sympathetic vibrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cello Parvenu

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

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

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

Mandelshtam and Maybeck: music, wood, architecture

Прозрачной слезой на стенах проступила смола,

И чувствует город свои деревянные ребра.

Resin's oozed onto the walls like a transparent tear,
And the city feels its wooden ribs.

(Osip Mandelshtam, "За то, что я руки твои не сумел удержать," / "Because I couldn't hold off your embraces," December 1920)

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. (Here's the whole poem--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.

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.

Глядим на лес и говорим:
— Вот лес корабельный, мачтовый,
Розовые сосны,
До самой верхушки свободные от мохнатой ноши,
Им бы поскрипывать в бурю,
Одинокими пиниями,
В разъяренном безлесном воздухе.

We look at woods and we say:
Here is a forest, for ships and for masts;
The pink pines
Stand free to their tops of bushy accretions,
They should creek in a storm
As do lone-standing pines
In the infuriated forestless air.
(Bernard Meares' translation)

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 too porous; the return of the rain will renew my battle with the leaky bathroom roof). And the wooden house feels built--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 ground, 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.

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 Bernard Maybeck, 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.

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.

Charles Keeler, 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:

"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."

Keeler formulated Maybeck's architectural philosophy:

"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."

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.)

"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."

Les voix humaines

"Do you play the cello? ... You have a voice like the voice of a cello."

When I recounted the incident with the stranger who appeared at the beginning of this story/bloggery, putting his abrupt question to me and offering his rationale for posing it, I swiftly added how this, in fact, it is relatively commonplace to observe that the cello's range and tone matches that of the human voice.

But that, of course, takes nothing away from the power and particularity of the cello's voice and the effect of hearing it. There is something not just human (the instrument's size is also a factor) but deeply humane about the sound of the cello. Listening, we soar with the song outwards into the world, and at the same time are drawn inwards to the heart that must be singing. It is melancholy and frank, though capable too of expressing great joy, and possessed of a certain nobility. Behind the sound, in all of its moods, is a sense of something sage, a wise and deep knowing, a fullness of feeling consciousness.

There is something of a clue to the shape of this depth and fullness in the technique (to what degree I may speak of technique--and speak of it I may do more so than enact it!) of playing: from the very beginning my teacher insisted how the motion of making strokes with the bow was a circle. That is, the right arm, drawing the bow across the string, does not just move back and forth across a single plane, but traces a whole circle; thus the sound comes from not just a straight line drawn on a surface, but an embodied shape that fills space.

And, as my teacher pointed out at that first lesson, it is an organic elegance of intersecting circles that makes for the cello's sound: the shape and motion of the arm meeting with the circular surface of the strings and resonating through wood which is not only curved through craft, but which came from the naturally rounded trunks of trees.

Indeed, if the wood of trees could speak, it seems it too might possess the voice of the cello. The special directness with which the cello speaks also seems to project dimensions in all directions: there is this direct connection to its material origins and, at the same time, to its addressees, whose human voices it seems to intone. And then there's the posture of playing this instrument of unlikely proportions, requiring direct and embodied contact. It is not diminished to a mere object simply held by its player, but commands a presence of its own, the cellist approaching the cello as a near-equal in eliciting sound from it.

I wondered where that idea about the human voice and the cello might have been first expressed. I don't know if this was the first expression of it, but in 1636 Marin Mersenne (a French theologian, philosopher, mathematician and music theorist, often referred to as the "father of acoustics") wrote of the viol, the family of precursors to the modern cello:

Without doubt if viols are made truly in proportion they imitate
the [human] voice best of all, and one esteems them too
as having the advantage in representing naturalness best. It
just seems that one cannot refuse the prize to the Viol, which
perfectly imitates the voice in all its modulations, and even the
most important affects of sadness and joy: because the bow
gives the effect of speech, it can maintain sound for a long
time like the breath of the voice, and with it one can imitate
joy, sadness, agility, gentleness and strength by its liveliness,
by its languor, by its speed, by its ease, by its pressure; coupled
with the trills and other niceties of the left hand—which is
the name given to the hand that touches the fingerboard—
representing artlessly the spirit and the charms, [in short]
portraying the grace of a perfect Orator.
[quoted by Lucy Robinson in Early Music, November 1999]

Some months ago, I randomly came across this piece by Marin Marais for viola da gamba called Les voix humaines, from 1701. It amazed me because it seemed to be somehow so very modern. I know tremendously little about early music (and forgive my philistinism) but this piece does not make me think of powdered wigs and staid courtly dances in the way that a lot of it can. In fact, perhaps it seems so modern precisely because doesn't evoke those public courtly occasions, but instead, in its rhythms and its tones, seems to be something far more private--a soul speaking intimately.

Les voix humaines

Ceci n'est pas une flûte

Set just on the edge of the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center, home to the usual array of oversized outlets of supremely standard wares, is Ifshin Violins, makers and purveyors of fine stringed instruments. In advance of my first lesson, on the recommendation of my teacher-to-be, I visited their store to rent a cello.

Since my contact with stringed instruments had been almost entirely from the distance of a concert-going audience member, entering this place where they were made, handled and repaired, where they had an intimate life, possessed a certain charge. Entering the shop really did feel like entering a whole other world—where knowledge of and proximity to one of these mysterious objects and the beautiful potential contained within them was a given part of life.

In the rental department, which was hung with violins ascending in size from the improbably tiny—for hands that would learn to play before they could tie shoelaces—I received one of the most basic student cellos. Somebody played it briefly for me, setting free a sound that might as well have come from a priceless Stradivarius in the hands of a concert soloist as from a humble German cello that had recovered from the violent-sounding injury of a “broken neck.” All these instruments, though, were crafted after a design that had changed little in hundreds of years, never surpassing their centuries’ old exemplars.

After some brief instruction in how to care for this delicate object—including the California-specific advice on protecting it from earthquake damage—I left, to carry my new acquisition home on public transport. I felt like a new mother, slightly incredulous that I was now at large in the world with this impossibly fragile-seeming item, uncertain and nervous of how it should be held and handled. It seems funny now to recall the awkwardness with which I carried it (on an incredibly hot day) back from BART to my apartment.

Given that I lived in a small studio apartment whose single closet was already ingeniously over-stuffed with my belongings, the cello was to be rather indecorously accommodated lying on its side in the apartment’s main room. Even though I could still do next to nothing to coax it into life, I felt like I was suddenly sharing this space with a living creature. I had played the flute (poorly and with little conviction) between the ages of about 9 and 12 (recall that James Galway made it in the UK charts in the late 80s). I can picture it sat in its red velvety lined case, but it now seemed inert, metal and mechanical, whereas the cello, in comparison, seemed a virtually sentient being.

The lacquered grain of its wood revealed the living lines of age and texture, time and material, belonging to both the natural world and studied craftsmanship. Where the strings met the bridge there was a thrilling sense of the potential energy contained within them, tension that was ready to be turned into sound at the slightest touch.