cello in the trees

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.

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...?

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, Locus Iste by Bruckner, a motet which evokes the soaring stone resonance of a church.   Then the second, one of the Polovetsian Dances from Borodin's Prince Igor, where the melody line floats in turn between us, issuing up from and returning to the harmonic pulse of the dance.

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.

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.

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.

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 yours, but the music's own, embodied through you.... 

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 original 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 learn 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.

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.

There was something profoundly musical, vital and therapeutic about that experience with TaKeTiNa (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 wanting them to play music, that they could create this special environment.

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 silence with a beat, with shape and contour!

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.

intimate geography

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: up towards the hills, down onto the thoroughly settled streets below, 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.

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.

West from my window.

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.


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 in California--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.)   


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.


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, Howie, one of Berkeley's cast of colourful characters (who I did then once meet, and who sadly died last year).  


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 Margaret Rowell, 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.

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.


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.

Galen Rowell, Sunset After a Storm, Yosemite Valley, 1970.

Galen Rowell, Clearing Storm over El Capitan, 1973.

From John Muir's The Yosemite: 

"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."

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 New

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

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

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

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

Translations

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.)

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.

In essence, I think the illumination that came anew to me with the translation analogy is this: in translation, you have to truly read every word, 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 hear and reckon with every single note, nothing can be skimmed over, everything is integral to the whole.

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.

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.)

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...

Performance Report!

Yesterday I played the second two movements of the Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 3 in A minor (see/hear below, previous post) and Saint-Saëns' The Swan 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 The Swan, albeit far from perfectly, I do somehow feel able to command and communicate something approaching that.

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.

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.

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:
Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 for soprano and 8 cellos

That rhythm thing

The trusty Feuillard and his Le Méthode du jeune violoncelliste guided me through the first 18 months of playing the cello. Despite the name, this beginners’ method book was well suited to the not so young violoncellist too: our man Feuillard had no truck with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the like, but, launches his charges straight into “real” music. The first piece in the book, using just a few notes and extremely simple, was a Schumann chorale. Midway through there came a particular thrill with a Minuet in G major by Bach—(originally for keyboard; familiar to most people who’ve ever learned piano, no doubt: daa da-da-da-da daa da da, daa da-da-da-da daa da da)—and even in the rudimentary way I could play this simple piece, I could somehow discern something of the particularity we associate with Bach, that crystalline form, perhaps.



But since graduating from Feuillard, among the pieces I’ve now been tackling in my lessons are Vivaldi’s cello sonatas, or, rather, to date, Sonata No. 3 in A minor. As respectful of Feuillard as I am, receiving the Vivaldi sheet music in the mail, I felt like a child let loose on the grown-ups’ books. My progress was even confirmed by the pleasingly elegant and newly serious cover. Moreover, YouTube confirmed that “real” cellists played these pieces, and iTunes even sold recordings!

Each sonata is in four movements — largo-allegro-largo-allegro — but each has a decidedly different character. At first this music was all very tricky going for me, but it is thrilling to hear the shapes of each figure and phrase, then each movement, gradually emerge. (Lest this sound as if it is overstating my proficiency, I should add that my threshold for being delighted is very low!)

The past couple of weeks I’ve been concentrating on the second Largo movement, and have become newly friendly with the metronome—as I am, I fear, a little rhythmically challenged, and was prone to a somewhat liberal rendition of this piece in particular. And in terms of the original motivating quest in playing the cello—to discover some new experience of the mind/body relation—having a fluid command of rhythm and really feeling the pulse which underlies the rhythm seem like where that experience lies. Playing along with the metronome or with my teaching marking the beat, some trickily fast passages gave me glimpses (or sensation-impses; felt not seen!) of the fluidity that comes with really feeling the beat and letting it carry the melody along, rather than simply roughly approximating it, or being too influenced by the printed paraphernalia of the music, which sometimes, to an eye used to reading words not notes, can be misleading (I’m sure that sounds as daftly foreign to those who are musical as the suggestion that Russian’s all full of backwards R’s does to a reader of Cyrillic). I suddenly felt like I was speaking fluently, almost as if a stutter had been cured.

One of the enduring wonders and pleasure of music is, of course, its power to evoke and suggest different emotions and different emotionally coloured narratives, scenes or shapes of experience. The second Largo of this Sonata No. 3 seems especially emotionally suggestive (it is indeed marked molto espressivo).

What follows is an experiment to see if I can describe what it seems to suggest to me…an experiment which may be of little interest beyond the process of seeking to describe it…

The first half of the piece piece seems to chart a wistful memory, its transformations and augmentations in time and from different temporal perspectives. The first phrase (beginning with a rising triplet) A-B-C C B-A) sounds a wistful and melancholy memory. A complementary and consoling memory from times further back is added. The memory is traced again, and now a possibility of hopefulness comes in. Hopefulness, resignation and yearning all tug at that memory. Then hopefulness is allowed freer range, and the scale rises; space opens out and there is contentment on sunnier plateaux, newly rediscovered activity contrasting with the slower pace of melancholy reflection, and, then, the dignity of a resolution. ... The final section of the movement somehow makes me think of the story being told from a different, more removed distance, where there is now quiet reflection on the experience whose shape is transformed with distance but still discernibly the same.

And here is the piece of music, played by Italian cellist Enrico Mainardi (1897-1976). (The final allegro movement also follows; I’m still working on this bit :-) ) I picked this recording off YouTube over others because it seems the least “baroque” and the most bare (though other versions with the continuo basso are also very nice).

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.