sympathetic vibrations

I wasn't going to practice yesterday, but as I was driving back from a quick errand in the evening, contemplating dinner and Dostoevsky (not to be confused with Dining with Dostoevsky), out of the car radio came some cello notes -- slightly electronic, musacky ones at that, barely real music, but just some filler between programs on NPR, but unmistakably cello -- and that was it -- irresistible seduction; I just had to take out the cello when I got in.

To say something was "pulling at the heartstrings" is obviously a total cliche, but the idea of the soul as something like a stringed instrument goes way, way back...in Plato's Phaedo the attunement of a stringed instrument is a metaphor for man's responsiveness to the divine. And, at the eighteenth century's gentlemanly invitation, "Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find," David Hume tells us, "that with regard to the passions, 'tis not of the nature of a wind-instrument of music, which in running over all the notes loses sound after the breath ceases; but resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays."

One of my early and most thrilling cello breakthroughs (a good many months in) was my discovery of sympathetic vibrations. I may have noted down something about this phenomenon from my Scottish physics teacher's endless dictation in high school, but it doubtless got lost somewhere between the formulae for calculating the elastic extension of springs and the speed of toy trucks rolling down ramps. If it did get a look in in those physics lessons, though, I'm also pretty sure it had more to do with preparing us as engineers of the future who made non-wobbly bridges, rather than as late-blooming cellists.

In short, though, when you play, say, a D on the cello's A string, it will cause the neighbouring open D string to resonate--due to sympathetic vibrations. The sound has an extra, glorious, quality of ringing resonance. As well as endearing the cello and its voice to me still further, this discovery went a long way at that time in helping me hear and understand how to play in tune. The sympathetic vibrations reach outwards, ringing with the potential to attract other kindred strings and spirits, and drawing the listener-player into their song.

The physics of the matter turns into both a beautiful sound and a powerful image for connection and communion, through music or otherwise.

In Virginia Woolf's long elegiac novel, The Waves, a work intensely concerned with the aural imagination and the aural landscape, Bernard muses as he walks the city streets: “Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which, unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks?”

Already moved by musical experiences and literary images of sympathetic vibrations--and having sneaked them into my dissertation chapter on the elegy--it was with delight that I came across Elizabeth Le Guin's book: Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Le Guin provides a brief sketch of the history of the soul-as-stringed-instrument metaphor (the examples above from Plato and Hume come from her), and concludes that by the eighteenth century what was new in the use of the metaphor was "its emphasis on the idea of bodies resonating, not only with God or with the organization of the universe, but in sympathy with one another."

My delight in Le Guin's book was manifold (but this element will make it into the dissertation footnotes; the cello deserves to be in there somewhere, even if covertly.) Now, I actually sat down meaning to tell you about Boccherini's Body (as I have been meaning to for ages), but this will have to serve as a preview of coming attractions....