Symphony and Bookshelf

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Epic and Novel

"Have you seen how full the store is with cakes and candies and cookies?" M. said. "All for Christmas. But they're not just all in one aisle, they're everywhere...."

"I know, " I said. "They're all over. Leaping out and thwarting your well-intentioned way to the check-out... The aisles of cake closing in on you and the shopping cart--like the Clashing Rocks menacing Jason and the Argonauts..."

"Are you all right? I thought I detected a kind of cynicism in you tonight...?"

"What, me? No. Oh no, I was getting quite into that. Modern day epic in the grocery store. Maybe I sounded a bit cheesed off earlier, it wasn't the most productive of days. But this conversation's been quite funny."

"Oh, ok. Maybe it's me."

"You and your self-conscious reflection rupturing my supermarket epic... I dunno. Modern folk, eh. But are you all right?"

* * * *

We were in Fatapples in El Cerrito later that night. I was drinking an olallieberry milkshake (rather, I should say I was eating it, as the milkshake will support an upright spoon for at least half an hour) and talking to my cellist and composer friend M.

We are both prone to idealism. The subject of the Wikileaks cables came up.

"I don't understand," I said, "why there has to be so many secrets that have to be kept. If the world was different, these secrets wouldn't exist, they wouldn't have to exist if things were harmonious and honest and undesigning."

"The problem began," M. said, "when people stopped singing."

* * * *

I have often thought that if M. lived in another age he'd be a kind of Singer of Tales. He's a storyteller and an improviser. I heard him play the Kodály Cello Sonata once -- with all the melancholy of fascination for disappearing folk song.


* * * *

Tolstoy, the Tram, the Cockerel, and Twitter

7th November marks the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death. What a remarkable instance it is of patterns extending from art into life that Tolstoy--whose Anna Karenina, at the end of a novel where the railroad is surrounded by dark omens, falls, clutching her red bag, under a train --should die, of all places, at a railway station.


The pianist Alexander Gol'denveizer recorded this episode from 1896:

Once I met Lev Nikolaevich [Tolstoy] in the street. He again asked me to walk with him. We were somewhere near the Novinsky Boulevard, and Lev Nikolaevich suggested we should take the [horse-drawn] tram. We sat down and took our tickets.

Lev Nikolaevich asked me:
"Can you make a Japanese cockerel?"

"No."

"Look."

Tolstoy took his ticket and very skillfully made it into a rather elaborate cockerel, which, when you pulled its tail, fluttered its wings.

An inspector entered the car and began checking the tickets. L.N., with a smile, held out the cockerel to him and pulled its tail. The cockerel fluttered its wings. But the inspector, with the stern expression of a business man who has no time for trifling, took the cockerel, unfolded it, looked at the number, and tore it up.


L.N. looked at me and said:


"Now our little cockerel is gone..."


-- A. B. Gol'denveizer, Vblizi Tolstogo / Talks with Tolstoi, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (1923)

Tolstoy was on a horse-drawn street car towards the end of his life, but Virginia Woolf (who aided in the editing of these translations and had tried, together with her husband, to learn Russian to collaborate with their friend 'Kot') was a member of what Walter Benjamin called "the generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar”--that is, those who had been subjected to the rapid political and quotidian upheavals of the turn of the century—war, revolution, urban modernity. Never, before this generation, had “experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”

But Tolstoy died in almost modern times too. The week of his final sickness and death at the train station at Astapovo was reported with all the obsessiveness of the Twitter update: more than 1000 telegraphs were sent during that week. (For more on the death of Tolstoy as Russia's first great mass-media event, see William Nickell's marvellous new book).

* * *
Here is a recording of Tolstoy's one alleged musical composition, a waltz for piano. It was apparently written down when Tolstoy played it for Gol'denveizer at Yasnaya Polyana in 1906.

The bloggeur goes live

A rainy Saturday night with nothing better to do, so I decide to make use of the video function on my camera and record myself playing the cello... This was, by turns, a novelty, somewhat sobering, and ultimately quite instructive. And will make a good virtual postcard to send to my parents, who have never heard anything of the new hobby other than my raving about it.

The first attempt was truly terrible. None of the notes seemed joined up. And when you correct yourself while playing, it's as if you only hear the corrected version--the one that was in your head all along anyway--whereas this, oh wisdom of ages, is not what the recording apparatus hears. Nor what we hear when we listen the apparatus's recording, oh no. My first reaction was one of embarrassment. (Embarrassment has been a preoccupation of the pen lately, as well as pertaining momentarily to the cello: I've been trying to turn visceral cringe into discursive analysis to describe that awful sense of embarrassment we often experience on seeing Dostoevsky's characters conduct themselves so appallingly, careering towards inevitable breaking points in front of the motley crowds that fill the drawing rooms and dachas and--speaking of music--would-be decorous concert venues of The Idiot)

Darwin concluded The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) with a chapter on blushing, and observed that man does not blush before God, but only before his fellow men. Well, there were no fellow men (the long-suffering neighbours were away) to hear these efforts, but if I didn't blush, I certainly cringed. It wasn't that I was under delusions as to the truth of the cello-playing matter, but for just an instant I felt a touch foolish for investing so much time, so much earnestness, so much enthusiasm...to produce such fragile results! (Especially when there are things like finishing the dissertation and finding gainful employment to focus one's energies upon). But those thoughts quickly vanished, for nothing detracts from the enjoyment of the process, the small wonders it yields to me, or all the humility and dignity involved in the well-meant efforts (all of which are more of a strength-giving solace than distraction, I maintain, in the face of the finding gainful employment trials). My friends' good-natured enthusiasm when I posted the video on my facebook page was quite touching.

Forcing myself to watch the first clip again, though, I could see, for the first time really, that my arms and hands were definitely not doing the things they were supposed to be doing, the things my teacher kept on about. It hardly needs saying, but, somewhat like Olympic gymnastics or triple-axle-double-toeloop combos, this cello malarky is not as easy as it looks, folks... There are a million different things that can be just not quite right...nuances of postion, motion, tension. So I tried again, again and again...trying to correct some of the things that looked so wrong. Definitely didn't catch them all, but my suddenly oh so long arm no longer looks like it's floating around in space quite so wildly, and dropping my elbow seemed like it made for better connection with the strings. At the next day's lesson Matthew proclaimed he detected a new kind of consciousness in the connection to and control over my bow arm -- this can only be good, surely! And in the meantime, live in my kitchen, complete with wonky rhythms, awkwardnesses and general unrefinement of sound is a subsequent, marginally improved take of the Arioso from Bach's Cantata #156...

(it was not deliberate to chop my head out of the frame; as the amateur improves, so will we endeavour to improve our command of the technology)

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...