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).