Symphony and Bookshelf

In the front rows of the symphony hall you can almost feel as if you are sitting underneath the piano, like a child amid the land of legs and hanging table cloths. The sound seems to come from above and all around you, not losing, in this proximity, a sense of the material—the elegantly reposing tabletop of strings and hammers—that issues its acoustic energy into the air.

This week the noise of time rushed in on all sides. I read The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt, a collection of elegant, clear-sighted, sometimes controversial, memoiristic essays composed by Judt in long nights of insomniac immobility when he was already paralysed by a motor neurone disease. The essays, beyond the opening pair, make few references to his illness; they are remarkable for their clarity and wit, a mind that is unrelentingly analytical, now presenting a vision of itself that is never self-pitying nor self-laudatory.

I do the essays a disservice by not writing more about them, but the feeling they left me with was strong — a kind of expanded sense of historicism, the sense of both belonging to and containing within me a larger sweep of history than that of simply my lifetime. Reading Judt, the contours of a post-war generation were tangible around me — familiar for their form-giving influence for my own generation too — and the vision of England in these essays resembles the formative one I hold inside myself. In fact, maybe this sense has gown in me largely because of being English in America — of feeling more acutely the absorbed-by-osmosis cultural knowledge and mythologies that are lodged deeply inside. For instance (not that this is something that Judt writes about explicitly) the proximity still of the Home front experience of WWII in my childhood: in films, books, school lessons, from parents, elderly neighbours. How many times had my father said he didn’t like to waste food because he was a war baby, how many times had I heard the halting speech of King George VI announce that this country was at war with Germany, how natural it seemed that Peggy next door was afraid of thunder storms and wanted to hide under the stairs because she thought it was a bombing raid, how afraid was I at having a luggage label attached to me and being evacuated far away from my mother to Wales…?

You almost feel as if you are sitting underneath the piano. The soloist has very shiny shoes. Beethoven tumbles and resounds around you. A small child amid the legs—furniture, tights-clad, and trousered—while thuds and movements of cutlery, plates and voices, dampened by linens, are audible above: the sounds of generations come down to you under the table of the half-century.

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Beethoven Piano Concerto, No, 3. Largo. The stern, tender pull of the cellos and basses--grounded, yet somehow also yearning--around (for the first time) 2.16 moved me profoundly.

The Cello Parvenu

This was a big day for my pauper cello: I took it to the violin shop in El Cerrito where it will hang out for a whole week in the company of some of its more finely crafted kin and acquire a new bridge and a new set of strings.

I hope it doesn't show itself up there; after all, it got its start as a bundle rescued from an underpass, not scooped off the velvety counter of an elegant workshop like Ifshin Violins.

I bought my cello about 18 months ago at a BART station, at the end of the line, from a guy who had said, when we arranged to meet, "You'll recognize me because I'll be the one with the cello." I tried it out (playing my one tune of the week, a Brittany Air) in the BART underpass. Unsurprisingly, no coins were tossed my way.

The New

Of course we know that learning means coming to know or be able to do something new. Practicing the cello on the first day of this new year, I was reminded that learning is not simply receiving the new, but being in the state of actively seeking the new--even when it is something that we are not yet quite sure of the exact nature of. The physical-sensuous nature of playing the cello brings this principle home to me in a more experiential manner than, say, any form of intellectual learning.

When you start playing the cello, hapless beginner that you are, picking up the bow and making some kind of noise, whatever it is you are doing in that action of drawing the bow back and forth over the strings feels right to you; it's what you're naturally inclined to do left to your own devices. Obviously your teacher chimes in; adjustments are made; improvements are heard. The things your teacher focuses your attention onto shift and change and become more nuanced--or maybe more fundamental. There seems to be some fundamental glitch that's keeping that whole fluid circuit of the legato bowing motion from being quite right, preventing the nuances of difference in your hand, wrist, arm at all the positions between the frog and the point being quite one unbroken motion. Something which prevents all the infinite instants of the arrow's points of rest in Zeno's paradox becoming the illusory motion of flight.

In order to overcome this, you really have to search for something that feels different. Like a wing, the teacher says, your arm should feel like a bird's wing. You have to strike out beyond that default thing that is "right" to you, that became a habit because there was no alternative competing with it. And suddenly, yes, you are doing something different, something that truly feels different, that maybe even makes the sound different. There is less weight and force in your hand holding the bow, there is motion coming from your upper arm, there is a feeling of connection to your shoulder blade. The wing draws its circles in the air; the arc of flight is smooth and clean.

Will you be able to find this feeling next time you play? Can your memory take a snapshot of this feeling, a kinaesthetic memory (with an aural memory tacked on)....? Perhaps not, or not every time, but having found it once, it gradually becomes easier and quicker to find again. But the seeking never quite stops.