Wednesday, June 23, 2010

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.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

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.