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My humble Eastman rental

“The hardest instrument to master,” says Tim, visibly unnerved by his own superlative, “is the voice. The second hardest are the string instruments.”

Tim is sharing this opinion with me by way of soothing my battered ego. After a week of sawing away at  “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” I return to my Monday lesson and give a performance of it for Tim that could best be described, in a word, as calamitous. Murphy’s Law has rarely been observed with such a multiplicity of adendums and codicils: everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong with an echo-chamber-like vengeance; flubs that weren’t even on the map of probabilities, I invented and executed with fortissimo in-your-faceness.

All at once, I am eight years old again, cowering under the withering glare of Mr. Stellato, my elementary school trumpet teacher. But I practiced so hard, my eyes cry  in despair. One should never underestimate the intimidating force of a music teacher’s presence to obliterate hours upon hours of diligent work.

Even cheery, bouncing-off-the-wall-with-positive-reinforcement Tim–the antithesis of the autocrat instructor—manages to throw me off course when the moment of truth arrives. It’s that old devil stage fright, that wretched creature who clawed at my back when I fell apart in front of the judges performing  a tricky level III trumpet piece at state competitions in 8^th grade. The same ogre who stalked me when I went up on my lines playing (can we talk about irony?) the Professor in Ionesco’s “The Lesson” in 10^th gratde. The same miscreant who flattened me in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer just days before opening night of “The Fantasticks” in senior year. 38 years later, he’s alive and well and living in Western Massachusetts.

After I recover, Tim says something on the order of, “Whenever possible, you should try to be looking at the music when you play.” Only someone like Tim could say something like this without it coming off as remotely sarcastic. But I am undone, all the same. I was so proud during practice sessions that I could carry the song by heart, it had never occurred to me that I would never learn what notes I was playing unless I looked at the music.

Hubris is a many-splendored thing.

It then occurred to me that I had been so over-eager to expand my repertoire—could one blame me?–that I had given “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” short shrift. I toyed with “Lightly Row,” going at it with a choppy, bronze-weight paddle. I fiddled around with “Long, Long Ago.”  I made a stab at “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” Tell her what? I can’t remember. That one was second grade chorus with Mrs. Landesberg.

This week, Tim wields the bow and demonstrates that elusive balance of lightness and subtle pressure that results in good tone. I  experiment with a series of long draws over the A, D, G and C strings. I add the merest breath of pressure with each successive attempt. Tim coos with approval, but I can’t hear the difference.

We move on to my new assignment for next week, a French folk song.  As I play, Tim makes a mental list of my accumulating bete noirs: the bow drifting up away from the bridge, the screeches (fingers on wrong strings), the difficulty of transitioning from an open note or first finger on the A string to the fourth finger on the D. Oh yes, and holding the bow.

Tim praises my acute pitch, and asks me what music I listen to. Cake. Bonnie Raitt. Eddie from Ohio, I fumble. And favorite classical? I falter over Ravel. Why does his name suddenly escape me? The Romantics. Schubert, Brahms, Chopin. Tim says that the Bach Cello Suites are really an anomaly, that there are really very few solo works written for the cello, but a great body of sonatas. He offers to make me a list. As Tim continues to probe my musical interests, it occurs to me that this is the beginning of an intimacy, that strange, particular rapport that develops oh-so-slowly between instructor and student. The incremental sharing of information. The letting down of one’s guard. It makes me a little self-conscious: there is an aspect of second or third date about it all. (Matthias, picking me up after the lesson, makes a joke of it: “Oh, my boyfriend left me for his cello teacher! My boyfriend made him gay!”)

At home, I promise myself that I am going to stick to the week’s assignment, but as the week goes along I find myself drifting away from the French folk song and the twinkling star to “Lightly Row,” “Long, Long Ago” and “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” (I don’t doubt that poor Aunt Rhody is rolling in her grave by now). As the days pass, I experience that long, long ago rush I used to know during trumpet lesson with Mr. Stellato, the little euphoria that comes with daily improvement. The pain in my right thumb is beginning to ease. I am able to hold the bow properly, with less discomfort and awkwardness. I am beginning to produce a tone that is vaguely, almost pleasantly, cello-like.

With each improvement comes a reluctance to let go. I anticipate each daily hour of practice with a gusto that is almost disconcerting; when the hour is up and fatigue is setting in, I push for ten or fifteen minutes more.

If I have any lingering doubts, they have to do with the inherent narcissism of recording the experience for public consumption. One evening, Matthias and I watch “Julia and Julie.” Whenever the Amy Adams’ character taps away at her appallingly precious blog scratchings on the tribulations of banging out 400-odd Julia Child recipes in 365 days, I am so mortified for her (and, by extension, for myself) that I want to hide under a table. Am I reducing my labors to the cutesy, cloying froth of a Nora Ephron comedy? Matthias does what he can to ameliorate my anxieties, which I also divulge to my friend Paul. Paul writes back, insisting that Meryl Streep will have a black hole in her career until she plays me playing the cello.

This is a cunning thought, although I would never wish it on her. I recall once asking Streep if she had ever accepted a role only to realize she had gotten herself in over her head. She nodded wearily and pointed to a violin that was sitting on a nearby couch, explaining “In four weeks I have to play that on the stage of Carnegie Hall.”

I think I’ll give myself a little more time. Five weeks, at very least.

My sturdy rental cello

I don’t know which is more depressing: turning on the radio and hearing the rabid blowback on the new health care bill or switching the dial to “On the Top” and listening to some 17-year-old wiseacre from Highland Park, Illinois whiz through Variations on a Theme of Paganini by Gregor Piatagorsky.

This week I aced “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” By heart. In three keys. I made respectable progress on “Lightly Row” and “Long, Long Ago.” I refined the G scale, the D scale and the A scale. Still, I don’t expect “On the Top” is in my future. Even if I was to hurl through the great psychedelic light show of infinity like Keir Dullea in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and reverse course toward babyhood.

There are no weekly radio shows to celebrate the sticktoitvness of late bloomers.

I must clear my house of envy or regret. There is enough clutter without them. No matter what finish-line you vault, how little time it took to get there, how many medals you win, there will always be someone who got there younger and faster and gathered up more medals along the way.

Even Tim, my twentysomething teacher who has been playing the cello since he was 7, suffers from Mozart envy. “By the time Mozart was 7,” Tim sighs, “he had already written thirty-two variations on ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

I suffer too. I suffer from novice’s impatience. I want to wake up tomorrow with every volume of Suzuki cello exercises under my hat, a distant and not unpleasant memory. I have played “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” so many times that the notes are beginning to morph in my head, pink-elephant style. The plodding melody creeps in and inhabit the crevices of every waking thought, like some awful novelty song that mugs your brain and makes off with everything in its possession. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” has become my “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” My “Yummy Yummy Yummy (I’ve Got Love in my Tummy).”

This week I continue to struggle with the (theoretically) simple matter of holding the bow. I try and keep my thumb in the preferred position, nuzzling the frog, but halfway through a song my thumb begins to nag at me. I push my way through, but well before I reach the final measure, my thumb is throbbing and the tip of the bow is flopping downward.

Tim insists by way of consolation that one should not do something that is going to hurt, but I am anxious not to develop bad habits at this early stage of the game. Every time I finish a scale or a song I steady the bow with my left hand and reposition the fingers on my right, curving my thumb in a tortuous perpendicular to the frog as I the stretch my second and third fingers slightly westward. How can I limber up this recalcitrant appendage? There must be an exercise, some thumb push-ups or  jumping jacks.

That said, nothing is more painful than the primal scream that issues from my cello when I attack a string  from an uncongenial angle. Somehow, luckily, Matthias finds all the wailing and screeching of my daily practice to be restful. “Lightly Row” has rarely generated such a tumult of angry waves, and yet the tsunami seems to gentle his soul as he combs through spam e-mail on his MacBook from the safe distance of the dining room.  “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” that enduring blight on the landscape of all beginning musicians, has found new lease on life as a soothing soundtrack for the latest barrage of penis enlargement offers.

One day, perhaps, I will kiss the earth on which Mr. Suzuki walks. May that day arrive before I am sixty, or, develop arthritis in my right thumb. Whichever comes first.

My Eastman rental

I broke a string. Damn.

Barely three weeks into my lessons, and I’m breaking strings. An A string. Twisted the knob too tight. Snap, thwang. Sorry, Anita.

At least it was the day before lesson 3, when I had run through the week’s pizzacato regimen as many times as I could bear. I never thought I would be panting to learn a scale. By the time I break my first string, I am chomping at the bit.

I get my wish at lesson 3. The D scale. Ta-da!

Before getting a crack at the D, Tim gives me a refresher course in music theory. He pulls out a sheet of paper with empty music bars, and starts drawing in clefs and notes: numbers, dots, letters. Finding the tonic. The tempo. The meter. Octave: eight notes, of course. The G clef, which I know from my misbegotten grade school years playing the trumpet. And then, not but least, the bass clef.

Hello, bass clef. Make room. This is where I will be visiting for the rest of my life. My third home.

I’m primed for the D scale, but first, Tim must detour again briefly to disabuse me of the bad habits I have already developed holding the bow. The correct position feels just too strange and ungainly: thumb tucked down by the frog, other fingers resting perpindicular over the bow. Perpindicular? I fight it. This bow thing is going to be a problem.

Tim walks me through the D scale, starting with an open D string. Then my first finger down. Second and third fingers. Keep that ball in your hand, Jan. Pinky, all four fingers down. Sour note, flat. I groan. Tim says not to worry about getting the note right yet. Jump to A string. Open string. First finger. Second and third finger. Another sour note. Flat or sharp tones make me cringe. I spread my fingers instinctively to correct the note. Pinky.

There, says Tim with a triumphal fluorish. That’s the D scale.

Now, reverse course. A string: Four fingers, three, one, open. D string: Four fingers, three, one, open.

Tim has me repeat the scale a few times. More cringing.  Tim doesn’t seem perturbed in the least, reassuring me once more: Don’t worry about the note. I worry. I grope the neck repeatedly for the correct note, then move on. Good. Beautiful. More. I want more.

Okay, says Tim. Now let’s add rhythm to the  mix.

He pencils in 4/4, followed by ascending ½ notes, beginning with D. He sets a slow 4/4 tempo with his foot, and launches me into the D scale again, two counts to each note.

I make it through, anxiously second guessing myself, repositioning my right hand on the bow and my left fingers on the neck. This scale thing is going to be a problem, too.

As I pack up the cello, I quiz Tim more about his band work (more or less over, after seven years) and his studies. He is winding down his masters degree, finishing a thesis on Bach’s Cello Suites. I ask if he has any preferred artists on the Cello Suites. He opts for the second Yo Yo Ma recording. Rostropovich. The Pablo Casals (“of course”). And a musician new to me, Pieter Wispelwey.

Practicing over the following week, I alternate, with seesaw regularity, between self-confidence and exasperation. One day, I find the D scale with ease, as if we were old friends from college. The next day, it eludes me. The day after, it returns. But the strings sound plastic, like a toy guitar I strummed as a child. I keep hunking on the rosin, to no avail. My right thumb hurts as I try to extend the bow to the tip. I scour the web for another YouTube video on how to hold the bow; there must be about 52. I find one with a nebbishy guy in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt. His video only has a two and a half star rating (blame the outfit), but he manages to put across what I’m doing wrong: I should be pressing my thumb vertically against the frog, rather than horizontally. I try that, and the rest of my fingers rest with comfort over the bow; my thumb, in turn, ceases to throb.

Once I am holding the bow properly (or rather, more better), the resonance returns to the strings. But as I draw the bow across from tip to frog, my right wrist remains stiff; my elbow pulls my arm as if the entire limb were in a cast. How do I relax the wrist? I feel like a golem.

As I become more comfortable with the D scale, I feel frustrated that I don’t know exactly what notes I am playing. I feel like I am flying blind. Am I getting ahead of myself?  I don’t want to overdo the YouTube crutch, as I don’t want to mangle Tim’s teaching strategy with too many others. Does Tim have a teaching strategy?

When one is starting from square one, one takes a leap of faith with marbles in one’s shoes.

My rented and practically brand new Eastman cello

The light in Tim’s back-room studio is considerably more festive at four in the afternoon, the time of my new lesson slot. Two windows flanking the room from opposite sides suddenly become visible, and the sun spraying through brings out the presence of items that had gone unnoticed the week before: an autographed photograph of Bela Fleck on the wall, a hand truck that doubles as a coat rack. Hanging from the truck when I enter is a jacket that has been left behind by the last student, a retired gentleman in his sixties who is trying to make friends again with his neglected double bass. Tim sent him out at lesson’s end with an encouraging word and a homework assignment of “How High the Moon.” In another minute, he will return to retrieve his jacket.

Somewhere in my Google searching for cello websites the other day, I came across one of those simple sentences that are supposed to help you remember the notes on an instrument, one of those little Every Boy Deserves Good Favor tricks. But by the following day I couldn’t remember the suggested sentence for remembering the four cellos strings (A-D-G-C), nor could I remember where I had found it. So, I spent the better part of my lunch hour hike trying to come up with a sentence of my own. I bandied about three

(1)  All dragons get cavities.

(2)   Always dig graves cautiously.

(3)   Alsatians devour goat cheese.

before settling on a fourth

(4)  Anita dangles green castanets.

In keeping with that simple maxim about best laid plans, however, I  get flustered when Tim asks me to start a bowing exercise on the C string, and I fumble around in my head trying to recall if dragons devour goat cheese or Anita digs green cavities.

Sensing my distress, Tim points at the C string, and life goes on.

My second lesson is devoted to coordinating my anatomy to that of instrument, an arduous series of gymnastics which entails curling my knuckles, flexing my left forearm and twisting my right elbow about like an emotionally conflicted department store mannequin.

Things to remember for the left hand:

• Bend only the fingers.
• Maintain a straight line on from the elbow to the pinky.
• Bring the hand over the strings like you are holding a ball.
• Relax

Exercises for the right hand:

*Hold the bow with the thumb between fingers 2 and 3.

* Pull the bow in a down bow (frog to tip), carving a U shape  in the air with the bow as you draw it from Castanets to Anita.

* Reverse, doing an up bow (tip to frog), carving a U shape in the air with the bow as you draw it from Anita to Castanets.

* Keep the fingers perpendicular to the stick

* Keep the stick perpendicular to the strings

* Place the hair near the tip on the bridge and rock the bow .

Oh, and P.S.: Don’t press weight on the bow as you draw it across the strings.

This is a lot to digest, and my arms respond to the rapid influx of information with rebellious contortions. My left pinky has a mind of its own, and keeps extending straight when I try to keep it curled. How does one keep a straight line from one’s elbow to one’s pinky when one’s fingers are curled over the strings? How does one  negotiate “perpendicular” when one is looking down at the bow from an angle? And how, let’s be real, does one relax?

Tim maintains his sang froid as I attempt to sort out the dos and donts.  Tim, methinks, is a natural teacher. He’s always very present and engaged, without being overly personal. One senses that he cops the same buoyant, “Sesame Street” pose with his adult students and child students alike, without ever seeming patronizing.  I don’t know where the hour goes, but it is free of that melancholic weight that hung over my ill-fated piano lessons in college, when I trudged through scales at the distracted prodding of a depressive university student. Before the hour is up, Tim says he will dig up a Suzuki book for me in time for the next lesson, and promises that I will be banging out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in no time. It’s a good song, I respond. No “How High the Moon,” perhaps. But they both have a resolution, and room to move.

My brave cello

Cello Lessons: First lesson  Mar. 8, 2010

Tim’s studio sits at the back of a modest duplex house in Northampton, MA, a mile or so as the crow flies from the Academy of Music. A stately brick retirement home across the road mocks the starter-home sincerity of Tim’s apartment, which he shares with his pianist and opera-singer wife Miranda and a newborn who displays considerable operatic promise (especially before she has had her dinner). The studio itself is a long narrow space the size of a walk-in dressing closet, just behind the kitchen. Tim is a tall man in his 20s, very good-looking and wholesome in a manner redolent of Up with People! or an old Disney comedy with Dean Jones. Even at 6 in the evening, his broad, Steeplechase-Amusement-Park grin seems indefatigable.

I anticipated he might ask my about my ambitions for the instrument, but he keeps the preamble brief, assuring me without asking that there are any number of community orchestras who are always in need of the lower strings (“Everyone wants to be a violinist” he says shooting me a conspiratorial look, and I roll my eyes to let him know I don’t easily suffer lemmings either). We only have a half hour, the first five minutes of which are wiled away as Tim conditions the unused bow, fresh out of its plastic wrapper (“you can never use enough rosin!” he explains, rapidly masturbating the strings with the little black block). He demonstrates tightening and relaxing the bow for starting and finishing practice (“remember, righty tighty, lefty loosey!”) and holds the cello up to his nose by way of showing how much to let out the stand at the bottom.

The remaining 20 minutes are spent getting up, close and comfortable, wedging the cello between my knees at a sloping angle, learning how to hold the bow with my right arm, how to position the left. There is nothing slick or programmed about Tim’s teaching methods; if anything, he seems to be learning on the job. His raggedy enthusiasm works for me, at least for now. He demonstrates a simple exercise: pressing down each of my left hand fingers  in succession on the A string as I pluck with my right hand. A déjà vu sensation: I feel spastic as I try to relax and straighten my left wrist so that the fingers spread naturally over the string; the awkwardness and discomfort makes immediate again that awful lack of coordination I felt all those years ago in Little League when I tried, with little success, to connect a bat with a ball.

As I struggle trying to relax my wrist, Tim’s baby launches into an aria in the next room;  Miranda shouts for Tim to oome in and give her a hand, and he excuses himself for a moment. When he returns, I have moved on to the D string, a show of eager-beaver initiative that earns teacher’s approval. As we wind down, I cajole Tim to find a longer lesson slot, explaining that time seems less infinite and open-ended in one’s mid-50s than at 5 or 15. I’m in luck; an hour slot has opened up on Monday afternoons. I write Tim a check for five weeks, misspelling his surname, and head out to the car committing my  new mantra to memory: “Tighty righty, lefty loosey.”

The Eastman cello

This is my cello.

Or rather, it is the cello that will be following me to my first lesson this evening at 6 PM. It is brand new and has never been played, or so I was told by the fellow at the music store who rented it to me. It gives off  a new cello smell; if it were a scented candle, it would fill the room with the woozy stink of freshly varnished maple wood.

My temporary cello is an Eastman. It was built in China by an American-Chinese manufacturer, the clerk further explained in response to my question. I wanted to know. I think China turns out extraordinarly proficient musicians, but I would never go to bat for  their exports or trade policies. But it should do for now.

I haven’t played any kind of instrument in over 35 years. To be honest, I’m a little afraid of the thing: its glossy, too-perfect patina, its untapped potential. The sheer vastness of what there is to know about it. I’m not quite sure what to do with my cello. When I took it out of the case the other night to show to Matthias, it didn’t respond in a friendly way to the bow. Nothing recognizably cello-like came out when I scraped it across the strings, just a sickly, plastic screech very similar to the one made by a cheap mandolin I bought years ago in Riga. When she heard it, Cannobio (the African gray parrot in residence) skittered down her branch looking discernibly anxious.

Our friend Craig, who played the cello for two years in another lifetime, thinks the bow is too fresh and needs a good going over with rosin. Until a week ago, I had never heard of rosin. Think how one’s world can change on a  dime.

Still, I love my new temporary cello. I love locking it between my knees and imagining that one day, possibly before I am 70, I will be able to finesse my own, down-and-dirty cello arrangement of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. I loved coming out of Rayburn’s with it, on Columbus Avenue just across from Lincoln Center. Had I known what a thrill it would be to walk down Broadway near 64^th street carrying a cello, I would have bought an empty cello case years ago and paraded it up and down the Upper West Side.

I  don’t have any illusions about myself or my cello. I don’t expect to be playing for Dudamel or Gergiev before I depart this world. I know I’m setting myself for years of doubts and insecuritiers  But then one can never have enough of either.

The other night, Matthias and I attended a chamber concert at Zankel featuring the pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his sister Tanja on the cello. The program was a Schubert trio, followed by a Shostakovich. We sat in the front row, where I hung onto Tanja Tetlaff’s every move. She sat impassively as she played, her eyes turned inward, impenetrable; it was as if all her emotion was being sucked out by the score and funneled into the instrument, leaving nothing readable in her face or body. She was brilliant, and she made me antsy. At the intermission, I leaned over to Matthias and said, “I wish I could say she makes it look easy, but it looks very, very hard.”

Tanja Tetzlaff’s cello is Italian and was built in 1776. The insurance payments alone exceed the sum total of  my lifetime assets, I have no doubt.

I couldn’t have imagined how difficult it would be to simply find a cello in the Massachusetts Pioneer Valley, where The Big House is. All these institutions of higher learning and only one stringed instrument store? After going to Stamell, tucked behind the post office in Amherst, I determined that the cello I had inquired about two weeks earlier was gone and that they couldn’t say when another one would come in. After scouring Craig’s List for an inexpensive used instrument, I returned to New York City and researched the neighborhood rental shops.

The first place I visited was called Universal, on Broadway a block south of 8^th street. You go up a flight of stairs; at the end of a short hall there is an open door, which leads you into a large, junk-filled loft: the “American Buffalo” set of David Mamet’s wildest dreams. The instrument cases were barely visible for all the piles of newspapers, boxes, dead furniture, flotsam and jetsam. It made Francis Bacon’s painting studio look like a minimalist installation.

A commensurately dissheveled gentleman emerged from behind a leaning tower of McDonald’s take-out bags. When I explained to him my needs, he reached over to a curvaceous case that was camouflaged by the surrounding debris. He opened it  and produced a frail instrument that looked like it had been air-lifted out of Dresden during the firebombings and dropped over the East Village without a parachute. He plucked a couple of the strings, which returned the favor with two tinny thumping sounds, and said blandly, “Here’s a cello.” After eyeing it dubiously, I asked if he had any others. He said, “Oh, yeah, we’ve got lots in the back.” This wasn’t the back? I said I would pick one up at the end of the week.

Well, so I lied.

The next day, a fierce and foul snowstorm fell over Lincoln Center, where I was doing a little marathon of French movies. I made a bee-line to Rayburn’s Music Store in between two films, and walked out with a rental contract for three months. It was was written up by an officious but courteous young man who  seemd very surprised when I told him about the burgeoning market for stolen instruments. He responded with a visible shudder, saying that he played the saxophone and that it cost him a lot of money. He offered to tune my cello, then immediately retracted the offer, explaining that the minute I walked out the store with it, it would need tuning again. I told him I would pick it up at the end of the week.

I returned the next day.

I am now back up in New England, throwing logs on the fire at The Big House. My cello sits a few feet away, patiently waiting to be brought to life.