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.
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