for musicians who spend hours practicing every day…but to me it seemed quite miraculous—a new, embodied experience of admitting music into my person.

And speaking of cello choirs, playing this (ours was arranged for string orchestra, not just cellos; and no singer—the violins unleashed their inner soprano for our purposes) was a highlight of my summer exploits in the San Francisco Civic Symphony String Orchestra workshop:
Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 for soprano and 8 cellos

That rhythm thing

The trusty Feuillard and his Le Méthode du jeune violoncelliste guided me through the first 18 months of playing the cello. Despite the name, this beginners’ method book was well suited to the not so young violoncellist too: our man Feuillard had no truck with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the like, but, launches his charges straight into “real” music. The first piece in the book, using just a few notes and extremely simple, was a Schumann chorale. Midway through there came a particular thrill with a Minuet in G major by Bach—(originally for keyboard; familiar to most people who’ve ever learned piano, no doubt: daa da-da-da-da daa da da, daa da-da-da-da daa da da)—and even in the rudimentary way I could play this simple piece, I could somehow discern something of the particularity we associate with Bach, that crystalline form, perhaps.



But since graduating from Feuillard, among the pieces I’ve now been tackling in my lessons are Vivaldi’s cello sonatas, or, rather, to date, Sonata No. 3 in A minor. As respectful of Feuillard as I am, receiving the Vivaldi sheet music in the mail, I felt like a child let loose on the grown-ups’ books. My progress was even confirmed by the pleasingly elegant and newly serious cover. Moreover, YouTube confirmed that “real” cellists played these pieces, and iTunes even sold recordings!

Each sonata is in four movements — largo-allegro-largo-allegro — but each has a decidedly different character. At first this music was all very tricky going for me, but it is thrilling to hear the shapes of each figure and phrase, then each movement, gradually emerge. (Lest this sound as if it is overstating my proficiency, I should add that my threshold for being delighted is very low!)

The past couple of weeks I’ve been concentrating on the second Largo movement, and have become newly friendly with the metronome—as I am, I fear, a little rhythmically challenged, and was prone to a somewhat liberal rendition of this piece in particular. And in terms of the original motivating quest in playing the cello—to discover some new experience of the mind/body relation—having a fluid command of rhythm and really feeling the pulse which underlies the rhythm seem like where that experience lies. Playing along with the metronome or with my teaching marking the beat, some trickily fast passages gave me glimpses (or sensation-impses; felt not seen!) of the fluidity that comes with really feeling the beat and letting it carry the melody along, rather than simply roughly approximating it, or being too influenced by the printed paraphernalia of the music, which sometimes, to an eye used to reading words not notes, can be misleading (I’m sure that sounds as daftly foreign to those who are musical as the suggestion that Russian’s all full of backwards R’s does to a reader of Cyrillic). I suddenly felt like I was speaking fluently, almost as if a stutter had been cured.

One of the enduring wonders and pleasure of music is, of course, its power to evoke and suggest different emotions and different emotionally coloured narratives, scenes or shapes of experience. The second Largo of this Sonata No. 3 seems especially emotionally suggestive (it is indeed marked molto espressivo).

What follows is an experiment to see if I can describe what it seems to suggest to me…an experiment which may be of little interest beyond the process of seeking to describe it…

The first half of the piece piece seems to chart a wistful memory, its transformations and augmentations in time and from different temporal perspectives. The first phrase (beginning with a rising triplet) A-B-C C B-A) sounds a wistful and melancholy memory. A complementary and consoling memory from times further back is added. The memory is traced again, and now a possibility of hopefulness comes in. Hopefulness, resignation and yearning all tug at that memory. Then hopefulness is allowed freer range, and the scale rises; space opens out and there is contentment on sunnier plateaux, newly rediscovered activity contrasting with the slower pace of melancholy reflection, and, then, the dignity of a resolution. ... The final section of the movement somehow makes me think of the story being told from a different, more removed distance, where there is now quiet reflection on the experience whose shape is transformed with distance but still discernibly the same.

And here is the piece of music, played by Italian cellist Enrico Mainardi (1897-1976). (The final allegro movement also follows; I’m still working on this bit :-) ) I picked this recording off YouTube over others because it seems the least “baroque” and the most bare (though other versions with the continuo basso are also very nice).

Les voix humaines

"Do you play the cello? ... You have a voice like the voice of a cello."

When I recounted the incident with the stranger who appeared at the beginning of this story/bloggery, putting his abrupt question to me and offering his rationale for posing it, I swiftly added how this, in fact, it is relatively commonplace to observe that the cello's range and tone matches that of the human voice.

But that, of course, takes nothing away from the power and particularity of the cello's voice and the effect of hearing it. There is something not just human (the instrument's size is also a factor) but deeply humane about the sound of the cello. Listening, we soar with the song outwards into the world, and at the same time are drawn inwards to the heart that must be singing. It is melancholy and frank, though capable too of expressing great joy, and possessed of a certain nobility. Behind the sound, in all of its moods, is a sense of something sage, a wise and deep knowing, a fullness of feeling consciousness.

There is something of a clue to the shape of this depth and fullness in the technique (to what degree I may speak of technique--and speak of it I may do more so than enact it!) of playing: from the very beginning my teacher insisted how the motion of making strokes with the bow was a circle. That is, the right arm, drawing the bow across the string, does not just move back and forth across a single plane, but traces a whole circle; thus the sound comes from not just a straight line drawn on a surface, but an embodied shape that fills space.

And, as my teacher pointed out at that first lesson, it is an organic elegance of intersecting circles that makes for the cello's sound: the shape and motion of the arm meeting with the circular surface of the strings and resonating through wood which is not only curved through craft, but which came from the naturally rounded trunks of trees.

Indeed, if the wood of trees could speak, it seems it too might possess the voice of the cello. The special directness with which the cello speaks also seems to project dimensions in all directions: there is this direct connection to its material origins and, at the same time, to its addressees, whose human voices it seems to intone. And then there's the posture of playing this instrument of unlikely proportions, requiring direct and embodied contact. It is not diminished to a mere object simply held by its player, but commands a presence of its own, the cellist approaching the cello as a near-equal in eliciting sound from it.

I wondered where that idea about the human voice and the cello might have been first expressed. I don't know if this was the first expression of it, but in 1636 Marin Mersenne (a French theologian, philosopher, mathematician and music theorist, often referred to as the "father of acoustics") wrote of the viol, the family of precursors to the modern cello:

Without doubt if viols are made truly in proportion they imitate
the [human] voice best of all, and one esteems them too
as having the advantage in representing naturalness best. It
just seems that one cannot refuse the prize to the Viol, which
perfectly imitates the voice in all its modulations, and even the
most important affects of sadness and joy: because the bow
gives the effect of speech, it can maintain sound for a long
time like the breath of the voice, and with it one can imitate
joy, sadness, agility, gentleness and strength by its liveliness,
by its languor, by its speed, by its ease, by its pressure; coupled
with the trills and other niceties of the left hand—which is
the name given to the hand that touches the fingerboard—
representing artlessly the spirit and the charms, [in short]
portraying the grace of a perfect Orator.
[quoted by Lucy Robinson in Early Music, November 1999]

Some months ago, I randomly came across this piece by Marin Marais for viola da gamba called Les voix humaines, from 1701. It amazed me because it seemed to be somehow so very modern. I know tremendously little about early music (and forgive my philistinism) but this piece does not make me think of powdered wigs and staid courtly dances in the way that a lot of it can. In fact, perhaps it seems so modern precisely because doesn't evoke those public courtly occasions, but instead, in its rhythms and its tones, seems to be something far more private--a soul speaking intimately.

Les voix humaines

Ceci n'est pas une flûte

Set just on the edge of the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center, home to the usual array of oversized outlets of supremely standard wares, is Ifshin Violins, makers and purveyors of fine stringed instruments. In advance of my first lesson, on the recommendation of my teacher-to-be, I visited their store to rent a cello.

Since my contact with stringed instruments had been almost entirely from the distance of a concert-going audience member, entering this place where they were made, handled and repaired, where they had an intimate life, possessed a certain charge. Entering the shop really did feel like entering a whole other world—where knowledge of and proximity to one of these mysterious objects and the beautiful potential contained within them was a given part of life.

In the rental department, which was hung with violins ascending in size from the improbably tiny—for hands that would learn to play before they could tie shoelaces—I received one of the most basic student cellos. Somebody played it briefly for me, setting free a sound that might as well have come from a priceless Stradivarius in the hands of a concert soloist as from a humble German cello that had recovered from the violent-sounding injury of a “broken neck.” All these instruments, though, were crafted after a design that had changed little in hundreds of years, never surpassing their centuries’ old exemplars.

After some brief instruction in how to care for this delicate object—including the California-specific advice on protecting it from earthquake damage—I left, to carry my new acquisition home on public transport. I felt like a new mother, slightly incredulous that I was now at large in the world with this impossibly fragile-seeming item, uncertain and nervous of how it should be held and handled. It seems funny now to recall the awkwardness with which I carried it (on an incredibly hot day) back from BART to my apartment.

Given that I lived in a small studio apartment whose single closet was already ingeniously over-stuffed with my belongings, the cello was to be rather indecorously accommodated lying on its side in the apartment’s main room. Even though I could still do next to nothing to coax it into life, I felt like I was suddenly sharing this space with a living creature. I had played the flute (poorly and with little conviction) between the ages of about 9 and 12 (recall that James Galway made it in the UK charts in the late 80s). I can picture it sat in its red velvety lined case, but it now seemed inert, metal and mechanical, whereas the cello, in comparison, seemed a virtually sentient being.

The lacquered grain of its wood revealed the living lines of age and texture, time and material, belonging to both the natural world and studied craftsmanship. Where the strings met the bridge there was a thrilling sense of the potential energy contained within them, tension that was ready to be turned into sound at the slightest touch.

Before the Cello

In February 2008 I went—reluctantly and too warmly dressed— to a party hosted by a fellow graduate student in her small Berkeley apartment. The party was very dark, and very awkward. It is highly likely, though, that my memories of both the lighting and the social flow speak only for my own experience; this was, for me, a period of increasing darkness of mood and awkwardness in thought and body. Despairing in my inability to successfully join any enjoyable conversation, I stood apart at one side, feeling horribly oppressed by the room but hopelessly distant from its partying.

I never quite figured out who he was, or whom he was at the party with, but a man who was significantly older than any of the hip, huddled, or minimalistly dancing (as space and style dictated) grad students introduced himself to me, thorough his thick Russian accent and with disarming brevity, as, simply, a Jew. We chatted briefly—also somewhat awkwardly—about Russian literature. He liked Isaac Babel. Then, out of nowhere, he asked me, “Do you play the cello?” “No!” I exclaimed, sounding, I fear, somewhat affronted. “You have a voice like the voice of a cello,” he stated. The conversation ended, and I left the party shortly afterwards.

Now, I am certainly not claiming anything profoundly meaningful about this scene. (It is said, incidentally, that the cello possesses a range closest of all instruments to that of the human voice). Depending on your sensibility, the scene may seem either enigmatic, romantic, cheesy, or banal. I present it, though, merely as a fact. It was certainly not an omen; as inclined as I may be to perceive literariness in life, the incongruous party guest and his question were not an omen foreshadowing my future fate with the cello in the same way as, say, the unfortunate railway worker falling onto the train tracks was for Anna Karenina. No, the novelist and the narrative we need here is a different one. This was an instance of the gradual accumulation of consciousness around an idea, this was Raskolnikov overhearing words in the tavern, his thoughts of murdering the old woman gaining momentum, not implanted from without, but nourished by an exchange between self and world. There is no real identifiable beginning of the idea (mine was more harmless than Raskolnikov's, it should be added)—but there are moments when consciousness becomes crystallized in some newly knowable form, perhaps not yet articulable as such, but then the sifting brings the idea—that had long been present—closer to the surface: I wanted to play the cello.

The idea stayed dormant for some time. The semester pressed on. It is not at all my intention to dwell on the reasons for and nature of the slowed, hunched, dark period of depression that blighted it (which was, thankfully, brief and relatively mild). One detail from that time, though, I will mention, in as much as it pertains to music. Near the low-point of this period, I went to to hear the San Francisco Symphony—usually an experience from which I would derive great pleasure. They were playing Mozart. I barely heard the music: a numbing tension stretched and snapped my attention, leaving only its frayed ends, not fine enough for perception or pleasure. Only later, on checklists of symptoms for depression did I come across “ahedonia: an inability to experience pleasurable emotions from normally pleasurable events.”

A few months later, circumstances, on many fronts, had changed for the better, and I was more or less restored to my old self. Some mild medication had helped make things manageable more quickly—helped me both deal with the external challenges and tend to the internal sore spots more level-headedly, and I am glad that option was available. I was left with a vague but strong feeling, however, that what had really come out of joint in the past months was the relationship between mind and body, that this was the rift which needed healing, and that this was something which would not be achieved through drugs.

In the meantime, consciousness of my desire to play the cello received two more catalysts in its crystallization: I happened to pay a visit on two Berkeley professors who had been spending the year in Paris. In their apartment were the stringed instruments that one of them and their three children played. I had never seen stringed instruments at rest, as it were, just hanging out as part of people’s lives and homes, and I thought how much I’d like one to be part of my life too. But surely it was too late…you had to start playing as a child, right? Then, a dear friend from Finland told me all about how she had joined a flute class for adults in Helsinki…I didn’t mention my cello-yearning in this conversation, but made some silent resolutions.

Music, I felt, still vaguely but with conviction, could be the way to heal the rift between mind and body.

I returned to Berkeley in August, did a small amount of internet research to establish that adult beginners on stringed instruments did in fact exist, that it was possible and affordable to rent a cello, and to identify a teacher on the ever-ready Craig's List. I had my first cello lesson on 1st September 2008.