Music’s Room of Its Own

This month I’ve been having a holiday from my regular cello teacher, and last week I had a lesson with somebody new — the first such experience since beginning to learn two years ago. I enjoyed the lesson, and obviously, as well as the quirk of its firstness, there were differences—different energy, dynamics, approach. I wasn’t looking to find a better teacher or to make a judgment over whom I preferred — I was just curious, and in that sense both the curiosity and I were satisfied.

After the lesson, as we were chatting, the conversation turned to houses and their spaces, and R. spoke of a house (one for sale in Berkeley) with a room so large that it could be a private concert hall… He spoke of the idea with a passionate wonder that made me think his dreams had designed such a space before. My regular cello teacher, and dear friend, Matthew, has also spoken often of spatial fantasies, of a house he dreams of as an ongoing project of the imagination in which no room is too small…

This thought that the two cellists shared reminded me not just of the spaces that music fills, but of the space that music can articulate. There’s a wonderful description of this in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Sacks quotes from an article appearing in the Guardian by Nick Coleman, an English music critic, who had lost hearing in one ear:

“I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting volume as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear “buildings” whenever I heard music—three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not “see” these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them in my sensorium. These forms had “floors,” “walls,” “roofs,” “windows,” “cellars.” They expressed volume. They were constructed out of interlinked surfaces which depended on each other for coherence. Musis to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional contained, a vessel, as real in its way as a scout hut or cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces. I’m absolutely certain that this “architecture” had everything to do with why music has always exerted such an emotional hold over me…

I’ve always kept quiet about this architecture business, partly…because I’d never been entirely confident that “architecture” was what I really meant. Maybe “hearing music architecturally” was just me being inarticulate.

But I am confident now. “Architecturally” was precisely right. What I hear now when I listen to music [after losing hearing in one ear] is a flat, two-dimensional representation: flat as in literally flat, like a sheet of paper with lines on it. Where I used to get buildings, I now only get architectural drawings. I can interpret what the drawings show but I don’t get the actual structure. I can’t enter music and I can’t perceive its inner space. I’ve never got much of an emotional hit from technical drawings. This is what really hurts: I no longer respond to music emotionally.” (Sacks, Musicophilia, 159-60.)

This week I also heard other kinds of music fill a particularly beautiful space — the Mather Redwood Grove in Berkeley’s Botanical Gardens. A chance discovery led us to a small concert there by Petracovich and Walking in Sunlight (both pretty great -- natural and honest, gentle and strongly felt).

After walking up to the gardens in the afternoon sun, entering the shady peace of the redwoods was like slipping into a cool, still pool. There truly is something sacred about the redwood trees—transforming all the space below them that their massive height spans into somewhere that feels both perfectly still, but charged with fecundity, ferns breathing fog, motes of life dancing in the sun…

One last thought, which I would not usually mention, as it sounds a little crazy, but seems to belong here with trees and ideas about spatial and textural components of emotional experience: A couple of weeks ago I was walking in Berkeley, in a tree-lined street, not thinking about anything particular (and definitely not under the influence of anything), when suddenly my gaze fell, lightly but with odd intensity on the bark of the tree growing by the road. In that moment, I felt like I had an acute experience of the texture of the wood’s bark, which somehow, and for inexplicable reasons, was suddenly and deeply moving, as if those sensory impressions had completely bypassed rational, conscious or language based ways of perception and cognition…It was as if the sight of pure living texture translated itself into something simultaneously tactile and emotional.

Why bother?

“For my part,” said Deronda, “people who do anything finely inspirit me to try. I don’t mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”

“But then if we can’t imitate it?—it only makes our own life seem tamer,” said Gwendolen, in a mood to resent encouragement founded on her own insignificance.

“That depends on the point of view, I think,” said Deronda. “We should have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our own performances. A little private imitation of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it, and most of us ought to practise art only in the light of private study—preparation to understand and enjoy what the few can do for us…”

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

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).

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.

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.