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