tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85800773587397850722024-02-02T01:38:26.211-08:00Ongoing Composition for Cello and PenEveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-30559979884337872502012-08-22T00:26:00.000-07:002012-08-22T12:36:15.087-07:00cello in the trees<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
West off Highway 101, through Sebastopol celebrating local bounty at its apple fair, through the neat braids of vines that cover the gentle, sunny hillsides of Sonoma county, onto the Bohemian Highway, and into the shade of the redwoods, onto the single-track roads that wound up through Camp Meeker.....I had no idea what to expect as I pulled up at the Navarro River String Camp, a five day summer camp for beginning and intermediate adult string players. When the camp began, 8 years ago (I think), there were about 15 campers--the students of its founders, Marcia Sloane and Marion Crombie. Now there were over 50 enthusiastic players of violin, viola and cello, some who had begun as adults, others who had returned to their instrument after playing as a child.<br />
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As we gathered in the main house for the first time for introductions, I asked the man next to me, in his 60s, perhaps older, if he had come to the camp before. "It's marvellous," he said, with quiet appreciation, "it sustains you all year." Vague feelings of nervous expectation and slightly fearful doubt flickered through me upon his reply. Was it possible that this experience could bring to me something so powerful, but of as yet uncertain dimensions...? This, deep down, was what I was seeking, by coming here, by beginning to play the cello in the first place -- but how would such wishes bear up to reality? Would they collapse or remain meagerly unrealized through my limited abilities to actually make music...?<br />
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There was much to learn. At the first meeting of our cello quartet, we were four people on chairs randomly strewn out over the room. Move closer, Elizabeth, the coach, told us before we even set to playing anything. We had an attempt at our first piece, <i>Locus Iste</i> by Bruckner, a motet which evokes the soaring stone resonance of a church. Then the second, one of the Polovetsian Dances from Borodin's <i>Prince Igor</i>, where the melody line floats in turn between us, issuing up from and returning to the harmonic pulse of the dance.<br />
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We could focus on only one piece to perform at the concert at the end of the camp, and we chose Borodin. Alas, we lost the lead member of our quartet after the first day...the hillside retreat did not seem to be quite the right time or place for her just then...so her part was to be taken by one of the coaches. We practiced on days two and three alone, and with a coach: we counted out the measures, we counted and played together, counted and played separately, counted and tried to dance with our cellos, and counted some more. One hour after lunch I practiced alone, on a deck high up among a natural circle of redwoods, my shiny lacquered red cello against the rough red of their bark. I played Borodin, I played Bach, and Corelli. At the beginning of the camp, I might have been too self-conscious to do such a thing, but soon the all-pervasive ease and enthusiasm dissolved any such feelings. And throughout the camp, the sounds of others practicing and playing were to be heard everywhere among the trees. <br />
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On day four Diane, Christine & I played the piece again, missing the first cello. I nearly wept. Something had happened overnight. We were suddenly much more together, and we could listen to one another. The music was happening somewhere in the mingling of our voices. There was a new responsiveness between us: I slowed in my line of melody; the others could slow the accompaniment to match, to catch me, rather than let me fall through the cracks in the rhythm. We played again, with Burke, the coach -- these were moments of such joy that I think they will be forever dear to me, the feeling that we were really making music together, the change of a chord that is caught by the strange organ of perception that's somewhere in the middle of your chest.<br />
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There was plenty of other playing besides: chorales, warm-ups, large ensembles, impromptu sight-reading before dinner, after dinner, late into the night. At night, in bed at last, I would float off to sleep on the pulse on the Polovetsian dance and hear my heart beat out its rhythms into the bed beneath me.<br />
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Rhythm was obviously the key to playing together. If you played all the right notes at the wrong time, then they are all wrong, my teacher had once said. And rhythm was probably the hardest and least-conquered aspect of playing for me. The most elusive and attractive property of music was that sense of continuous movement -- movement that was not <i>yours</i>, but the music's own, embodied through you.... <br />
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The camp included an elective 3-session workshop called "Solidifying Our Inner Pulse and Developing Sight-Reading Skills." For part of this session each day we stood in a circle, with four syllables: Ta Ke Ti Na, a regular drum beat and an incrementally developing series of steps and claps to co-ordinate with the syllables. Then there was a call-and-response: could you maintain the pulse while repeating different rhythmic syllables back, or simply maintain the pulse in spite of the disordered rhythm. The first day, I would stumble, clap wrong, miss a clap, flail about, or, so very fleeting and elusively, land in the rhythmic pattern. The second day was little better, but suddenly I found myself upset and troubled -- about more than steps or claps, but rather a deeper anxiety, about my being in the world, my occupation, my education...was I ever fully embodied and present? how rare were those moments of embodied being, free from the incessant, overlaid (verbal, reflective, critical) consciousness....? I was taken right back to feeling that <a href="http://eveningprose.blogspot.com/p/before-cello.html" target="_blank">original</a> vague but strong impulse that had led me towards the cello -- the sense of a rift that needed to be healed between mind and body. I did not need to <i>learn </i>how to step and clap and utter the syllables; I needed simply to surrender myself and my intuition to the force of the rhythm around me.<br />
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In the third and final session, something was, or became, palpably different in the room. I feel confident that it wasn't just my own experience that was different, that there was a collective altered state. I still stumbled and flailed at times -- but now I felt that the rhythm was still there, that it was there to catch me. I was more aware of the connection with the ground as I stepped, and more aware of the connection with the group as I moved. Now, more often, at least, my movements didn't originate from conscious mental effort but from connection to a source that was outside of me, outside of all of us. When we stopped, it did not feel like an arbitrary end, an abrupt transition into another state; rather, that rhythm that had been ours stayed resonating in the room and had to slowly, silently, subside.<br />
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There was something profoundly musical, vital and therapeutic about that experience with <a href="http://www.taketina.org/taketina/" target="_blank">TaKeTiNa</a> (I learned, back at home in front of my computer, that it is actually an established phenomenon). I feel most fortunate to have had the opportunity to open myself up to something like that, which is unlike anything I have ever done before. Such an immersive and embodied experience of rhythm goes far beyond anything that a regular weekly music lesson could provide. I feel incredibly grateful to Marcia and Marion, the organizers, who could see that in this might lie a solution to what their adult students struggled with so much. And, in general, I am inspired and moved to think of how they, and all the coaches, so honestly met their students' passionate desire to play music with such passionate commitment to <i>wanting</i> them to play music, that they could create this special environment.<br />
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One more rhythmic revelation came in the final rehearsal for our large ensemble, where we played some of the Hungarian folksong-infused "Ten Pieces for Children" by Bartok. In one piece, a fairly fast canon, there was a bar of general pause, silence for everybody, followed by, for the cellos, another bar's rest. This was tricky. First of all, I didn't know how I was going to stop my bow and ensure it was silent and not skittering and flailing about on the strings as I stumbled into that measure of silence. With that resolved, we then finally learned how to count the silence. And suddenly that experience of the rest was utterly transformed -- from a vague sense of hanging about and not playing and hoping for the best that you would come in again at the right moment, into <i>silence with a beat, </i>with shape and contour!<br />
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As I drove back home to Portland, along the foggy coast on 101, I thought of those words the fellow camper had said to me in the first conversation on the redwood-ed hillside, "it sustains you all year." I do feel like the camp has given me something I could not have imagined beforehand, and left me with a special reserve of experience that will continue to nourish the coming weeks and the return to the oh so other rhythms of the academic semester. A deeply human and humane experience, a far-reaching well-being, new friendships, the special connection of the shared days and meals and music, a falling away of the fear and stress that, alas, have pervaded much of my new work. But, perhaps, this experience will be sustaining--and in all the other weeks of the year it might be possible to fall away from fear and away from the consciousness it renders brittle, and into the buoyancy of rhythm.<br />
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Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-66979286484673378872012-03-18T12:39:00.003-07:002012-03-18T12:39:52.715-07:00the cellist and the garden<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "American Typewriter Light";">I’m
sleeping on a bed that was made for a cellist.
The bed is raised high up off the ground by shelves at its head and foot,
and in the middle, under the bed, is an empty space. A place to keep a cello for a cellist who
once lived with little space to spare. </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter Light';">Now the bed is in a small cabin just north of Fort Bragg, and the space under the bed serves well the suitcases of visitors who come to the Pacific coast and let the ocean breathe into them. </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter Light';">The cellist is no longer a cellist but a gardener. “I hated being inside. Hours in the practice room – that was the
worst thing for me.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter Light'; text-indent: 0.5in;">From
the gardens around the cabin comes the night-time song of frogs. </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter Light'; text-indent: 0.5in;">The garden around the cabin is beautiful – plants
and trees shape this living space, extending to the outside the created world
of a home that tends and protects.</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter Light'; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter Light'; text-indent: 0.5in;">It
has been raining a lot, and all the outdoors brims and drips with water
droplets. Under the wide spread of a cedar tree is an outdoor bathtub, reached
across a green carpet of baby’s tears ground cover. I lie in the steaming bathtub in the dark, under the branches, after the rain. </span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4PrIUgrCL6FFCV4RhN3C49igAWx69SZ5Z6i8jE99dVrj_HjaV1jzbaFacqPjhdTbakFl1Cp0hCQqdhPfG7Jq1RnncgTR6TgGKNjujBqA-HWvBjBM59KdFlRzaMyNKtkhvKGPIHEsUsjk/s1600/photo+(2).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4PrIUgrCL6FFCV4RhN3C49igAWx69SZ5Z6i8jE99dVrj_HjaV1jzbaFacqPjhdTbakFl1Cp0hCQqdhPfG7Jq1RnncgTR6TgGKNjujBqA-HWvBjBM59KdFlRzaMyNKtkhvKGPIHEsUsjk/s320/photo+(2).JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Garden bathtub between the leaves</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "American Typewriter Light"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">All the more striking for its contrast with the
sheltering intimacy of this garden, at the end of the lane, the road gives onto the wild
sand dunes of McKerricher State Park. A
vast open expanse of dunes leads down to the ocean, rising up to over 100 feet
and then opening out into broad, wind rippled flats.
Grasses, succulents and other hardy coastal plants grow here: in many
places the grasses have an established hold on the sides and crests of the
dunes, but there are other places where single leaves or shoots appear through
the sand, at the mercy of its shifting in the wind, and always ready to press
and grow their way back to the surface.
The sand, and winter storms, has also reclaimed stretches of the old
logging haul road, the line it draws down the coast from Ten Mile River erased
and blurred at intervals into the surrounding dunes. Turning away from the water and heading
inland back towards the tree line, the sound of the ocean gradually diminishes
as each dune you round hushes its pounding roar. From the bathtub, the continuous motion of the waves is still audible from beyond the garden.</span><br /><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9OwFb5OvZ4L6EUgPf0SBrmQMxJmK2z2EORVjrQsF6-QcBSAwLn3Af4gWzm6M4wbVK0jhpnHb_3WzUDp8UC4eJ1xwzavg3Y46FtSFf525Pw5goXHcaCX8P-b-4lhTbBGUFEg1vxyQ0Z_A/s1600/photo+(1).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9OwFb5OvZ4L6EUgPf0SBrmQMxJmK2z2EORVjrQsF6-QcBSAwLn3Af4gWzm6M4wbVK0jhpnHb_3WzUDp8UC4eJ1xwzavg3Y46FtSFf525Pw5goXHcaCX8P-b-4lhTbBGUFEg1vxyQ0Z_A/s320/photo+(1).JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>McKerricher State Park</i></td></tr>
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<br /></div>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-86487513529761197172011-11-26T13:00:00.000-08:002012-01-14T10:07:19.264-08:00intimate geography<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Three months in a new city, a new job, new circumstances of life, and there has not been a lot of time to reflect. In California I got used to seeing far: </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">up towards the hills, down onto the thoroughly settled streets below, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">across the water, the consoling twinkle of the Bay Bridge lights, the contours of Marin, the bold geography -- human and physical -- reassuringly legible, and after a few years, comprising a map I held and knew inside myself. I like to let my eye move over these distances, and there is a special freedom gained, a healing salve received from these views and the many transformations and contrasts they contain, which take one out of oneself, supplying the energy of an exchange with a dedicated interlocutor.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Portland, there are views to be had of the forest that surrounds the city -- to the east beyond Mt Tabor and out towards Mt Hood, and, from the westward looking window of my apartment, beyond the tamed, variegated leafiness of trees that line streets and shade houses, you can just see the top of a dark ridge of forest that lies somewhere on the other side of the Willamette River. The climate and ecology here, even within the city, feel like they are of the forest. My road is thick with wet fallen leaves; only the asphalt thwarts the regenerative processes of the forrest floor.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKZeAfCVjzZMzSaw_TuJ7X-3OxWJ0Rkdi8x-TrxhSxh5Z6v62jGYa0Er2zzPED9ru1R4Lv49VMDNGXpYLLcol_3icUZhkrMxa_e9CkqvXWMBhPEy9wmsG5UY73d-CnPCXhOghYSscaBog/s1600/SAM_0667.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKZeAfCVjzZMzSaw_TuJ7X-3OxWJ0Rkdi8x-TrxhSxh5Z6v62jGYa0Er2zzPED9ru1R4Lv49VMDNGXpYLLcol_3icUZhkrMxa_e9CkqvXWMBhPEy9wmsG5UY73d-CnPCXhOghYSscaBog/s320/SAM_0667.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">West from my window.</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There has not been a lot of time for the regenerative reflection and leisurely wandering of the eye or mind, nor, alas, for the cello. I now realize even more how my learning to play the cello was bound up with the writing of my dissertation. The combination of relative solitude and a peculiarly singular focus in the dissertation-writing period (which I'm not necessarily harking back to as idyllic from this vantage point; it also bred its own moments of difficulty and dissatisfaction) happily admitted another idiosyncratically singular focus into my near-daily life--the cello.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The cello also became bound up with the growing sense of connection and at-home-ness I felt living in the Bay Area. I realized at some point </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in California</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">--at a time that I think coincides with the beginning of learning to play the cello--that I was particularly vulnerable to, and derived great pleasure from, inserting myself into, or allowing inside of myself, stories and experiences that all laid down some deeper or more densely braided sense of connection to this place. One simple instance, which never failed in giving me that pleasure, was taking the road from Berkeley to El Cerrito to where I had my cello lessons -- Colusa Avenue that winds northwards, probably about mid-way between the hills and the bay. I simply loved knowing the way, possessing an experience, confirmed regularly, of everyday life against the backdrop of this landscape. After the early years of myopic preoccupation in a place to which I had no links, personal or historical, other than to the university that welcomed me there, I had finally acquired a sense of something larger that I could at once hold inside myself and find myself participating in. (I'm sure such a sense is a rather fundamental psychological need that must be met in order for us to experience fulfilling self-realization -- but it's curious how in the case of my years in California, all of this found a vivid articulation through my relationship to landscape and geography.) </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There were other things too, of course: playing the cello, I met Matthew, who had been born and lived all his life in California, and who is someone in whom the past lives vividly and so close at hand and as an abiding constituent of the present -- something which comes through in his stories -- and was one of the first things I noticed about him. Through him, more of the map and more of the past of Berkeley and of California came alive to me.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Before I went to Yosemite for the first time in late spring 2009, Matthew told me a hilarious story of a visit of his own there, with two musicians who were brothers, and an older eccentric friend of theirs, </span><a href="http://archive.dailycal.org/article/111968/former_uc_berkeley_lab_technician_dies_at_78" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Howie</a>,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> one of Berkeley's cast of colourful characters </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(who I did then once meet, and who sadly died last year). </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the room where I had my cello lessons, on the wall above the place where Matthew's own cello stood elegantly in its velvet-lined wooden box, was a striking photograph of a woman smiling and seeming to call out with joy from the picture. She was leaning at an angle of about 45 degrees with her arms stretched out above her head to another large slab of rock above -- so that it almost looked as if she hanging or dangling from the granite. The woman in the photo was <a href="http://www.cello.org/cnc/rowell.htm">Margaret Rowell</a>, Matthew's cello teacher, and the picture was taken in Yosemite. The photograph expressed an energy which seemed to come from the unlikely opposing forces captured in that instant. There was a tension in the stretched body, but also an ease and delight. The angle she was stood at was so unlikely that it looked as if it could have only lasted for a moment, but was, in fact, perfectly supported by the rock above and below. The portrait was taken relatively close-up, but the scale of the rocky surroundings is still palpable, and the photograph spoke at once of the body's smallness against this backdrop of its liberation and life.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhja4LurIy6o5MLa7ATbJrWR48AyzsKmCz-aymrE3bmH75VGHmxilFJ4qInRtPW6sma0fvF3EVPDoHDOEbQwdPtlYvoF4b-lGfkwhWJHBg6gi1Zo2GKIUyYmRJ-dswXJM2PkJ-pexslPPY/s1600/cover.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhja4LurIy6o5MLa7ATbJrWR48AyzsKmCz-aymrE3bmH75VGHmxilFJ4qInRtPW6sma0fvF3EVPDoHDOEbQwdPtlYvoF4b-lGfkwhWJHBg6gi1Zo2GKIUyYmRJ-dswXJM2PkJ-pexslPPY/s1600/cover.jpeg" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yesterday was the first day that I have allowed myself to wander in Portland. I went to Washington Park where the city begins to meet the forest. I looked for the views of Mt St Helen's and Mt Hood, but either the cloud or the trees, or my own poor orientation, obscured them. Then I went to Powell's Books (the largest independent used & new bookstore in the world, occupying a whole city block in downtown Portland). I found myself in the photography section, looking at books of Yosemite, and found there an edition of John Muir's 1912 text "The Yosemite," in an edition with photographs by Galen Rowell, the son of Margaret, a climber, explorer and photographer, who had died in a plane crash in 2002. The book was dedicated to "My mother Margaret Avery Rowell, whose lifelong passion for Yosemite started with a visit by open touring car in 1916." I recalled Matthew also telling me of how Margaret played cello in the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite. I obviously never knew these people and my links to them are vague and fragile, negligible, even, but suddenly happening upon these connections again yesterday was deeply restorative -- wandering reflection, the eye traversing distances, and entering into a dialogue that extends over decades and landscapes and enters, for a moment, into an exchange with the stories of lives that were closely wed to those landscapes.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">After these three months of feeling like I had been acting only on one plane, with only the most proximate visible to me, feeling like only one thing is of any consequence--survival in this new working situation--it was revivifying to let the eye and mind wander, and to see the transformations and connections that compose a larger picture of distances and proximities, and to let the energy and value that we attach to some of the more distant things let itself be felt in life again.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKWMZ49IIQXdHUCCT-vMB_eoYR1TOdPXHAiM7hhRaqKc0EQfGsndtLY5QWQRuRG6lUUI5kdrO4EJsrczyEUhQlRy489x36cb4uZqofEz-G7HozA0sse9Oq-P2_roH8JnsbKyj7ttbbeYk/s1600/photo-1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKWMZ49IIQXdHUCCT-vMB_eoYR1TOdPXHAiM7hhRaqKc0EQfGsndtLY5QWQRuRG6lUUI5kdrO4EJsrczyEUhQlRy489x36cb4uZqofEz-G7HozA0sse9Oq-P2_roH8JnsbKyj7ttbbeYk/s320/photo-1.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Galen Rowell, Sunset After a Storm, Yosemite Valley, 1970.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYCqfqkOSI8OkPzij4-YwLRwyES2DXIup4jpTmxIMeUiGniKoMFf4yQ5BOgdenbVktgvLVf11aZh6lNklc7dQETJfnjXi7ZRNh_YGnyElsfrRnFBgwrNOWQmDCOEoY7zHwxKLOPCR-W7o/s1600/photo-2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYCqfqkOSI8OkPzij4-YwLRwyES2DXIup4jpTmxIMeUiGniKoMFf4yQ5BOgdenbVktgvLVf11aZh6lNklc7dQETJfnjXi7ZRNh_YGnyElsfrRnFBgwrNOWQmDCOEoY7zHwxKLOPCR-W7o/s320/photo-2.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Galen Rowell, Clearing Storm over El Capitan, 1973.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">From John Muir's <i>The Yosemite</i>: </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"These beautiful days do not exist as mere pictures--maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-74297840269636681192011-09-20T20:25:00.000-07:002011-09-21T08:40:32.428-07:00Fwd: Please Re-Deliver to Bach<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Last night I practiced: some scales, and then the Prelude of the first Bach Suite. Something always catches inside me when, at the half-way point, you reach the return of the G-D-B chord after all the journeying out from those notes that had opened the Prelude. The recognition of home, the same but different, after all that's come before. Then, as I paused on the long high D before the waves of scales start, I thought I heard applause from the street below. I carried on. This morning, as I left the house, there was an envelope on the porch, in front of the doormat. A slug or snail had clearly investigated it in the night, taking a few nibbles from the top.</div>
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I opened the envelope as I walked to the bus stop. A neighbour asking me to be quiet? Inviting me to join their garage jam opposite? As I read, my eyes filled with tears.</div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dear Anonymous Cello Player,</span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tonight you saved me. I cannot explain how or why, but you simply saved my life tonight. </span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Recently I had been planning to take my life and leave this world. But the music that flowed from your window stopped me, it paralyzed me. And in doing so, I was completely caught off guard.</span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The woman I love left me heartbroken and tortured, but the song that breathed on the air of this night reminded me that I would be leaving far more than just this world. I would be leaving so much more behind as well. Beauty, pure unparalleled beauty.</span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In saying that I cannot thank you enough. Tonight I heard the most breath-taking music I have ever heard. Nothing will ever compare. The memory of that sound, the reminder it gave me will never leave me.</span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So thank you. You have shown me that there is more surprise to this world than I have ever known.</span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Again, thank you for saving my life. I will never know you and you will never know me, but know that music, and the perfect night, are there.</span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sincerely, </span></i></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A Listening Stranger.</span></i></div>
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That the simple, beautiful designs of Bach can issue into the night from the cello of a novice and be -- music -- act as music in the world -- that, truly, is miraculous. That in one unwitting moment and for one accidental listener, I could be a musician and let music into somebody else's world -- with that, too, the letter-writer has shown me, in turn, that there is more surprise in the world than I have ever known. </div>
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I wish the Listening Stranger well, and may future happiness be his.</div>
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A day of unconventional mail, art again moving through the world and making its effects felt in unexpected places: also received today, from dear Matthew, in California, who taught me to play, a painting. It sat on top of his piano, and the window whose view inspired it was behind me as I sat with my cello. The light on the San Francisco Bay luminous in pastel as the framer carefully cuts it free of the packaging. He looks it over admiringly: "every inch is expressive, is an integral part of the work...." I tell him that if one knows, then this impressionistic light and colour is unmistakably the Bay, seen from the hills to the the east. The rise of Angel Island in the foreground, the contoured mass of Marin in the right-hand background. "I used to live there," he said. "This gives me goosebumps."</div>
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Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-48974302035474696222011-08-17T22:55:00.000-07:002011-08-18T11:14:13.924-07:00tale from the in-between times<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii3gVwqaZnQap0X4fUrQ_K_9sB9qzWtv4D62rRrQmFope_6n5vvGyLpMYlieQjpRLnGpnRN6VCY9jpvEyoLQ0UY_P-YypxGlZnrFmvEKMARb9fM-jzmT2GothV53MHoi_tWI6Qn3QsldM/s1600/SAM_0595.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 162px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii3gVwqaZnQap0X4fUrQ_K_9sB9qzWtv4D62rRrQmFope_6n5vvGyLpMYlieQjpRLnGpnRN6VCY9jpvEyoLQ0UY_P-YypxGlZnrFmvEKMARb9fM-jzmT2GothV53MHoi_tWI6Qn3QsldM/s320/SAM_0595.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5642046248975713026" /></a>
<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA7IzlG78B6GFx2y2oeYi_3bQ-uFIDu0WSWG6V1Th6s2lvnXW-94Br4E7c8Pec4Brqp_aAWKg3T-ztU6hH0-rxg4lP_n90zKBRfQxakvcEBi9WT36NlJl91gK4PQI8D0NcLdEGAExRXck/s1600/SAM_0539.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 133px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA7IzlG78B6GFx2y2oeYi_3bQ-uFIDu0WSWG6V1Th6s2lvnXW-94Br4E7c8Pec4Brqp_aAWKg3T-ztU6hH0-rxg4lP_n90zKBRfQxakvcEBi9WT36NlJl91gK4PQI8D0NcLdEGAExRXck/s320/SAM_0539.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5642046121470249922" /></a>The past few weeks I have been living in something of an in-between time - when the normal rhythms of daily life have been utterly suspended. Upon returning to the US from Russia (with quick dip back into the English woods on the way) just over a month ago now, I essentially entered the state of Moving. And although I've been at rest in my final destination for a week, I don't think I will truly exit this state until my furniture catches up with me, and I can finally be at rest on something other than the air mattress or the single chair I brought with me in the car (brought along for the cello, of course, for what good would it be to be in an empty apartment with a cello and no chair...?) <div>
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<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>Pictures: (left) cello with houseplant in my </i><i>empty old </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>apartment (good acoustics!)<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>(right) </i><i>"Musician's chair" at "Duet," an exhibition of woodworking and musical instruments in Mendocino, CA (July 2011).</i></span></div><div></div><div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; "><i> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></i></span></div><div>But the funny thing about this state of Moving was the sheer length of time it consumed -- there was at least a good week in the middle there pretty much entirely devoted to it (and that's not even counting the earlier house-hunting mission). And for this time I was very actively -- physically and mentally (the boxes even entered my dreams) -- engaged in the whole palaver -- yet all this daily effort had little worth in itself and yielded little meaningful creation in the world... I wasn't really Doing (and definitely not Relaxing, either) - just Moving. It all felt a bit like being on a very, very long plane ride...not just moving, but moving life on. It was all for the sake of what was to come at the Moved To destination.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>So maybe there wouldn't be much to tell about the Moving -- a prolonged banality full of details which were of little interest to anyone outside the immediate context of attaining the state of Moved, all a bit of a non-activity that comes between the real tellable incidents at either end. But there's a particular delight in finding stories in the banal in-between times, in elevating the mundane to the tellable. And in this whole process, I think one incident, or non-incident, captured this for me above all:</div><div>
<br /></div><div>I needed to procure a No Parking permit from the City of Berkeley in order to clear a space next to my house for the movers' truck to park -- or so the moving company informed me. Having spent at least the first half of my seven years in Berkeley feeling more like a transient student than an actual resident of the city, I quite relished the feeling of citizenry involved in making an appointment and showing up at the Permit Service Center in Downtown Berkeley. I dutifully drew my dubiously scaled diagram of the street, the house and the required kerb space on the orange form and waited my turn. In the waiting area I found a large-print edition of the Reader's Digest magazine to flick through. The Reader's Digest! This had been a staple of my childhood -- the true-life death-defying stories, the "It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power" vocab quizzes, and the humorous anecdotes sent in by readers -- all of these were consumed by me as a young, impressionable reader. The improbable anecdotes and gaffes, sent in by people from strangely named places like Coward, South Carolina or Carthage, Missouri were, in retrospect, one of my earliest encounters with America -- although I think all those names, places and comic incidents existed for me only in some haze of the obscure reality of the world of the Reader's Digest and its twelve little curlicues on the spine, shaded in, one more at a time, on each month's edition. </div><div>
<br /></div><div>In the middle of reading a true-life story about a college student who rescues her boyfriend who's plummeted down a rocky ravine, my name is called. The clerk is quite stern, and I am scolded for not knowing the exact length of my movers' truck. I am sent away to make a phone call, and when I return (having rejoined the queue, but barely for long enough to even resume my place in the ravine rescue story) we conclude that I need four 20 foot parking spaces. The clerk retrieves four No Parking signs (considerably larger at close quarters than when you see them in situ at the side of the road) and begins to fill in the details on them in marker pen. I had seen something about buckets of concrete on the instructions for how to erect the signs, and was a little nervous about the prospect of concrete mixing fitting into my weekend plans... There was, however, I learned, an alternative. Having established that there was a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the kerb, the clerk sternly and soberly issued detailed instructions: I was to go to a garden center, buy some bamboo canes, cover the No Parking signs with Saran wrap (<a href="http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/">BritEng</a>: cling film; for years, until I saw it written down (in Zadie Smith's <i>On Beauty</i> where maybe her own British ear was revelling in the local knowledge) I thought the <a href="http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/">AmEng</a> was "surround wrap" -- seemed perfectly logical...), thread the canes through the sign, tape them onto the back, and bang them into the ground -- but making sure to water the ground first because it will be too hard. I nod, pay, thank her, and leave with my armful of signs, slightly anxious about the meter that would've expired at my parking spot while I was being schooled in the art of bamboo sign assembly. How absurd would that be, eh - to get a parking ticket while you were out obtaining parking permits... </div><div>
<br /></div><div>I went to the Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, bought bamboo canes (not before inspecting the bamboo plant in our backyard and concluding that its stems didn't quite offer me what I needed) and devoted Sunday afternoon to a rather haphazard arts and craft project with the signs. (As a friend pointed out, perhaps I could have fashioned them into an entry for the Berkeley Kite festival that was taking place that weekend at the Marina). But the clerk was right, and I did indeed need to water the ground before being able to bang the canes in...I felt like I was consecrating the earth, sprinkling it with holy water. </div><div>
<br /></div><div>My signs stood firmly by the roadside, duly offering their three days warning about the parking restriction. The designated No Parking day approached...A small white car occupied one of the spaces, and it had never moved the whole time...what if the owners where away? When it was still there the night before, I started to get worried -- my god, what if I actually had to have somebody towed away?! I wasn't banking on that! There was I feeling all nice and citizenly as I went down to the City of Berkeley offices -- not thinking that I would end up a tow-truck menace! Maybe the movers' truck will be smaller, I thought, hopefully. Which, of course, it was. You could have parked three of them in 80ft. So, in the end, the truck parked in a space behind the white car, behind all my carefully signposted spaces -- in a space that was empty anyway.... </div><div>
<br /></div><div>But I guess what really tickled and awed me about all this -- about the unflinching sobriety of the clerk, the specificity of the instructions and the established existence of the whole process was was just that -- its established-ness. That at any given time there were people in Berkeley who were in the extra-ordinary in-between time of moving (or doing construction work or whatever else means you ned to stake out the territory in front of your property) and who were piddling about with Saran wrap and bamboo canes and watering cans, or, pity the (BritEng) <a href="http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/verge_4">verge</a>-less, mixing concrete and buying buckets.</div><div>
<br /></div>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-69804133015346225682011-08-01T22:44:00.000-07:002011-09-21T07:36:22.404-07:00Petersburg's In-Between Spaces<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span">There’s a particular kind of daytime snoozing that I associate with the summertime in <span class="Apple-style-span">St Petersburg – a half- conscious, shallowly immersed, dream-state in which fragments of the surrounding envir</span><span class="Apple-style-span">onment and snatches of recent experience float and mingle and expand and contract. I didn't have so </span><span class="Apple-style-span">much cause to practice submitting myself to this art of lucid dreaming on this visit – for one, the c</span><span class="Apple-style-span">urtains of my room were thicker and more effective at blocking out the midsummer white nights—but the couple of times I have surrendered to a daytime nap, the experience is as vivid as ever. I’m sure this state arises from a combination of the unrelenting daylight, the suspension in a foreign city’s bustle, and the foreign lan</span><span class="Apple-style-span">guage’s rustle all around and inside. On this trip, at least, I felt some sounds and shapes of Russian a little more internalized than previously. Could this have anything to do with my newly attuned musical ear…? Of course, I’d like to think so, but who’s to know.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">In my last week in Petersburg, I went to a concert of organ and cello music. The street address on Sadovaya gave little away about the actual location – it turned out to be set way back from the street, in the grounds of the Suvorovskii-Military Academy, in the Maltese Chapel. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><i>[A Maltese Chapel in Russia? I had no idea…but it turns out that Paul I, son of Catherine the Great, had been made the Protector of the Order of the Maltese Knights of St John in 1797. Paul had grown up reading stories of knights of old, and he went on to develop a particular interest in things chivalric: he endeavoured (with no success or popularity) to reinstitute the honor of the old chivalric orders as an antidote to what he perceived as Russia's corrupt aristocracy. In Petersburg, city of royal palaces, it is a castle--Mikhailovsky Castle--complete with drawbridges and armored knights in relief on its front walls--that was Paul's residence. The Knights of St John were connected to the grail, and ss for the Maltese Chapel--and tales of knights that played on my own childhood imagination--I have to admit that something about the chapel's facade--which you come upon suddenly in a hidden courtyard, seamlessly joined to other buildings--reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the grail temple carved into the rock (filmed at Petra in Jordan).]</i></span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span">The Maltese Chapel at Sadovaya 26, embedded in the Suvorovskii Military Academy</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">But I digress…Russian tsars…Indiana Jones…ah yes, Vivaldi…To my delight, among the pieces they played was the Vivaldi cello sonata in Eb minor – one of the sonatas that I had played. This was a new experience for me – hearing something that I knew (and knew only through playing –not something I was already familiar with as a listener). Both this novelty and, perhaps, the very nature of this particular music – the clarity of its phrase structures – made for a different kind of listening experience – one where I was as aware of every note as of the unfolding movement of the whole. Listening to the clear line of the cello was like hearing it draw out of me something that I held whole inside myself. Like knowing the words of a play--not just glancingly familiar but deeply internalized—that you see acted before you. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">The semi-conscious lucid dreaming is just one of St Petersburg’s in-between spaces. In this transitional society--definitely still transitional 20 years after the end of the Soviet Union--building work, repair and remodeling are going on everywhere, and building-use, commercial activity and consumer behavior are all in a state of flux. I had two particularly striking experiences of Petersburg's in-between spaces that seemed very much typical of the city's current condition and evolution. It is probably no coincidence, either, that they were both in the company of my young friends -- who have degrees in interior design and environmental design, a specialty that also belongs to and finds much application in today's Petersburg.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">The first was a house -- an unrestored <i>osobniak</i> -- on the embankment right next to the Hermitage. The house was up for sale, but, thanks to its prestigious location and size, at such an enormous cost that it was hardly likely that a buyer would be swiftly forthcoming. So, in the meantime, it was being rented to group of young designers and artists who used the large empty rooms as exhibition and studio space. On my first night in Petersburg, I found myself on its balcony staring right across at the gold spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress against the midnight dusk sky. A party was being held to celebrate one young woman's fashion collection; the clothes were displayed against the flecked walls of peeling plaster, and some time after midnight were hoisted to ceiling-height to make more room for dancing. A couple of weeks later, m<span class="Apple-style-span">y interior designer friends took me to their studio. An entrance from the street led up a dingy staircase; we were let into one door and led through a long twisting, high-ceilinged corridor, hung with sheets, and between the seams, every now and then, you could see the building pared down to its bare structural form -- way beyond even the shabby chic of the make-shift fashion exhibition, completely uninhabitable. Then, suddenly, the corridor ended and opened into a large double-sized studio, with beautiful wood floors, fresh paint and all new fixtures. The windows looked onto the yard, and I was completely disoriented as to which way we now faced compared to where we had entered. What will these in-between spaces, and the spaces they are between, have become in another five or ten years, I wonder?</span></span></div>
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Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-26029118839673917632011-07-05T21:57:00.000-07:002012-08-25T15:17:24.807-07:00Ensemble of Violoncellists of St Petersburg<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Somewhere between the trips on vodka-vapoury buses that move at a rate of inches-per-hour and the trips on sleek express trains, where electronic cigarettes guarantee the cleanliness of the air as the kilometers between Moscow and St Petersburg are swallowed up, I have found my way to hear some cellos, and more besides. <br />
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First off, right at the bottom of the classical music listings, there was the <a href="http://cellomusic.info/index.html">Ensemble of Violoncellists of St Petersburg</a>. I turned up at the venue, a recently restored Estonian church, with no idea of what to expect. I was vaguely recalling the night, some ten years ago, when I went to a jazz club in Samara: I had been thinking intimate smoky basement -- and I joined orderly rows of audience in a vast hall to listen to a four hour long concert of hopping big band music on a stage hung with a banner proclaiming, Soviet-style, glory to geologists.</div>
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(Lest I was overstating the dissolution of all difference between Russian and Western ways in my previous post, let me just say that on the way to the concert I had an amusing experience of Russia's all-too-often flagging (but evolving) culture of customer service: I went into a shop and asked for a bottle of mineral water. The sales assistant pressed some buttons on the till, then--ever so slowly--turned away from me, took up a comb, looked into a small mirror that was hanging on the partition that divided the drinks counter from the dairy products counter, and carefully combed her fringe a few times. She turned slowly back to me, and asked, moodily, "Is that all?") </div>
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On entering this cleanly painted, plain wooden Lutheran church just round the corner from the Mariinsky Theatre, we were handed a programme and a pen, with the instructions to rate each piece with points on a scale of one to ten. For an instant, I thought I'd come to see some kind of strange talent contest, and not convinced I'd understood correctly, I asked my neighbour what this was all about. "Just so they know what people like best," she told me. No contest, then -- just a bit of audience engagement. </div>
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There were 17 short numbers on the programme -- ranging from Rachmaninov to Chuck Berry, from Ukrainian folk dance to the Pink Panther. The arrangements were pretty great, and the eight cellists were joined by a soprano from the Mariinsky for a few numbers -- including, to my delight, Villa-Lobos' Aria from Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5, which I had stumbled through, piecemeal, in the string orchestra workshop in San Francisco last summer. My other favourite was probably the arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie's Night in Tunis...translated into marvellous jazzy cello riffing... Biased toward the cello I may be, but with that versatility, who needs any other instrument...</div>
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I'm not sure I was fully committed to the point allocation aspect of the evening -- but I nonetheless recorded my scores for each number (minimal distinctions between generally superlative responses--an opinion largely shared, my sneaks revealed, with my neighbour, and judging by the hall's response, with most of the audience, too) and dutifully handed in my sheet at the end. </div>
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I'd never heard a cello choir concert before, nor a concert with such a varied programme -- and as well as great musicianship, there was also what seemed like a good dose of adventurousness in exploiting the cello's potential. A couple of pieces were a little heavy on the romantic-sentimental side for me, but overall there was something quite refreshing about the whole concert (and which made me think of the conversation some<a href="http://elysiajoy.wordpress.com/"> fellow cello-bloggers</a> had had a while back about concert programmes and the profiles of dwindling audiences): moving easily between such a range of genres, these Petersburg cellists quite openly and enthusiastically combined some serious artistry with music's emotional transports and an unabashed experience of entertainment. And as a result, while the music wasn't at all amateur, the feeling of community among the public (of around 80 people, probably) was somehow more akin to my memories of (English) village hall events than to the solemnity and urbanity of a concert hall. </div>
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Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-30029689965663994792011-06-27T15:15:00.000-07:002011-06-27T15:37:36.503-07:00On the Streets of St Petersburg<div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; line-height: 18px; "><i>This post comes to you courtesy of </i></span><img src="http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif" alt="Align Left" border="0" class="gl_align_left" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; line-height: 18px; "><i>wi-fi on board the Sapsan [Peregrin Falcon] express train from Moscow to St Petersburg...amongst whose other high-tech amenities number "electronic cigarettes"-- on sale in the buffet car for those who can't make the four hours...I wonder if these may have been introduced as a precautionary measure after desperate passengers, used to the lengthy stops of regular Russian trains, nipped out for a quick smoke at Tver', only to be </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; line-height: 18px; "><i>stranded on the platform as the speedy Sapsan took silent flight....</i></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span lang="RU" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">Умом</span><span lang="RU" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; "> </span><span lang="RU" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">Россию</span><span lang="RU" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; "> </span><span lang="RU" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">не</span><span lang="RU" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; "> </span><span lang="RU" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">понятъ</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; "> - You can't understand Ru</span></span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">ssia with your mind, as Tiutchev's words come out rather less pithily in English.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But sometimes with your body, perhaps: I walk a lot in my usual life, but why does walking the streets of Petersburg make my foot strangely swell up and my limbs ache with a deep fatigue?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The air is filled with traffic fumes, cigarette smoke, and, at close quarters on pavements and in shops, the tragic smell of stale vodka.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Yesterday afternoon I bought a slim volume about Shost</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; ">a</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">kovich in a</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; ">n <i>antikvariat</i></span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; "> bookshop from a man who gave off that familiar odour of toxic vodka tears.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Last week, I sat on a bus for almost an hour, stuck in o</span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">ne of Petersburg's many <i>probki </i>(traffic jams) crawling along a few hundred meters of Sadovaya Street to join Nevsky Prospect.</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">This was the very place that,</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span><a href="http://stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/alyson/alyson_b3.html"><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">on board a tram</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> in 1918</span></a><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman CYR', serif; ">,</span><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> a chance encounter took place between the poets Zinaida Gippius and Aleksandr Blok.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Unable to reconcile herself to Blok's recently published long poem, <i>The Twelve</i>, and its depiction of the revolution, Gippius declared th</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">at in public, at least, all relations between them must be severed.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The tram stops and Blok gets off.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It was the last time Gippius was to see him before his death in 1921.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Stuck in today’s city's traffic jams, they would have had time to thrash out the matter further; the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; "><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">probki </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">grant no such fleetingness to encounters aboard public tra</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">nsport.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">A man breathing sour vodka vapours sits down next to me.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>"You have beautiful hand</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">s," he says, through the slight thickness of drink.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">"Veins--that's good--they carry life, you know you are alive."<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(After the exertion of a walk in the heat, the vein</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">on the backs of my hands were prominently standing out.)<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He compares his own hand to s mine: almost unnaturally smooth skin covered the puffy reddish hand; I recalled the more extreme bloatedness in the hands and faces of the drunken men and woman--the si</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">ght of the women was always more shocking--I used to see hanging around on Ligovsky Prospect near the Moscow Railway Station before a smart new shopping centre was built there.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>"No veins, you see."<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He took a call on his mobile phone.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When it ended, he complained about a nagging woman, and then, with a hint of ruefulness, added "My daughter -- she took away my car because I drink." <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The traffic lights at the corner with Nevsky changed several times; we moved nowhere.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">The St Petersburg traffic is somewhat calmer and less </span></span><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">anarchic than it was six years ago-</span></span><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">-and not just because it spends most of its time ground to a halt in perpetual traffic jams.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Many streets in the centre are now one-way (to make room for parking the rapidly growing number of vehicles at the curb), there are light-controlled pedestrian crossings with reassuringly large green-man walk signs, and, I am told, a new law stipulating that vehicles must give way to pedestrians.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Crossing Ulitsa Marata each morning, though, is still something of a gauntlet to run: woe betide the pedestrian who thinks it is for him that the speeding car slows, and not to swerve a gnarly patch of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">potholes and raised tram-tracks...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">I can’t help but wonder, though, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">how </i>the changes in the traffic rule</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">s happened—I mean, in a way, it must have been a change that happened overnight--did they just put up sign and the next morning everyone drove the right way?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Did people get it right straight away?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Were there chaotic encounters as cars erroneously came nose-to-nose in newly designated one-way streets, or confusions and frustrations as drivers were sent looping round the block one more time…?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And does this most banal change—the establishment, one day, of a one-way street, work as something of a metaphor for other processes of change in Russian society…?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Now the traffic situation is more or less entirely normalized – as are the other changes most visible to me.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; "><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span>For the young Russian friends (5 years my junior) </span><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">that I live with, the new normality is seamlessly assimilated: they tell me that clothes from [the English high street store] Marks and Spencer are simple, that bread from the French bakery is good, that a smart phone was really the only upgrade to go for. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The five years that separates us in age is not a lot, but it does mean that their adult life began in the mid-to-late 2000s, when the “middle class” had grown, wealth was becoming more evenly distributed after the grotesque extremes of the unstable 90s, and the gap between Russia and western Europe, at least on the most readily observable plane of material existence, had shrunk.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">Their adult lives had largely been formed in the six years that I had not visited Russia, so the imperceptible assimilation of these new ways was somehow even more striking to me.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4hbYLL610ggpERDpnUw7qe9aaWL_MjwPhM2t1E6fNLsdjLT1vO8lZ4yofkP2kfiFdACegJj4NbNw5jdnIu_HcTAQ4Qws8t5eBbGQCBNTo9lKrg8XgIz4iTr1iSQFsfqSsILxDCuUPRbU/s320/SAM_0118.JPG" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623026622735369442" /></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>"Modernization or Death"</i></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Lbp7isAFiDclbVXq4I_kF15p141YaTqQ822yif6jlAxBNSljd7XqiVg_WnZk68VC1WuWGOGV52tN_hyphenhyphenGggeH0P9rjICmuBlMUoUowaAxG5KiQ3fJjvx81ZCV6owk_6kuzi35CHa-wzc/s320/SAM_0147.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623027226773824546" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 180px; " /></span></p><div><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">I had first come to Russia in 1998, and in forming my relationship to the place and to people here, the “d</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">ifference” of the place that I came from had to be dealt with one way or another. Perception of the differences stood behind the interest, openness, good humour, and sometimes exasperation, that came along with experiences of everyday life in Russia.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>People would often ask about where you lived and what your life was like or how certain things worked—and I remember a feeling sometimes of the sheer impossibility of conveying some of these things—not because any one individual aspect of life was so wildly different, but because the whole picture of life that they formed was an altogether different kind of composition.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Now, though, that difference has diminished dramatically, and in my relation to Russia and Russians, I no longer feel so much of that suppressed or under-expressed sense of the gap.</span></div> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">***<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5oIPjHdNUytL2O7XRM7YYxYzCiqMeigQ6ztT0IPKoeJVtHdbUOiKM6w8TpR8GBzICW9Zc5zGX43A9dSEzUuemcGENKaijxKuw4L_tSgjd0MRN_F843d0c5JE0VK7qhuq25XuOJvKAWjY/s320/SAM_0123.JPG" style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 320px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5622978827475575874" /><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span">The other day I was stopped on the street and asked the way to the Dostoevsky</span></span></span><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span"> house-museum, and the next day, the way to Pushkin’s apartment on the Moika. I was, of course, able to help these seekers of literary addresses –this layer of St Petersburg remains unchanged in the six years since I was last here--but when I speak and they realize I am not Russian, they laugh good-naturedly at the unlikely foreigner who knows where Pushkin </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; ">lived…</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><i>St Isaac's Cathedral on a White Night, from Canal Griboedova</i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px; "><br /></span></p>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-39638347627571771922011-06-17T13:34:00.000-07:002011-06-17T13:48:26.090-07:00Travelogue ~ Prologue ~ Prelude<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px; ">My cello has been left upstairs in the attic room at the top of M.’s house that looks one way onto the San Francisco Bay and the other way onto a wooded hillside that is home to new-born, long-legged prancing deer, sweet-songed orioles, a slinky red fox, nine menacing turkeys, and, occasionally, to the delight of M. the improvising cellist, a partner in nighttime duets, the ever-inventive mocking bird.<span> </span>The hard white case in which M.’s own cello has travelled to Russia, Palestine, Israel, Hungary and elsewhere lives up in this room as well -- and the room itself, with its odd-shaped ceilings and many angles is not unlike a giant cello case of its own.<span> </span>I think my cello will be happy there while I am off on this summer of restless travels.<span> </span>Perhaps, now and then, first thing in the morning, instead of picking up his own 300 year-old cello of dark, wise wood, M. will take downstairs my three-year-old anonymous cello, bought from the man in the subway station, and play Bach on it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span"> ***</span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><span class="Apple-style-span">Returning to England for the first time in eighteen months, I made the hour’s drive from Heathrow to my parents’ house in Hampshire.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>After the expansiveness and scale of the American landscape, England always seems cosy and rounded, its features—both natural and built—huddling on an island, not stretching across a continent.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span>In the past few years of living in the Bay Area, I have found myself, now and then, perceiving the landscape in a more primal way--with some awareness the land and climate that exists separately from all that is built, natural contours and dynamics that exist apart from and prior to the modern life that goes on there.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>With the bay, the headlands of Marin and San Francisco, the Berkeley hills and the certainty of westerliness that comes with the sun descending into the Pacific, one comes to always be sure of one’s orientation in this place.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>With so many vantage points from which to admire the view of the bay, one is so often struck by how thoroughly humanly settled the area is and, at the same time, how dynamic and boldly defined its landscape is.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> (</span>Knowledge of the possibility of earthquakes heightens this sense still more.)<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And as for the weather, one usually has the feeling that although it is so rapidly variable, it moves in large, wide fronts off the ocean or down the coast and across the land.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Sometimes, especially when it rains in huge sheets for hours on end, as it did so much this spring, there’s almost some of feeling of processes that are not just local but that belong to the planet, or a relationship between earth and sky that adheres to geological time, not human time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><span class="Apple-style-span">As I near my parents’ house in the village of Headley, and in the next few days as I drive to nearby towns, I feel that that habit formed in California to perceive both raw landscape and its relation to human settledness now apprehends something anew about this familiar place.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What strikes me is how we really do live in woodland.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There are woods all around the houses and villages that are joined by narrow, often deep sunk roads.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The dense leafiness that is all around creates a sense of protective proximities, and the possibility of ever being able to see as far into the distance as one might from a window or hillside in Berkeley now seems strange and almost audacious.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This sense of proximities has an audible manifestation too: issuing from the woodland is a true chorus of birdsong—not the single voice of an oriole or mockingbird, but a constant and variegated song, a tuneful babble of chirps and whistles and low and clear coos, all woven together and close around, through the kitchen window, like sticks and grasses making a nest of song.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span"> ***</span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><span class="Apple-style-span">Now St Petersburg: the first time here for six years.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The same familiar smell of the tap water.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>My body remembers the odd feeling of encountering the one differently spaced flight of stairs on climbing to the fourth floor apartment on Svechnoi pereulok (Candle Lane).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And though the trams are all new, the same rattle that’s felt right through the apartment when they pass along the street below. There have been some cellos in Russia, too (heard not played) but more on those another time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span"> ***</span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><span class="Apple-style-span">I did fulfil the ambition of playing some Bach by the time I had finished the PhD -- the Prelude of Suite No. 1 --and so I made this recording the week after I had submitted the dissertation. It’s certainly quite crude and patchy, and despite a couple of more overtly botched moments (including, annoyingly, the end), it’s just about palpably whole enough. At the very least, a yardstick by which to measure future and hopefully ever- improving efforts…</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN" style="line-height: 115%; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><object width="400" height="300"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="movie" value="http://www.facebook.com/v/10150263297842667"><embed src="http://www.facebook.com/v/10150263297842667" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="300"></embed></object> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-55757918435177097742011-03-27T22:50:00.000-07:002011-03-29T12:02:37.690-07:00[just wow]Every so often the musical experience comes along that blows your mind, alters your state of being...tear-inducing and <a href="http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/12/09/5619731-messiah-give-you-chills-thats-a-clue-to-your-personality">skin-gasm</a>-giving (learned that one from <a href="http://ccandme.wordpress.com/">Eddie</a>!). Tonight it was the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yuri Temirkanov and Alisa Weilerstein playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1. Preceded by Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture (and followed by Brahms Symphony No. 4 and an encore --hurrah-- from the Enigma Variations, which did something beautiful and delicate at the very end, giving the final pronounced dying note to a violin somewhere at the back). But they had me from the first notes of the Rimsky-Korsakov. The sound of the orchestra was just beautiful -- a completely different experience from the SF Symphony (feel a little bad there resorting to such comparisons). So <span style="font-style: italic;">live</span> -- in the sense that no recording could ever approximate this sound -- a performance that pulls you right there into the present with it, that doesn't just let you listen from the outside, as if through glass or through speakers, but pulls you right there into the music with it.<br /><br />Lacking much proficient vocab for describing these things, I want to say somehow that their "pronunciation" of the music was different, and that its "posture" was somehow exceptional. Perhaps the pronunciation was the deep and many-sided emotion -- as well as something that I struggle to describe in how the transitions between different kinds of passages seemed to more meaningfully articulated than anything I've heard before. And perhaps the posture is the sense of an unshakable conviction that this was profoundly serious, that the efforts to use all this art form's abundant and varied means for communication and expression and to convey all that these pieces contained -- that these efforts were made with the utmost earnestness and with abandon. In short, I suppose what there was here (or what I was ready to feel) was art, unabashed, unapologetic art.<br /><br />And, by the time we got to Shostakovich in particular -- art as a matter of life and death, in all its urgency. Weilerstein was tremendous. The Shostakovich concerto is terrifying and ferocious. And so devastatingly subversive. Appropriating music to fit a desired meaning is notoriously fraught (especially in the case of Shostakovich), and although the Soviet authorities found a perfectly acceptable narrative of their own in the concerto, it's impossible not to hear the cello as a biographical subject of the past decades of Stalinist Terror and war that preceded its writing. And that the cello could say what it does with the full support of the ranks, of an orchestra around it -- is somehow visually also deeply subversive. At one point, in one maniacally repeating dance right up high in thumb position, I swear you could actually hear the cello issue a caustic mocking laugh. Even the breaking of a string during the final movement and Weilerstein's departure from the stage to fix it did nothing to diminish the taught, terrible power of the whole. Maybe, like the enigmatic, ambiguous, disturbingly strained "sound of a snapped string" in Chekhov's famously obscure stage direction to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Cherry Orchard</span>, it only enhanced it.Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-67485814549293005912011-03-23T23:55:00.000-07:002011-03-26T14:06:01.849-07:00heaven, earth, seaThe concert-goers, with ample yards, between them, of the kind of good quality raincoat cloth that bespeaks wealth and decency, hurried out of the rainstorm into the sanctuary of Bach's Mass in B Minor in Davies Hall on Saturday.<br /><br />I've never heard the whole of one of Bach's big choral works performed live before, and it was indeed a soaring, glorious edifice. I realized, though, how my sense of this music is so bound up with some experience of church interiors and architecture -- columns and interlacing of arches, traced by the voices that rise upwards, dancing and weaving in their polyphony, sent back to us the listeners by the acoustics of stone and the tall length of the nave. As I listened at the Symphony, every now and then, I would have some vague feeling of disconnect between the sound and the space--the rounded, evenly lit, open space of the concert hall--that I found myself in.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/profstewartrk/3567442701/" title="Thomaskirche, Leipzig by profstewartrk, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3659/3567442701_5c73ea9e64.jpg" alt="Thomaskirche, Leipzig" height="265" width="500" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Interior of </span><span style="font-style: italic;">the </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Thomaskirche, Leipzig, where Bach was cantor for 27 years.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">-- photo by profstewartrk @ flickr</span></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">At the end of one movement which closed on a powerful choral note, the sound of the voices hung and resonated and dispersed in the air -- like the puff of rosin dust issuing up from a bow, or maybe a puff of chalk from the wooden boards in the Lutheran church where the numbers of the week's psalms were written up.<br /><br />The cellos and basses play almost continually throughout the Mass -- providing the bass line, the continuo part. In one gentle and beautiful movement (of the Sanctus) the cello is quite prominent, playing with only the flute to accompany the tenor. Yet at the end, as the conducted invited the different sections and soloists of the orchestra to take their bows, the humble cellos won little in the way of extra cheer or applause. Their part is too unremarkable, rarely attaining prominence, yet their the grounded earthliness of their bass line sends the harmonies soaring and keeps rhythm's surety of creation.<br /><br />In other Bach news, I have started playing the Prelude of the 1st Suite in my lesson and have been practicing the first half of it, one note to a bow, in the kitchen this week. Maybe it's because the music is so familiar, or because of some more readily intuitable logic in the progression of the chords as they go a-venturing outwards, but I can feel, in a way that is new (there was maybe an inkling of it with the last Vivaldi sonata), some closer connection between the sound and my fingers of my left hand -- I mean I can <span style="font-style: italic;">feel </span>it, <span style="font-style: italic;">hear </span>it even, in my fingers -- especially when I go to sleep at night not so long after practising...in the same way you might feel like you're still on a ship when you lie down to sleep again on land after a journey by sea.<br /></div></div>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-56970434656952456162011-03-17T23:48:00.000-07:002011-03-18T00:46:46.691-07:00sympathetic vibrations<span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >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 <a href="http://diningwithdusty.blogspot.com/">Dining with Dostoevsky</a>), 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.<br /><br /></span><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >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.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> 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."<br /><br />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-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge_%28London%29">wobbly bridges</a>, rather than as late-blooming cellists.<br /><br />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 </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >sympathetic vibrations. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">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.<br /><br />The physics of the matter turns into both a beautiful sound and a powerful image for connection and communion, through music or otherwise.<br /><br /></span> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria Math"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Times; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; font-family: Times; }div.WordSection1 { page: Word</style><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >In Virginia Woolf's long elegiac novel, <i style="">The Waves</i>, 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?”</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Boccherinis-Body-Essay-Carnal-Musicology/dp/0520240170">Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology</a>. 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 </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >sympathy with one another.</span><span style="font-size:100%;">"<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Boccherini's Body</span> (as I have been meaning to for ages), but this will have to serve as a preview of coming attractions....<br /><br /></span>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-61604557706698330222011-03-06T15:10:00.000-08:002011-03-08T19:56:49.615-08:00springtime stock-takeThe (sporadic) bloggeur is going to have to relinquish her original ambition of playing a Bach suite by the time she finishes her dissertation. This is not done with any sadness, though, as it certainly does not mean the cello itself is being relinquished; I still foresee it as an invaluable companion in what is hopefully the final couple of months of the dissertation-writing life.<br /><br />And not does it mean there is any disappointment about what has been attained. In a way, that ambition was always a bit abstract, tinged with a gently jesting idealism. And besides, all this amateuring is premised on what is almost the sheer impossibility of the goal; the delight comes in the process, in having added to life the active experience of music, in hearing the most vaguely musical shapes emerge from the cello, in exerting the patience and perseverance that gradually bring the next elusive element of technique into reach, in the experiences of the genuinely new, of the not-yet-conceived-of perceptual and expressive possibilities. <br /><br />And, in the end, maybe the ambition need not be entirely dismissed as unfulfilled: I have, at least, played, in my kitchen, in uneven and rudimentary form, the Prelude of the first suite, and, in a lesson, its first Minuet. The notes are deceptively simple, but how to give them shape and expression seems another matter altogether.<br /><br />In some other more concrete sense--the sense that is constantly modifying and fluctuating week by week and lesson by lesson--the measure of things is good: I'm still playing, still enthusiastic, still improving, still thrilled by minor and modest accomplishments, still energized by practicing in my kitchen, and still convinced I'll play the suite one day. And of course, the part of me that still disbelieves that any of this music-making business was ever at all possible has had its expectations well and truly exceeded.<br /><br />I think all three personas--the high-aspiring idealist, the persevering realist, the easily delighted naive novice--are key to the motivation and reward-reaping of the adult amateur (or this one at least). <br /><br />In the meantime, though, I had a delightful experience last night of playing together with two patient and generous friends at one of our department's annual social events in the warmly welcoming house of two of its professors. In the company of my musically gifted friends, The Swan, as a cello-violin-piano trio sounded--to me at least--quite transformed. Playing with others, especially carried along by my friends' stronger skills, the music feels, well, more musical, more of an embodied whole. It's suddenly not just a line moving along in time, but a many-dimensioned shape moving and turning, with texture that's almost available to many senses all at once.<br /><br />Last week at my lesson, I had one of those experiences of the new, too: my teacher modelled (with singing and gesture; he rarely plays to demonstrate) how to play one particular phrase in the Vivaldi final allegro movement, and told me to do what I might feel like was exaggerating the bow movement. The result of imitating his model made me gasp -- it both sounded and felt so different! But more than that, I felt it had taken me beyond some long-held reluctance or self-consciousness in the face of fullness of performative or extraverted expression. His particular choice of words to encourage me was even reminiscent of something an invaluable adviser had once said in helping me enhance my own presence as a teacher in the language-learning classroom: don't be afraid to exaggerate, she had told me, because, your sense of what exaggeration is probably takes you nowhere near what others, and your students, would actually perceive as exaggeration. The perceptiveness of that advice I now appreciate anew and all the more.Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-67998149014950979222011-01-24T12:20:00.000-08:002011-01-26T07:53:09.049-08:00Symphony and BookshelfIn 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.<br /><br />This week the noise of time rushed in on all sides. I read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Chalet-Tony-Judt/dp/1594202893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295900703&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Memory Chalet</span></a> 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. <br /><br />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…?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />* * *<br />Beethoven Piano Concerto, No, 3. <span style="font-style: italic;">Largo. </span>The stern, tender pull of the cellos and basses--grounded, yet somehow also yearning--around (for the first time) 2.16 moved me profoundly.<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7OYSELv5VPw" frameborder="0" height="390" width="480"></iframe>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-86479018238983745392011-01-19T18:29:00.001-08:002011-01-20T00:36:10.530-08:00The Cello ParvenuThis 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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-55826471812315637252011-01-10T15:13:00.000-08:002011-01-10T16:08:55.155-08:00The NewOf 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />In order to overcome this, you really have to search for something that <span style="font-style: italic;">feels</span> 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. <br /><br />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.Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-70035163582473583922010-12-17T22:58:00.000-08:002010-12-19T10:46:10.579-08:00Epic and Novel"Have you seen how full the store is with cakes and candies and cookies?" M. said. "All for Christmas. But they're not just all in one aisle, they're everywhere...."<br /><br />"I know, " I said. "They're all over. Leaping out and thwarting your well-intentioned way to the check-out... The aisles of cake closing in on you and the shopping cart--like the Clashing Rocks menacing Jason and the Argonauts..."<br /><br />"Are you all right? I thought I detected a kind of cynicism in you tonight...?"<br /><br />"What, me? No. Oh no, I was getting quite into that. Modern day epic in the grocery store. Maybe I sounded a bit cheesed off earlier, it wasn't the most productive of days. But this conversation's been quite funny."<br /><br />"Oh, ok. Maybe it's me."<br /><br />"You and your self-conscious reflection rupturing my supermarket epic... I dunno. Modern folk, eh. But are you all right?"<br /><br />* * * *<br /><br />We were in Fatapples in El Cerrito later that night. I was drinking an olallieberry milkshake (rather, I should say I was eating it, as the milkshake will support an upright spoon for at least half an hour) and talking to my cellist and composer friend M.<br /><br />We are both prone to idealism. The subject of the Wikileaks cables came up.<br /><br />"I don't understand," I said, "why there has to be so many secrets that have to be kept. If the world was different, these secrets wouldn't exist, they wouldn't have to exist if things were harmonious and honest and undesigning."<br /><br />"The problem began," M. said, "when people stopped singing."<br /><br />* * * *<br /><br />I have often thought that if M. lived in another age he'd be a kind of Singer of Tales. He's a storyteller and an improviser. I heard him play the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Kodály Cello Sonata</span> once -- with all the melancholy of fascination for disappearing folk song.<br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2qm7_cI2b30?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2qm7_cI2b30?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br />* * * *Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-2622531651304918342010-11-07T23:55:00.000-08:002010-11-09T00:39:15.572-08:00Tolstoy, the Tram, the Cockerel, and Twitter7th November marks the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death. What a remarkable instance it is of patterns extending from art into life that Tolstoy--whose Anna Karenina, at the end of a novel where the railroad is surrounded by dark omens, falls, clutching her red bag, under a train --should die, of all places, at a railway station.<br /><br /><br />The pianist Alexander Gol'denveizer recorded this episode from 1896:<br /><blockquote><br />Once I met Lev Nikolaevich [Tolstoy] in the street. He again asked me to walk with him. We were somewhere near the Novinsky Boulevard, and Lev Nikolaevich suggested we should take the [horse-drawn] tram. We sat down and took our tickets.<br /><br />Lev Nikolaevich asked me:<br />"Can you make a Japanese cockerel?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"Look."<br /><br />Tolstoy took his ticket and very skillfully made it into a rather elaborate cockerel, which, when you pulled its tail, fluttered its wings.<br /><br />An inspector entered the car and began checking the tickets. L.N., with a smile, held out the cockerel to him and pulled its tail. The cockerel fluttered its wings. But the inspector, with the stern expression of a business man who has no time for trifling, took the cockerel, unfolded it, looked at the number, and tore it up.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLwmYoJo1Ngqa-3bKxHQTeBHcCz8hmmqATy3n-oXFy0H5Bv5VJ0R5GPfPktthrzbpjifB6Biw3VcGeyGeGgJJXbxuAclJwMJZszh4LTn26EEwNBO6tStFLTxmU7P66iangB5VpJlmOC1M/s1600/a534837666_2275266_9414.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 180px; height: 135px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLwmYoJo1Ngqa-3bKxHQTeBHcCz8hmmqATy3n-oXFy0H5Bv5VJ0R5GPfPktthrzbpjifB6Biw3VcGeyGeGgJJXbxuAclJwMJZszh4LTn26EEwNBO6tStFLTxmU7P66iangB5VpJlmOC1M/s320/a534837666_2275266_9414.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5537463866243264018" border="0" /></a><br />L.N. looked at me and said:<br /><br /><br />"Now our little cockerel is gone..."<br /><br /><br />-- A. B. Gol'denveizer, <span style="font-style: italic;">Vblizi Tolstogo / Talks with Tolstoi</span>, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (1923)</blockquote><br /><br />Tolstoy was on a horse-drawn street car towards the end of his life, but Virginia Woolf (who aided in the editing of these translations and had tried, together with her husband, to learn Russian to collaborate with their friend 'Kot') was a member of what Walter Benjamin called "the generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar”--that is, those who had been subjected to the rapid political and quotidian upheavals of the turn of the century—war, revolution, urban modernity. Never, before this generation, had “experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”<br /><br />But Tolstoy died in almost modern times too. The week of his final sickness and death at the train station at Astapovo was reported with all the obsessiveness of the Twitter update: more than 1000 telegraphs were sent during that week. (For more on the death of Tolstoy as Russia's first great mass-media event, see William Nickell's marvellous <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Tolstoy-Russia-Astapovo-Station/dp/0801448344">new book</a>).<br /><br />* * *<br />Here is a recording of Tolstoy's one alleged musical composition, a <a href="http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/writings_on_ib/hhonib/BerlinHarvard5.mp3">waltz for piano</a>. It was apparently written down when Tolstoy played it for Gol'denveizer at Yasnaya Polyana in 1906.Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-25679728449932084312010-10-26T00:02:00.000-07:002010-10-27T00:01:21.213-07:00The bloggeur goes liveA rainy Saturday night with nothing better to do, so I decide to make use of the video function on my camera and record myself playing the cello... This was, by turns, a novelty, somewhat sobering, and ultimately quite instructive. And will make a good virtual postcard to send to my parents, who have never heard anything of the new hobby other than my raving about it.<br /><br />The first attempt was truly terrible. None of the notes seemed joined up. And when you correct yourself while playing, it's as if you only hear the corrected version--the one that was in your head all along anyway--whereas this, oh wisdom of ages, is not what the recording apparatus hears. Nor what we hear when we listen the apparatus's recording, oh no. My first reaction was one of embarrassment. (Embarrassment has been a preoccupation of the pen lately, as well as pertaining momentarily to the cello: I've been trying to turn visceral cringe into discursive analysis to describe that awful sense of embarrassment we often experience on seeing Dostoevsky's characters conduct themselves so appallingly, careering towards inevitable breaking points in front of the motley crowds that fill the drawing rooms and dachas and--speaking of music--would-be decorous concert venues of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Idiot</span>)<br /><br />Darwin concluded <span style="font-style: italic;">The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals</span> (1872) with a chapter on blushing, and observed that man does not blush before God, but only before his fellow men. Well, there were no fellow men (the long-suffering neighbours were away) to hear these efforts, but if I didn't blush, I certainly cringed. It wasn't that I was under delusions as to the truth of the cello-playing matter, but for just an instant I felt a touch foolish for investing so much time, so much earnestness, so much enthusiasm...to produce such fragile results! (Especially when there are things like finishing the dissertation and finding gainful employment to focus one's energies upon). But those thoughts quickly vanished, for nothing detracts from the enjoyment of the process, the small wonders it yields to me, or all the humility and dignity involved in the well-meant efforts (all of which are more of a strength-giving solace than distraction, I maintain, in the face of the finding gainful employment trials). My friends' good-natured enthusiasm when I posted the video on my facebook page was quite touching.<br /><br />Forcing myself to watch the first clip again, though, I could see, for the first time really, that my arms and hands were definitely not doing the things they were supposed to be doing, the things my teacher kept on about. It hardly needs saying, but, somewhat like Olympic gymnastics or triple-axle-double-toeloop combos, this cello malarky is not as easy as it looks, folks... There are a million different things that can be just not quite right...nuances of postion, motion, tension. So I tried again, again and again...trying to correct some of the things that looked so wrong. Definitely didn't catch them all, but my suddenly oh so long arm no longer looks like it's floating around in space quite so wildly, and dropping my elbow seemed like it made for better connection with the strings. At the next day's lesson Matthew proclaimed he detected a new kind of consciousness in the connection to and control over my bow arm -- this can only be good, surely! And in the meantime, live in my kitchen, complete with wonky rhythms, awkwardnesses and general unrefinement of sound is a subsequent, marginally improved take of the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Arioso from Bach's Cantata #156</span>...<br /><br />(it was not deliberate to chop my head out of the frame; as the amateur improves, so will we endeavour to improve our command of the technology)<br /><br /><br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/tszBumYxJgw?fs=1&hl=en_US&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/tszBumYxJgw?fs=1&hl=en_US&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-68301498029834310952010-10-13T16:27:00.000-07:002010-10-13T22:25:43.675-07:00Translations<span style="font-size:100%;">In the world of words, I recently finished--after a lengthy period of abandonment--a short essay to accompany some translations I have been doing from Russian. Translation, before it is an activity of writing, is a particular kind of close reading, where no word can be skimmed over; every word is touched and has its shape felt, including the seemingly inconsequential and unremarkable ones which never elicit any attention. (One of the translator's jobs is to render the text's silences and neutralities as well as the ways in which its style speaks out loud, to ensure that the new text does not attract attention to specific words or formulas that are thoroughly unmarked in the original.)<br /><br />In the world of music, there is a new Vivaldi sonata in my sights -- No. 5 in E minor. I've tackled the first two movements so far, and have been listening to a recording of them (by Anner Bylsma, but also this one below, with orchestral arrangement). Listening with a view (or an ear) to learning the piece myself, I've realized my attention is different. In a sense, it resembles the kind of reading that proceeds translation: it was listening not just for the overall effect, but for each note and each phrase, attention falling onto every single element. Although I lack the language or the command of music theory to explain them, my sense of musical structures is definitely growing, the more I play and the more I listen with this new kind of attention. Some notes -- ones that I'll have difficulty playing smoothly for the longest -- somehow evade being heard by me -- I just can't quite hear how they fit together, how the individual notes are making the sound I hear. Most often, though, like translation, you can understand the original, hear it, but can't quite find the way of rendering it naturally and fluently. But now it's not facility with language that's the obstacle, but facility with your hands, arms, fingers -- and the way they work in mysterious connection with the inner ear. Translating internally held impression into expression -- which underlies all communicative acts, but the coincidence of these linguistic/literary and musical activities has thrown it into new relief.<br /><br />In essence, I think the illumination that came anew to me with the translation analogy is this: in translation, you have to truly <span style="font-style: italic;">read </span><span style="font-style: italic;">every word</span>, nothing of the whole can be omitted or glossed over. And in playing music, regardless of whether it is learning by imitating, or individual interpretation, you truly have to <span style="font-style: italic;">hear and reckon with every single note</span>, nothing can be skimmed over, everything is integral to the whole.<br /><br />I have been shown, too, new nuances in listening. There is a series of eighth notes in the first phrase of the Largo movement -- 4 repeated Es. But all eighth note Es are not equal. I was originally playing them as statically and fixed as the ticking of a clock, but when Matthew grabbed my cello to play them, now I could hear not just the motion of the growing crescendo, but a motion that articulated connection and forwards movement... How, though, to translate this understanding into a comparable expression through my own body's movements remains slightly elusive... The mystery of the mind--body connection, mediated by the ear, continues to fascinate and mystify me.<br /><br />Despite that, I can play the Largo reasonably well. The Allegro is proving trickier -- how do I convey to my body that it's my wrist that should be moving the bow on the 16th-note string-crossings, and not my arm...? On the recording, though, I love the passages that are hardest of all for me -- they are ones which give me the feeling of what I would instinctively describe as the movement of biographical time. I remember the first time I felt this profoundly in music when I was a teenager -- not coincidentally, probably, at the age when one is just beginning to become aware for the first time of life's biographical movement... (There's probably something faintly Hegelian here, but that's something to muse on another time, maybe... And hazarding a guess at what, technically speaking, is happening in these moments, I think, maybe, sometimes, at least, they are movements of repeated patterns through different keys.)<br /><br />Incidentally, the piece I translated -- an experimental semi-autobiographical long essay called "The Return Home" (Возвращение домой) from the 1930s, by the Russian scholar and writer Lidiia Ginzburg, itself has very much to do with the connections between physical and intellectual experience: The sensory experience of the body is revealed, again and again -- in the landscapes she describes (the waters of the Black Sea, the mountain roads of the Caucasus, the long birch-lined roads of the north, the Neva’s embankments) -- as indissoluble from the intellectual and analytical movement of thought. And, like listening to the Vivaldi recordings, in this instance translating actually involved, to some degree, translating from senses or perceptions other than purely linguistic ones: I found myself looking at the sliver of Bay visible from my window, parched grasses under foot, and clouds of fog snagging on the Berkeley hills, in order to find the words that might give expression to the experience of faintly comparable landscapes. It's by coincidence, then, that secretly and ever so slightly underwriting this particular translation from Russian into English is a translation of summer in the Crimea and the Caucasus into summer in northern California...<br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MLozYo2Tn7U?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MLozYo2Tn7U?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br /></span>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-87033148307431714142010-09-22T00:55:00.000-07:002010-09-24T13:22:09.143-07:00Mandelshtam and Maybeck: music, wood, architecture<span style="font-style: italic;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">Прозрачной слезой на стенах проступила смола,</span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style: italic;">И чувствует город свои деревянные ребра.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Resin's oozed onto the walls like a transparent tear,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And the city feels its wooden ribs.</span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:85%;">(Osip Mandelshtam,</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> "За то, что я руки твои<em></em> не сумел удержать," / "Because I couldn't hold off your embraces," December 1920)</span></div></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;">Although there's not really anything at all in the poem that would suggest it, I can't help but hear the sound of a stringed instrument in the background to these lines from one of my favourite poems by Mandelshtam. (<a href="http://web.mmlc.northwestern.edu/%7Emdenner/Demo/texts/couldnt_hold.html">Here's the whole poem</a>--but the translation is downright shoddy). There's a space that's wooden and resonant (the city, the Trojan horse, homes, poems, рукоделие, things made) that cries tears of resin. If there's a sound of wood weeping, its tears have formed the rosin that helps the cello's strings' sound, the sound then consoled and amplified by the crafted wooden shape that it fills and mingles with.<br /></div></div><br />Hearing that sound stems from my fascination with and love for the cello's crafted wooden-ness, inhabiting the poem with my own meaning, perhaps. Another of Mandelshtam's poems, "The Finder of a Horseshoe," (Нашедший подкову) begins with the view of a forest in which the trees are seen simultaneously as the masts of ships; time and its transformations coexist; forms contain others that may be wrought upon themselves. --Which, we might say, is how music shapes time too.<br /><br /><blockquote>Глядим на лес и говорим:<br />— Вот лес корабельный, мачтовый,<br />Розовые сосны,<br />До самой верхушки свободные от мохнатой ноши,<br />Им бы поскрипывать в бурю,<br />Одинокими пиниями,<br />В разъяренном безлесном воздухе.<br /><br />We look at woods and we say:<br />Here is a forest, for ships and for masts;<br />The pink pines<br />Stand free to their tops of bushy accretions,<br />They should creek in a storm<br />As do lone-standing pines<br />In the infuriated forestless air.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(Bernard Meares' translation)</span><br /></blockquote><br />When I first came to California, one of the first things that captivated me, after the brick I had grown up inside of, was the wooden houses. For one, the wooden house feels more porous, more connected to the outside (my own apartment, alas, a little <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">too</span></span> porous; the return of the rain will renew my battle with the leaky bathroom roof). And the wooden house feels <span style="font-style: italic;">built</span>--as if the process and the intention is more palpable--whereas my brick houses felt like they grew from the ground, or, rather, felt as if they are as present with the same kind of certainty as the ground is itself. Sometimes in California, I feel acutely aware of the <span style="font-style: italic;">ground</span>, of things being built on the ground, of the built thing's ongoing negotiation with the ground, while in England, the matter of the building and the ground's relationship was settled long, long ago.<br /><br />Where I live now is my third home in Berkeley/Oakland. And it is a house with historical foundations: it was the first house built by<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Maybeck"> Bernard Maybeck</a>, the famous Arts and Crafts architect, and the first house that he himself lived in in Berkeley. It dates from the 1890s, and it is very wooden. It has been divided into apartments and is not in perfect condition, but it retains a special character and traces of its creator. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoJuT0GNPK5b2G1eHiOwBohsYa3prLEpkWg-2f-ordTQllX2ogaSkTw-2Tg0XNvdzbz1hKlyrFW53aL9a6Yt8PySnaH61lya-o_Z1kT-b2XPKbYFycQ1mbK93O_8kN98dFOYd8EWhjfs4/s1600/1st_Maybeck_house.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 206px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoJuT0GNPK5b2G1eHiOwBohsYa3prLEpkWg-2f-ordTQllX2ogaSkTw-2Tg0XNvdzbz1hKlyrFW53aL9a6Yt8PySnaH61lya-o_Z1kT-b2XPKbYFycQ1mbK93O_8kN98dFOYd8EWhjfs4/s320/1st_Maybeck_house.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5519675663762165794" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In this picture of the house from 1902, the projecting sleeping porch (extended and refashioned) is now my kitchen. The house has gained some more in size since then too.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Keeler">Charles Keeler</a>, who had first met Maybeck in 1891, on the commuter ferry from San Francisco to Berkeley (long before any Bay Bridge!), described the house as it was in 1895:<br /><blockquote>"I sought out Mr. Maybeck at his home in northwest Berkeley and told him I had come to accept his offer to design our house. I really had no idea what I was getting into when I put myself in his hands. I found his own home was not yet complete and that he was working on it at odd times, with the assistance of Julia Morgan’s brothers. His house was something like a Swiss chalet. The timbers showed on the inside and the walls were of knotted yellow pine planks. There was no finish to the interior, for the carpenter work finished it. There was a sheet iron, hand-built stove, open in front and with brass andirons. Most of the furniture was designed and made by Mr. Maybeck himself. It was a distinctly hand-made home."</blockquote>Keeler formulated Maybeck's architectural philosophy:<br /><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote>"A wooden house should bring out all the character and virtue of wood—straight lines, wooden joinery, exposed rafters, and the wooden surface visible and left in its natural state. A house should fit into the landscape as if it were a part of it, it should also be an expression of the life and spirit which is to be lived within it. [...] whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. [...] [Maybeck] was interested in the simple life which is naturally expressive and consequently beautiful. He believed in handmade things and that all ornament should be designed to fit the place and the need. He did not mind how crude it was, provided it was sincere and expressed something personal."</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>And here, in particular, is a description which places the wooden house in the company of music and poetry: (The Gothic cathedral is also a prominent architectural image in the poetry of Mandelshtam, from approximately the same period, and for approximately the same reasons; meanwhile elsewhere in his metaphorical thinking, made and used domestic utensils are important too.)<br /><blockquote>"So Mr. Maybeck proposed to build wooden houses in which the beauty of the natural wood was to be given its full value on both the inside and outside. His next principle was that whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. He called attention to the fact that, in the old Gothic cathedrals the rafters which upheld the pointed arches, the succession of pillars which gave strength to the walls, the flying buttresses that helped hold them firm were all necessary to the solidity and stability of the building. The repetition of exposed columns and rafters were like the beats in music or the metrical emphasis that gives accents to poetry. That is why Ruskin speaks of architecture as frozen music. But a room with smooth plastered walls creates no sense of rhythm and its machine stamps wallpaper is applied to relieve the barrenness of its boxlike effect. Mr. Maybeck proposed to restore the handcrafts to their proper place in life and art."</blockquote>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-8415743061073782332010-09-01T22:05:00.000-07:002010-09-01T22:08:08.310-07:00Cello & Chard<div style="text-align: left;">I might have discovered, tonight, the bikram yoga technique of cello practice. With the temperature still over 80<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">F at sunset, I decide to bake, in my kitchen that's been lapping up the sunshine all day long, a <a href="http://scally.typepad.com/en/2009/07/swiss-chard-and-goat-cheese-quiche-tart.html">Swiss chard and goat's cheese q</a></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><a href="http://scally.typepad.com/en/2009/07/swiss-chard-and-goat-cheese-quiche-tart.html">ui</a></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><a href="http://scally.typepad.com/en/2009/07/swiss-chard-and-goat-cheese-quiche-tart.html">che</a>--an established favourite, and quite summery, you could say, were it not for the cranking up of the oven that its preparation requires.</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br />The recipe also nicely accommodates a multi-tasking cello-practice (and my practice is always accommodated in my kitchen):<br /></span></span><ul><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">blind bake the crust for 10 mins :: warm up with a few scales</span></span></li><li>pause to saute chard for 2 mins (Take care before, during and after this stage to wash hands and keep bow safely out of way of olive oil; the amateur-bloggeur lost her first bow to some wayward sardine oil. Sunflower oil, as readers of <span style="font-style: italic;">Master and Marga</span><span style="font-style: italic;">rita </span>well know, is capable of even more diabolical damage.) </li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">bake assembled quiche for 35 mins :: a couple of times through the 4th</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> movement (allegro) of the old Vivaldi Sonata No. 3 in A minor, with special </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">attention to syncopated rhythms and transitions between phrases (I'm prone to just stop).<br /></span></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Ping! Remove quiche from oven! </span></span></li></ul><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX-slbGqhRMtHO1EEncbeHWxxWBYD9-XvK8pEL6poK7GGR16yCs5VaX6_HzFu5ladUSM_eLd7JwBKmnNaYbcnc4cV0ODvFiy16HvtxS3pF8AcaD24lKIS7sNazIhXExdzxwZci5FhmggM/s1600/DSC04913.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX-slbGqhRMtHO1EEncbeHWxxWBYD9-XvK8pEL6poK7GGR16yCs5VaX6_HzFu5ladUSM_eLd7JwBKmnNaYbcnc4cV0ODvFiy16HvtxS3pF8AcaD24lKIS7sNazIhXExdzxwZci5FhmggM/s320/DSC04913.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512176599644720258" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Tonight's post, it should be added, comes with a nod </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> of acknowledged inspiration to <a href="http://diningwithdusty.blogspot.com/">Dining with Dostoevsky</a>.</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">This was a particularly pleasing practice session; I got through some tricky passages more smoothly than ever. It even elicited some kind words of approval from my long-suffering neighbour who arrived home to hear strains of Vivaldi (and smell of baking) wafting out my open front door. I partly attribute its success to the staggering temperature that my kitchen must have reached during this hour -- all the better for limber limbs and faster fingers, it seems.</span></span>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-42691398991901030932010-08-20T08:53:00.000-07:002010-08-23T21:47:58.794-07:00Music’s Room of Its Own<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSUaiZ7FZMN1TE-JRJgni1lGZQseUTFqHeg41sxJgTPL_CObgomY1p_DnWo-HbOae68bNMxqrTXPnQTgDglJCUcDw2apHf_9f77sy-7aNHo-VWcVYb51rAU4oT1nJiIxJ95nLEOCcndSQ/s1600/DSC04898.JPG"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 134px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSUaiZ7FZMN1TE-JRJgni1lGZQseUTFqHeg41sxJgTPL_CObgomY1p_DnWo-HbOae68bNMxqrTXPnQTgDglJCUcDw2apHf_9f77sy-7aNHo-VWcVYb51rAU4oT1nJiIxJ95nLEOCcndSQ/s320/DSC04898.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5507521992101686034" border="0" /></a>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.<br /><br />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…<br /><br />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’<a href="http://www.oliversacks.com/books/musicophilia/"><span style="font-style: italic;"> Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain</span></a>. Sacks quotes from an article appearing in the Guardian by Nick Coleman, an English music critic, who had lost hearing in one ear:<br /><blockquote>“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…<br /></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote>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.</blockquote><blockquote>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, <span style="font-style: italic;">Musicophilia</span>, 159-60.)</blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmuo05lfmaORfKDkxJY1e1C5aXCEuFnnipKFJfyIEaHYnfypmf0TeriuI7L8qlHd2s0h9S6vnkHl5o2LReEqgIvuo5BcVMrhPokh3u-cH4mIVm10iqpB4DNrxAa5BBQT2msLch_u41P5E/s1600/DSC04899.JPG"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmuo05lfmaORfKDkxJY1e1C5aXCEuFnnipKFJfyIEaHYnfypmf0TeriuI7L8qlHd2s0h9S6vnkHl5o2LReEqgIvuo5BcVMrhPokh3u-cH4mIVm10iqpB4DNrxAa5BBQT2msLch_u41P5E/s320/DSC04899.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5507521553532544482" border="0" /></a><br />This week I also heard other kinds of music fill a particularly beautiful space — the Mather Redwood Grove in Berkeley’s <a href="http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/">Botanical Gardens</a>. A chance discovery led us to a small concert there by <a href="http://www.petracovich.com/petracovich_main.html">Petracovich</a> and Walking in Sunlight (both pretty great -- natural and honest, gentle and strongly felt).<br /><br />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…<br /><br />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.Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-85455126853099285192010-08-15T15:48:00.000-07:002010-08-15T15:57:53.717-07:00Why bother?<span style="font-size:180%;">“F</span>or my part,” said Deronda, “people who do anything finely inspirit me to try.<span style=""> </span>I don’t mean that they make me believe I can do it as well.<span style=""> </span>But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done.<span style=""> </span>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.<span style=""> </span>Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”<p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">“</span>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.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“That depends on the point of view, I think,” said Deronda.<span style=""> </span>“We should have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our own performances.<span style=""> </span>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…”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> George Eliot, <i>Daniel Deronda </i>(1876)<!--EndFragment-->Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580077358739785072.post-5247569650536167792010-08-08T15:52:00.000-07:002010-08-08T16:23:08.545-07:00Performance Report!Yesterday I played the second two movements of the Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 3 in A minor (see/hear below, previous post) and<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>Saint-Saëns' <em style="font-style: italic;"></em><span style="font-style: italic;">The Swan</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Swan</span>, albeit far from perfectly, I do somehow feel able to command and communicate something approaching that.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 for soprano and 8 cellos</span><br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NxzP1XPCGJE&hl=en_US&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NxzP1XPCGJE&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object>Eveningprosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05103782801560701045noreply@blogger.com0