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