Night music
My first time playing cello
Halfway through the party, the host brought out her cello. This was a family party, with kids running from the backyard into the house and back again building castles and robots out of cardboard boxes and painting an imaginary backdrop by shouting just a few words like, “Look over there—a pirate ship!”
The adults cooked, chatted and played along with the kid’s games and caught glimpses of our children’s imaginary world.
When it was too dark to go outside anymore, our host set up her cello. She played two or three short excerpts, and then offered each of the kids a chance to take a turn. They each held the bow and tried to make a sound and plucked the stings, sometimes working in pairs, with one child holding down the strings while another tried to bow.
Our host then offered me a chance to play. Although I love classical music, I’d never played a cello before.
Climbing into the chair and holding the instrument, I thought about all the other professions that have an initial position: bronc rider across a pinned horse, wrestler standing with legs and arms articulated, fencer with foil extended, potter with centered clay, chef with knife across a vegetable with her thumb positioned with just the nail touching the side of the blade to work as a sliding guide. I also thought of the poet holding a pen and the painter with a brush. The wood carver. The knife sharpener. The conductor. The traffic cop. The sprinter. The surgeon. The prima ballerina. The speed skater. The oarsman. The lumberjack. The sniper. The calligrapher. The tailor. The long jumper. The lifeguard. The ballroom dancer. The thief. Also, without getting too psychological, holding a cello suggests a pantomime of love at every stage—a mother holding a child, a young couple in spring, the pieta of the Renaissance, and the old couple holding hands at the end of a long life together. You don’t hold a cello like a lunch box or a laptop. You hold it like a living creature.
She showed me how to hold the bow—which from afar looks like a strung stick, but up close reveals itself to be a series of unexpected curves and visceral horsehair. No line is straight. Each part is an exquisite counter-curve that expects the bending pressure you’re about to apply.
My first stroke was throaty and animal. It sounded like a barking wolf or a creaking ship. I then caught the right angle and the familiar bourbon howl started to rise.
Seeing I’d caught a ghost, I asked for a few notes of Bach’s first cello suite. I shouted for the notes the way that Edison shouted for Watson through the telephone. The cello’s owner reached in and showed me a way to play the first few notes with a special fingering that even someone who had never played cello before might be able to do on their first try.
The score looks like this, but I wasn’t reading the score, I was following her instructions as she showed which string to bow and which string to hold. This looks tricky, but the first little bit (which is mostly repeating) can be played by holding and releasing one string while bowing across ascending open strings. She showed me once, and—I got it.
Miraculously, buoyed along by a lifetime of loving this music, I managed to play the first few notes. If you haven’t heard the cello suite before, here’s a recording of Pablo Casals playing the prelude to no. 1. He first got famous playing these in concert as a young man, but then later in life, he returned to the suites to record them, and in a way, also record the contemporary issues he was facing—some scholars have argued that you can hear the Spanish Civil War in the pathos of his playing.
The lightning intellect of Bach is so strong that even evoked from the bow of a non-musician, his music transformed the room. I was punch-drunk from ecstatic reverie to release those notes into the hot Palo Alto air. Unlike Mozart’s Night Music, which is a thrilling, but light-hearted romp, Bach’s Cello Suite no.1 is a long embrace.
Playing his notes, I felt like I was drawing, but where the line connected the emotions of others through my hand. As if I was flying a kite, holding the tugging string of intellectual sublimation, and pulling out the initial vibration and primal resonance. I was bursting with happiness. Bach—ringing through the room, washed away vexation and delivered hope.
