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.

Symphony and Bookshelf

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

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

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

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

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

Before the Cello

In February 2008 I went—reluctantly and too warmly dressed— to a party hosted by a fellow graduate student in her small Berkeley apartment. The party was very dark, and very awkward. It is highly likely, though, that my memories of both the lighting and the social flow speak only for my own experience; this was, for me, a period of increasing darkness of mood and awkwardness in thought and body. Despairing in my inability to successfully join any enjoyable conversation, I stood apart at one side, feeling horribly oppressed by the room but hopelessly distant from its partying.

I never quite figured out who he was, or whom he was at the party with, but a man who was significantly older than any of the hip, huddled, or minimalistly dancing (as space and style dictated) grad students introduced himself to me, thorough his thick Russian accent and with disarming brevity, as, simply, a Jew. We chatted briefly—also somewhat awkwardly—about Russian literature. He liked Isaac Babel. Then, out of nowhere, he asked me, “Do you play the cello?” “No!” I exclaimed, sounding, I fear, somewhat affronted. “You have a voice like the voice of a cello,” he stated. The conversation ended, and I left the party shortly afterwards.

Now, I am certainly not claiming anything profoundly meaningful about this scene. (It is said, incidentally, that the cello possesses a range closest of all instruments to that of the human voice). Depending on your sensibility, the scene may seem either enigmatic, romantic, cheesy, or banal. I present it, though, merely as a fact. It was certainly not an omen; as inclined as I may be to perceive literariness in life, the incongruous party guest and his question were not an omen foreshadowing my future fate with the cello in the same way as, say, the unfortunate railway worker falling onto the train tracks was for Anna Karenina. No, the novelist and the narrative we need here is a different one. This was an instance of the gradual accumulation of consciousness around an idea, this was Raskolnikov overhearing words in the tavern, his thoughts of murdering the old woman gaining momentum, not implanted from without, but nourished by an exchange between self and world. There is no real identifiable beginning of the idea (mine was more harmless than Raskolnikov's, it should be added)—but there are moments when consciousness becomes crystallized in some newly knowable form, perhaps not yet articulable as such, but then the sifting brings the idea—that had long been present—closer to the surface: I wanted to play the cello.

The idea stayed dormant for some time. The semester pressed on. It is not at all my intention to dwell on the reasons for and nature of the slowed, hunched, dark period of depression that blighted it (which was, thankfully, brief and relatively mild). One detail from that time, though, I will mention, in as much as it pertains to music. Near the low-point of this period, I went to to hear the San Francisco Symphony—usually an experience from which I would derive great pleasure. They were playing Mozart. I barely heard the music: a numbing tension stretched and snapped my attention, leaving only its frayed ends, not fine enough for perception or pleasure. Only later, on checklists of symptoms for depression did I come across “ahedonia: an inability to experience pleasurable emotions from normally pleasurable events.”

A few months later, circumstances, on many fronts, had changed for the better, and I was more or less restored to my old self. Some mild medication had helped make things manageable more quickly—helped me both deal with the external challenges and tend to the internal sore spots more level-headedly, and I am glad that option was available. I was left with a vague but strong feeling, however, that what had really come out of joint in the past months was the relationship between mind and body, that this was the rift which needed healing, and that this was something which would not be achieved through drugs.

In the meantime, consciousness of my desire to play the cello received two more catalysts in its crystallization: I happened to pay a visit on two Berkeley professors who had been spending the year in Paris. In their apartment were the stringed instruments that one of them and their three children played. I had never seen stringed instruments at rest, as it were, just hanging out as part of people’s lives and homes, and I thought how much I’d like one to be part of my life too. But surely it was too late…you had to start playing as a child, right? Then, a dear friend from Finland told me all about how she had joined a flute class for adults in Helsinki…I didn’t mention my cello-yearning in this conversation, but made some silent resolutions.

Music, I felt, still vaguely but with conviction, could be the way to heal the rift between mind and body.

I returned to Berkeley in August, did a small amount of internet research to establish that adult beginners on stringed instruments did in fact exist, that it was possible and affordable to rent a cello, and to identify a teacher on the ever-ready Craig's List. I had my first cello lesson on 1st September 2008.