Fwd: Please Re-Deliver to Bach

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.

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.

Dear Anonymous Cello Player,

Tonight you saved me. I cannot explain how or why, but you simply saved my life tonight.

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.

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.

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.

So thank you. You have shown me that there is more surprise to this world than I have ever known.

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.

Sincerely,

A Listening Stranger.

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.

I wish the Listening Stranger well, and may future happiness be his.

* * *

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."

Travelogue ~ Prologue ~ Prelude

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. 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. I think my cello will be happy there while I am off on this summer of restless travels. 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.

***

Returning to England for the first time in eighteen months, I made the hour’s drive from Heathrow to my parents’ house in Hampshire. 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.

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. 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. 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. (Knowledge of the possibility of earthquakes heightens this sense still more.) 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. 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.

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. What strikes me is how we really do live in woodland. There are woods all around the houses and villages that are joined by narrow, often deep sunk roads. 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. 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.

***

Now St Petersburg: the first time here for six years. The same familiar smell of the tap water. 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). 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.

***

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…

heaven, earth, sea

The 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.

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.

Interior of the Thomaskirche, Leipzig, where Bach was cantor for 27 years.
-- photo by profstewartrk @ flickr

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.

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.

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 feel it, hear 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.

springtime stock-take

The (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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The bloggeur goes live

A 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.

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 The Idiot)

Darwin concluded The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (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.

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 Arioso from Bach's Cantata #156...

(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)