Music’s Room of Its Own

This month I’ve been having a holiday from my regular cello teacher, and last week I had a lesson with somebody new — the first such experience since beginning to learn two years ago. I enjoyed the lesson, and obviously, as well as the quirk of its firstness, there were differences—different energy, dynamics, approach. I wasn’t looking to find a better teacher or to make a judgment over whom I preferred — I was just curious, and in that sense both the curiosity and I were satisfied.

After the lesson, as we were chatting, the conversation turned to houses and their spaces, and R. spoke of a house (one for sale in Berkeley) with a room so large that it could be a private concert hall… He spoke of the idea with a passionate wonder that made me think his dreams had designed such a space before. My regular cello teacher, and dear friend, Matthew, has also spoken often of spatial fantasies, of a house he dreams of as an ongoing project of the imagination in which no room is too small…

This thought that the two cellists shared reminded me not just of the spaces that music fills, but of the space that music can articulate. There’s a wonderful description of this in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Sacks quotes from an article appearing in the Guardian by Nick Coleman, an English music critic, who had lost hearing in one ear:

“I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting volume as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear “buildings” whenever I heard music—three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not “see” these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them in my sensorium. These forms had “floors,” “walls,” “roofs,” “windows,” “cellars.” They expressed volume. They were constructed out of interlinked surfaces which depended on each other for coherence. Musis to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional contained, a vessel, as real in its way as a scout hut or cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces. I’m absolutely certain that this “architecture” had everything to do with why music has always exerted such an emotional hold over me…

I’ve always kept quiet about this architecture business, partly…because I’d never been entirely confident that “architecture” was what I really meant. Maybe “hearing music architecturally” was just me being inarticulate.

But I am confident now. “Architecturally” was precisely right. What I hear now when I listen to music [after losing hearing in one ear] is a flat, two-dimensional representation: flat as in literally flat, like a sheet of paper with lines on it. Where I used to get buildings, I now only get architectural drawings. I can interpret what the drawings show but I don’t get the actual structure. I can’t enter music and I can’t perceive its inner space. I’ve never got much of an emotional hit from technical drawings. This is what really hurts: I no longer respond to music emotionally.” (Sacks, Musicophilia, 159-60.)

This week I also heard other kinds of music fill a particularly beautiful space — the Mather Redwood Grove in Berkeley’s Botanical Gardens. A chance discovery led us to a small concert there by Petracovich and Walking in Sunlight (both pretty great -- natural and honest, gentle and strongly felt).

After walking up to the gardens in the afternoon sun, entering the shady peace of the redwoods was like slipping into a cool, still pool. There truly is something sacred about the redwood trees—transforming all the space below them that their massive height spans into somewhere that feels both perfectly still, but charged with fecundity, ferns breathing fog, motes of life dancing in the sun…

One last thought, which I would not usually mention, as it sounds a little crazy, but seems to belong here with trees and ideas about spatial and textural components of emotional experience: A couple of weeks ago I was walking in Berkeley, in a tree-lined street, not thinking about anything particular (and definitely not under the influence of anything), when suddenly my gaze fell, lightly but with odd intensity on the bark of the tree growing by the road. In that moment, I felt like I had an acute experience of the texture of the wood’s bark, which somehow, and for inexplicable reasons, was suddenly and deeply moving, as if those sensory impressions had completely bypassed rational, conscious or language based ways of perception and cognition…It was as if the sight of pure living texture translated itself into something simultaneously tactile and emotional.

Why bother?

“For my part,” said Deronda, “people who do anything finely inspirit me to try. I don’t mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”

“But then if we can’t imitate it?—it only makes our own life seem tamer,” said Gwendolen, in a mood to resent encouragement founded on her own insignificance.

“That depends on the point of view, I think,” said Deronda. “We should have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our own performances. A little private imitation of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it, and most of us ought to practise art only in the light of private study—preparation to understand and enjoy what the few can do for us…”

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

Performance Report!

Yesterday I played the second two movements of the Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 3 in A minor (see/hear below, previous post) and Saint-Saëns' The Swan at the group class / very low key recital that my cello teacher hosts every couple of months. I’ve always been the most novice present on such occasions, but am gradually gaining in credibility and respectability each time. Nerves certainly made for some shaky moments early on, which threaten to uncork general panic and have everything disintegrate, but were eventually overcome. As adults who pursue lives and careers where we use and cultivate our particular skills and strengths, our sense of self probably depends, to some degree, on our valorized competence in specific fields, both professional and personal. So we tend not to find ourselves in situations any more where we publicly (or semi-publicly) struggle with something from far outside those fields that is quite difficult for us. (Doing the long jump on school sports day is safely banished to the past.) But as well as the pleasure of the music itself, it is powerful to find myself doing something of which I had never thought myself capable. (Inspired in part by this sentiment, I'm hoping to volunteer as an adult literacy tutor in Oakland this year; perhaps the "Pen" part of the "Ongoing Composition" can report on this in future.) I have also never felt particularly possessed of physical gracefulness, but in playing The Swan, albeit far from perfectly, I do somehow feel able to command and communicate something approaching that.

I feel nervous about playing the cello in front of these friendly fellow-students not because of their judgment, but because I’m afraid of disappointing myself. And though I’m hardly aiming for a performance career, however well and however much pleasure I gain from playing when I’m alone practicing in my kitchen, or in my lesson, there’s a sense that this only becomes real when you play and other people listen. Or when you play with other people, which is why my threshold for being thrilled here is quite ridiculously low. We began the group class with the six of us playing a simple Schumann chorale—an arrangement into 4 parts of the first piece I’d played in my beginner’s book. Such beautiful harmonies, something grave and sacred, yet so simple. And a choir of six cellos prove that no other instrument is necessary.

In the end, in the second half of the Vivaldi allegro movement (which was probably, in some ways, the hardest of all, at least from the sheer number of notes point of view), I felt more confident in playing and keeping going than ever. This may have had something to do with the fact that on Thursday I had played more than ever before on a single day — practicing both before and after a lesson. And something happened which never had before: afterwards, and especially when I went to bed that night, I could feel the music and the motion in my hands…in the same way you might feel like you’re still on a boat the night after a ferry crossing. I’m sure that’s thoroughly commonplace for musicians who spend hours practicing every day…but to me it seemed quite miraculous—a new, embodied experience of admitting music into my person.

And speaking of cello choirs, playing this (ours was arranged for string orchestra, not just cellos; and no singer—the violins unleashed their inner soprano for our purposes) was a highlight of my summer exploits in the San Francisco Civic Symphony String Orchestra workshop:
Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 for soprano and 8 cellos