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.

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.

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