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