Cloistered

Here is what I think about these days when I feel isolated and frustrated:

1936. A turn-of-the-century apartment in Barcelona: living room, dining room, four bedrooms. A pared-down kitchen, no ice-box. One bathroom. No hot water or central heat. In this apartment live my father, his parents, his two younger sisters, and his older brother with his wife and two baby boys. And the maid, an orphan whom my grandparents took in many years ago. She sleeps on a cot in the kitchen.

The Spanish Civil War has broken out. My grandfather is an accountant in a cement company, but construction in all of Spain has come to a halt, so there isn’t much work for him. My grandmother sends the maid out to the shops every day, and makes do with what she brings back: bread and garlic and maybe a bit of hake or cod.

The older son used to have a job, but now has lymphoma and grows weaker by the day. Doctors and nurses are at the front, stitching wounds and amputating limbs, so he is cared for by his wife and his mother. His wife is a Mexican citizen. Like the Israelites smearing blood on their doors so the angel would spare their firstborns, the family has nailed a Mexican flag on the door of the apartment to deter the anarchist gangs that roam the city.

My father’s sisters are fifteen and twelve, and have to be kept mostly indoors because the streets are rife with soldiers. My father is twenty-two. Ever since his mother sat him on her lap and placed his fingers on the keyboard of the upright piano, music has been his life. A violinist, he is starting to make his way professionally.

Of all the family, he is the most endangered, more than the dying brother or the pubescent girls. Catalonia is in the grip of leftist furor. Centuries of deprivation have stoked hatred among the poor towards everyone and everything that smacks even remotely of privilege: the wealthy and the middle class, the great landowners and the farmers with a single field and a mule, and the church—priests good and bad, monks, nuns, former altar boys, and members of a Catholic organizations such as the Children of Mary.

In high-school my father belonged to the Children of Mary, along with the rest of his class. This now makes him subject to summary arrest and execution. One night his best friend, hiding in his own parents’ apartment, is dragged out from under the sofa and put on a truck headed for Montjuich, the hill overlooking the city where dozens are shot every day at dawn. But my father’s friend is charming, and on the way he strikes a conversation with the guard, who lowers the tailgate and lets him jump off.

As in every civil war, one is at the mercy of disaffected neighbors, disappointed rivals, the spiteful, the petty, and the just plain evil, any one of whom may take it into his or her head to nod in the direction of one’s hiding place. So my father has to stay in the apartment 24/7. Not only can he not go outdoors, he can’t stand on the balcony or close to a window. Not only may he not play the violin--that would give him away immediately--he has to speak softly and tread lightly, lest the downstairs tenants hear a man’s voice and footsteps while my grandfather and the elder son are out of the house.

What do they do, the ten of them, day after day in that apartment? There is a piano on which the girls practice their scales. There is a radio, but reception is poor. Otherwise there is nothing:  no TV, no wi-fi, no working telephone, no books or magazines other than those already on the shelves. There are frequent blackouts.

There is always prayer, and they all say the rosary together every evening. And for my father there are buttons to paint, for a little income. It is fashionable at the time for women to wear large painted buttons made of tagua, an ivory-like plant material. So my young father sits by the window (but not too close) with a slender brush and some paints, and invents tiny bucolic scenes for women to wear on their chests. What, at twenty-two, does he make of women, now that the only ones he sees are his mother, the maid, his sisters, and his brother’s young wife in the bedroom next to his?

Food is the great issue. How to get it, how to apportion it. The decisions are in my grandmother’s hands. My grandfather needs nourishment so he can continue to work, as does the maid. The girls are still growing. The daughter-in-law is pregnant or nursing. Now that his cancer is progressing, the older son doesn’t want to eat much, but he must be encouraged nevertheless. And my father—how to satisfy the hunger of a twenty-two-year-old man? Fortunately, he doesn’t get any exercise, so that helps.

At night the family gathers around the table, a candle flickering in the center because the electricity has been cut off.

“Here, take this bread. I’m not feeling very hungry.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s yours. Please eat it…”

They go to bed early to keep warm, but before retiring they file into the kitchen, one by one, and down several glasses of water. This is to give their stomachs the illusion of fullness, so they can fall asleep.

The war lasts three years.

My father, aged 21, the year before the war

Why Concerts Make Me Sad

When my father died of lung cancer at fifty-three, his death wrenched me out of the ocean of music that I'd been swimming in since infancy. Even as a toddler, I was so immersed in his music that my mother found me on the potty one day, humming the third movement of the Beethoven violin concerto, which my father was preparing to perform.

I spent a major part of my childhood attending--more like being dragged to--concerts. Sunday mornings, in Barcelona, my mother would take me to Mass, and then to the symphony concert in the Palau de la música catalana. There, in the hallucinatory Art Nouveau hall, swinging my legs, which were too short to reach the floor, I would sit through endless programs. Once I'd located my father in the violin section, I would entertain myself by gazing at the plaster busts of long-haired muses that emerged out of the wall behind the orchestra.

When the Ecuadorian government imported a quartet of Catalan players to Quito, with my father as first violin, we all--the second violinist, the violist, the cellist, my parents and I--shared a house so the quartet could spend mornings practicing for their bi-weekly performances, which I was required to attend. At twelve years old, even though by then my feet did reach the floor, a late Beethoven quartet seemed to last an eternity.

By the time we came to the U.S. I was in high school, and had been playing the violin for several years. By sheer dint of exposure, I was finding it easier to sit through and even enjoy my father's symphony concerts, and his chamber music and solo performances.

Then, as I was finally maturing musically, my father died, and I stopped going to concerts. Half a century later, I still find it painful to attend live performances. As a result, over the years I have missed a lot of good music. In Vermont, there is a vibrant musical community, and magnificent players regularly spill out of New York looking for venues, but it's all wasted on me. I can enjoy listening to music on the car radio, or on CDs in my living room. But live performances bring tears to my eyes, and so I avoid them.

Why, I've been wondering, shouldn't I get the same joy out of going to concerts as so many of my friends do? What is it about live performances that plunges me back into a state of mourning, as if my father had just died? Why can I listen to music in my car but not in a concert hall?

And then it came to me. There is one sound that is never heard on a recorded piece, but that you always hear whenever a string player picks up his or her instrument, whether preparing to practice scales or to perform at Carnegie Hall: the sound of tuning up.

For the violin, it starts with the two highest strings, A and E, played together, then A and D, and finally D and G, the tones growing sharper or flatter with each turn of the pegs, the adjustments finer and finer until the three perfect fifths are reached.

Together with my parents' voices, the sound of a violin being tuned, that homely wah-wah without which no music can begin, was one of the first vibrations to reach me as I swam in my mother's womb. So that, to this day, hearing the search for those perfect fifths immerses me in my father's presence: his hyper-flexible, tobacco-stained fingers, the circular sore on his left jaw from too many hours of playing, the aroma of cigarettes that enveloped him.

But if I open my eyes and see someone else tuning the strings, my father is suddenly wrenched away from me, replaced by a stranger who may well be a better violinist than he was, but is not him. And I am plunged into mourning once again.

If for me my father's persona was inextricably identified with music, it's little wonder that music, which like smell bypasses the obtrusive medium of language, can bring him back so vividly. And just as vividly--since it's no longer him playing, nor will ever be--snatch him away. I don't suppose that there's much I can do to alter this, nor at this stage do I really want to. I simply accept it as a fair price for all the years that I spent floating in the warm currents of my father's music.

My father (mustache, violin) and the Catalan quartet in Quito, 1955

Pizzicato (finale)

“Flat! Flat! You’re flat!” my father cried, swooping into my bedroom and waving his arms. He wasn’t scolding me—he just couldn’t bear it when I played out of tune. Occasionally, these interruptions would turn into a full lesson. More often, after reminding me to hold up my violin, my father would dash off to a rehearsal, a performance, or some other student’s regularly-scheduled lesson.

I was twelve and more advanced now, playing “real” music—Handel, Vivaldi, Viotti—and practicing an hour a day. But as I progressed, my ability to criticize my own playing had also advanced, and I was more aware than ever of the gulf that separated my playing from my father’s.

As conscious as I was of my failings, I had little notion of how to remedy them, and every hour I spent cloistered in my room with my four-stringed enemy felt like a week. Worst of all, my hoped-for reward—an hour of my father’s attention and possible approval—only came at long and unpredictable intervals. Given all this, I failed to see why I should be made to practice at all.

This is where my mother came in. My father having neither the temperament nor the leisure to keep me on task, she became the enforcer. “Have you practiced yet today?” she would ask as I finished my homework.

I would roll my eyes and close the door to my room. I would open the case, inhaling the sad, sour smell that emanated from its maroon velvet lining; pick up the violin; tuck it under my chin, and tighten the bow hairs. Then I would begin my musical Stations of the Cross—first the scales, then the harder position and bowing exercises, uphill through the assigned pages of Kreutzer, finally ending on  the Golgotha of some sonata. When the hour was over I would emerge shouting “I hate the violin! It’s awful! I despise it!”

My mother would shake her head sadly. “Such a pity! Such a pity! Daddy tells me all the time what a fine violinist you could be if only you wanted to. He says you have a good tone—something that can’t be taught….”

I wondered why my father never said those things to me, never looked me in the eye and said I had a good tone. As it was, my mother’s words only irritated me. “I don’t care,” I would say, stamping my foot. “It’s hateful. Why should I spend all this time on something I hate?”

My mother would smile wistfully. “Some day, when you are grown up and married, and living in your own house, on a rainy afternoon when you are feeling melancholy you will pick up your violin and play, and be grateful that I made you practice.”

This explanation only added fuel to my anger. I didn’t want to grow up into a lady with no way to fill a rainy afternoon. I had seen what empty afternoons did to my mother! Despite my dislike of it, to me the violin was serious business, not some bored housewife’s occasional pastime. I knew only too well how terrible that housewife would sound, if she only practiced when she was in certain moods.

Underlying all this was my intuition that there was something amiss in the lives of my mother and the other women in my family. They were charming, attractive, educated and smart. They were good at many things: they embroidered, painted in oils, played various instruments. They read constantly, went to concerts and to art exhibits every week. But somehow, in a way I couldn’t understand but was sure of, they weren’t serious. My father, on the other hand, was.

On the brink of puberty, without ever having been told so expressly, I saw myself relegated by fate to the charming, witty, non-serious side of things. Unfortunately, I wanted both: to be clever and attractive (especially that, please God) as well as serious. As for the violin, if I couldn’t play like my father, then I wanted no part of it.

Years passed.  My mother stuck to her guns and I to my grousing. In my freshman year in college, my father decided that I needed some orchestra experience. The woman who played in the last stand of the second violins in the Birmingham Symphony was going on maternity leave and had to be replaced. My father drove me to the conductor’s house one afternoon. I auditioned, and was told to report for rehearsal that same evening.

The nightly rehearsals and weekend concerts wreaked havoc with my social life, not to mention my study hours. I was so terrified of playing an unintended “solo” that I spent my time in the orchestra mostly trying not to be heard. But in some ways these were good music times for me: my father was the violin instructor at the college I attended, and I signed up for classes from him. On Friday afternoons, when it was time for my lesson, he would suggest that we go back home and do the lesson there. But I, knowing what would inevitably happen once we arrived—the phone would ring, my mother would have to be driven somewhere, somebody would drop by—insisted on having my lesson on campus, in a real classroom, like a regular student.

He must have liked what he heard during those lessons, because one day he announced that he and I were going to play the Bach Double Violin Concerto at the college’s weekly assembly. (In those by-gone days, it was usual for the undergraduate student body to convene for cultural events.)

Both flattered and terrified, I practiced hard. He and I rehearsed together a few times, and I got some pointers on ensemble playing (don’t play loud all the time; listen to the other voice). The day came. I did my best and even enjoyed it, in a strange way. The audience clapped and clapped--the Bach Double is an easy work to like—and one former boyfriend confessed that he had wept during the slow movement. I was pleased, and yet…

I was living at home, cleaning the house, doing the ironing, babysitting my sister, and giving private language lessons. I was taking a full academic load, majoring in Biology and French. I got only one credit for my violin courses, but worked harder on that than on all the rest.

Compared to the violin, the rest of college—the life cycle of the blood fluke, the dissected dogshark, even the poetry of Mallarmé--seemed relatively straightforward. I longed to sit with my classmates drinking coffee in the snack bar in the afternoons, listening to Frank Sinatra and smoking an occasional cigarette. I longed to walk the leaf-strewn campus paths with a boy at my side, like a regular American college student. The violin had to go.

All this was half a century ago. I am now a married lady, in my own house. And on a rainy afternoon, or even a sunny one, whether I am feeling melancholy or otherwise, I open my case and take out my plastic Yamaha alto recorder. I start with some basic tonalizations, remembering to hold my instrument up and minding my breath (which is the hairless equivalent of the bow). I struggle through some challenging bits by “Unknown 18^th Century Masters” and cap things off with Georg PhilippTelemann, a composer who devoted himself to tormenting recorder players.

Before I know it, an hour has passed. I look forward to my lessons, and to playing duets and trios with friends. These days, nobody has to remind me to practice. As I swab the spit out of the instrument and put it away, I can hear faint laughter emanating from the woods behind the house, where my mother’s ashes are scattered.

Pizzicato (continued)

Slowly and solemnly, my father set the violin on my left shoulder and tucked it under my chin, then stretched out my left arm to support the neck of the instrument. It was my long-awaited first lesson--the beginning, I hoped, of long, interesting sessions in which my father would pay flattering attention to me, and from which my mother would be excluded.

“You must hold the instrument up, up! so it’s never pointed at the floor,” he said. Then he went to work on my right hand, molding my fingers one-by-one into proper position on the frog of the bow. While this was going on, my left arm had drooped until my elbow rested comfortably on my belly. “Up!” my father reminded me. Next he gently placed my bow on the A string. “Now, veeery carefully, move the bow towards the tip.” I did, and the bow skittered disgracefully across the string, making an appalling noise.

“Yes,” my father said, “it is very difficult. I will explain.” Stopping periodically to raise my drooping left arm, he explained how the hair of the bow should be turned towards my face when I was playing near the frog, then gradually turn until it was flat when I played at the tip; how I was to press lightly against the string when the bow was at the frog, and gradually increase the pressure as I moved towards the tip; how at all times the bow was supposed to stay in an ideal (but unmarked) spot between the bridge and the fingerboard; how I should never put on too much resin on the hair, or touch it with my fingers, or neglect to wipe the wood with a cloth after every practice session.

“Bowing is very difficult,” he repeated, “but it is the key to a good tone, and without good tone there is no music.” Goodness knew I wanted to have a good tone. Those first bowings across the A string had been the sound equivalent of sucking on a lemon. But I was hopeful. Surely it wasn't all about the bow, and before the lesson was over he would teach me how to play a song? But after a few more explanations and some more proppings of my feeble left arm, my father declared that he had a rehearsal, and had to leave.

“What am I supposed to practice?” I asked.

“Bowing on the A string, of course,” he said.

“But what about my fingers, the ones on my left hand. Don’t I get to use them?”

He waved his hand towards the ceiling. “That will come much later, when you have practiced lots of bowing, at least five minutes every day.”

“Five minutes just bowing on the A string?”

“Of course,” he said. “Bowing is crucial! And don’t forget to hold up your left arm.”

And I did practice bowing on the A string, although all the instructions about the angle of the bow hair, the pressure and placement of the bow on the string, and the need to hold up the violin quickly vanished from my ten-year-old mind. This was so different from the piano, when from the first day one could play five notes with just the right hand, and those five notes sounded like regular notes, not like the unearthly screeches I got out of my A string. But at least my mother was keeping out of my way.

A week later, I caught my father as he was getting up from lunch, brushing crusty breadcrumbs off his pants. “Can I have my lesson now?” I asked. “Well, o.k.,” he said, looking at his watch. “Five minutes, because I have to leave for rehearsal.”

He repeated all the instructions from the first lesson, and showed me how to bow on the E string. “Now that you’re playing on two strings, you should practice ten minutes,” he said, putting on his coat and picking up his violin case.

A few weeks later, I was allowed to place my index finger on the A string, to play a B. By now I was required to practice fifteen minutes a day. I stood in my room (”Your father is composing. He must not hear you,” my mother said, closing the door), playing my five notes over and over, not knowing what I was aiming at but feeling in my very bones that the evil wooden box under my chin and the reverse magic wand in my right hand had nothing to do with music as I understood it.

Music was what my father made, and anything less sounded to me like an abomination. If music had been presented in a less reverential, more playful way, I might have developed a friendlier feeling towards the violin, but this was long before the Suzuki Method. As it was, with every squeak, every wrong note, I felt like a clumsy altar boy who spills the communion wine at Mass.

My humiliation at the inability to sound like my father soon turned to rage. Gritting my teeth, I would crumple up a particularly difficult sheet of music, then guiltily smooth it out again. Once I whacked my bow hard against the music stand, and several long white hairs came loose. Terrified that I had done irreparable damage, I cut them off with my mother’s manicure scissors and hid them in the kitchen trash. You know that little overhang where the top surface of the violin meets the side? A close look at my first violin would reveal two shallow dents made by my front teeth....

Pizzicato

“Would you like to do a pizzicato?” my father would ask, smiling under his black and bristly mustache. I would toddle over and he, taking care that my grubby fist did not graze the body of his violin, would put my finger on the E string and I would pluck it. Then he would wrap the violin in an old brown silk scarf of my mother’s and lay it carefully in its case, as if he were putting a doll to bed.

A violin being tuned—first the E and A strings together, then A and D, and finally D and G--followed by a warm-up scale was among the first sounds to reach me inside my mother’s womb. A couple of years later, when my father was practicing the solo part of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and I was being toilet trained, my mother found me on the potty one day, humming the opening bars of the third movement.

Not long after that, I started attending concerts. My father’s orchestra performed on Sunday mornings in the Palau de la Musica. My mother would first take me to Mass, and then to the concert. Those Sunday mornings required feats of self control on my part. First there was the sitting quietly at Mass, but at least that was interrupted by periods of kneeling and standing. But the sitting at the concert was unrelieved, and it seemed to go on for days. Fortunately, the concert hall was a near-psychedelic example of Art Nouveau architecture, and I entertained myself by gazing at the sculptures of the nine muses whose gigantic torsos protruded out of the wall behind the orchestra. Still, I conceived an early hatred of the Romantic composers, whose symphonies went on and on, fooling me into thinking that they were about to end only to rebound in cruel codas. Brahms and Schumann were especially bad that way.

In that pre-Suzuki era, music instruction was a serious, solemn business. When I was eight, before I was allowed to approach an instrument I did a year of solfeggio, a method to teach pitch and sight singing, and musical dictation. Nobody expected this to be fun, and it wasn’t.

When I was finally permitted to begin the piano I took lessons from my father’s sister, Maria Dolors, a gentle, skittish person, thin and wide-eyed as a gazelle. She was so tentative in her instruction that the closest to a correction she ever got was a whispered “perhaps you could try it like this...” I felt protective of my vulnerable aunt and worried that my mistakes gave her pain.

At home, when my mother sat next to me on the piano bench, my feelings were quite different. She had had some piano instruction herself, and she thought that she would help things along by correcting my technique while I practiced. But there was nothing tentative in her manner, and I resented her intrusion in what I perceived to be Maria Dolors’s and, by extension, my father’s domain.

The entire landscape of my life was ruled by my mother. She made me put on sweaters when I wasn’t cold, eat when I wasn’t hungry, go to bed when I wasn’t sleepy, and kiss ancient, black-clad relations who smelled funny. She supervised my prayers, scrubbed my face, braided my hair, put bows on my braids, and held my hand tightly while we crossed the street. Music, I had assumed, was outside her domain, but now she was invading that as well. Despite her having been my father’s student before their marriage, she knew very little about the violin, however. It occurred to me that, if I took up the violin, I would be safe. Even better, my father would be my teacher.

At eight or nine years old, I longed for my father’s attention. He was a benevolent but remote figure: “a saint,” according to his mother and sisters; “very busy, and not to be disturbed,” according to my mother. And he was busy, rushing from rehearsal to performance with his violin and sitting down to compose at the piano when he had five minutes to spare. I don’t think he ever once scolded me, partly because I was too much in awe of him to misbehave and partly, I suspect, because he didn’t notice me. For years I had racked my infant brains for ways to get him to focus on me. Now the solution was at hand: I would take up the violin, and he would have to give me lessons.

So after a year of piano, having mastered Schumann’s The Merry Peasant, I began to clamor for a violin.  My parents acquiesced, and on February 12, the Feast of Saint Eulalia, virgin and martyr, they presented me with my very own instrument. I couldn’t wait for my first lesson—which, as it turned out, also became my first lesson in the need to choose one’s wishes carefully. (To be continued)

My Mother Says...Continued

After her story of the Spanish Civil War, my mother begins to tell how she met my father.  She might never have come across him if my grandmother had been more traditionally minded and kept her in the village, or if the war had not happened, or if my mother had not taken it into her head to learn to play the violin. 

I've known about these near-misses for years, but my cousin in Barcelona recently told me something that her mother, my mother's youngest sister, had revealed.  It seems that in the middle of the war, while my mother was falling in love with communist soldiers on their way to the front and my father was starving in Barcelona, a lieutenant colonel in Franco's army saw her and decided to marry her.  Secretly, he wrote a letter to the priest of my mother's parish asking for information about the family--their political views, religious practices, financial status, and so on.

According to my aunt, my mother was so enraged when she heard that he had written to ask about the family without first consulting her that she never spoke to him again. Whew!  If it hadn't been for my mother's sense of what was her due, I could have been the daughter of a fascist officer.

After the war, my mother says, I went to Barcelona to study Greek and Latin so I could teach high school.  I had become disillusioned with the law, which I had imagined to be about saving innocent people accused of terrible crimes, like in the movies, but which turned out to be extremely dull instead.

There was so little food in Barcelona!  Luckily my mother sent baskets of food from the farm, and Evita Peron sent ships loaded with wheat from Argentina.  (I remember as a toddler being fed pasta that had been sent by "that kind lady in Argentina."  You can read about my grandmother's food baskets here) The bread that my mother sent used to go hard and stale, and little worms would grow in it.  I was always careful to shake them out before I ate.  What? my mother says, seeing our horrified faces, it wasn't as bad as it sounds....

As a teenager, I  had bought a violin because it seemed exotic and exciting, but I had never learned to play.  The people with whom I was boarding in Barcelona recommended a music academy, and I went to meet the teacher.  I was expecting an old man, bald and bent over.  Instead I found a young man with thick black hair and a mustache.

I started taking lessons from him, but for two years we barely spoke, other than about bowing and intonation  (I wasn't a very good student).   Then one day he invited my parents to attend a concert that he was going to give near their village.  Next, his parents invited me and my sisters and brother, who were also studying in Barcelona, to have coffee at their apartment.  And then he started walking me home after the violin lessons.  I was the first woman he ever kissed.

We were married in 1943, in the village church.  His entire family came from Barcelona in a rented bus.  During the Mass, I was kneeling in front of the altar with my long veil spread out on the floor behind me when suddenly I felt a sharp pull:  the altar boy had accidentally stepped on the veil with his boot and torn a huge hole in it.  After the Mass we went back to my parents' farm, had a big meal and drank lots of champagne.

That night, we tied the mattress and the sewing machine that my parents had given us to the roof of the bus, and rode back to Barcelona with all the relatives.

Violette's Violin

In these days when violins small enough to fit into a diaper bag are thrust into the hands of toddlers, my granddaughter Violette started taking lessons at the relatively late age of eight.  She practices on a 3/4 size instrument that has tapes on the fingerboard showing her where the notes are. The kindest thing you can say about this instrument is that it is serviceable.  She treats it as casually as an old teddy bear, setting the case down on the floor, dragging the violin around the house, letting it accumulate a fine powdering of rosin.  I am both alarmed and charmed by her blithe treatment of her fiddle.  From earliest infancy I was taught to treat any string instrument with reverence and awe.

No violin got more of both than my father's violin, which he bought from a gipsy who showed up unannounced at our apartment in Barcelona.  As a toddler, I was allowed as a special treat to pluck a single string ("pizzicato" was one of my first words) while my father held the instrument securely in his hands.  On our first Atlantic crossing on the way to Ecuador, in a fat Pan Am prop plane, the violin traveled with us in the cabin, like a person.

It is a good, though not an extraordinary, violin, rather small for a full-size, and with a clear, clean sound, just right for chamber music.  It is accompanied by superb bow, made by the fabled and now defunct Hill's of London.  Eventually my father had a new violin made for him, one with the big sound required by larger spaces.  This, and his viola were sold by my mother years after he died.

But the gipsy's violin, the one with the worn varnish where for years his hand had hit the higher notes, came to live with me.  For over forty years I carted it from house to house during our many moves.  On a couple of occasions I had it repaired (violins disintegrate if they're not played regularly) and the bow re-haired, with a view to resuming my practice.  But that never happened, and the violin would go back into its case for another long sleep.

Then this Christmas, when Violette was visiting, I remembered the violin in the closet and thought, why not?   I could at least let her try it on for size.  Our family, I am happy to say, is blessed with long arms, and when Violette, who is nine now, tucked the fiddle under her chin, her hand effortlessly reached the right spot on the finger board.  I replaced a broken D string, tuned it up for her, and suggested that she play one of her pieces.

This violin, needless to say, had no tapes prompting her finger positions, and the distances on the fingerboard were proportionately larger than on her small instrument.  Yet she adjusted her fingering quickly, by ear, like a real musician.  And the whole family gathered around her sighed with pleasure at the clarity of the sound she made.

Four generations.... This violin paid for tuition at my German nuns' school, the Sunday paella, the airfare  to Ecuador and, four years later, to the U.S.  Now it's in the hands of Violette, who I hope was sufficiently impressed by my cautions to treat it with at least some reverence and awe.  My father would be pleased to hear her play.  He would, I'm certain, say she has "conditions."  And then, like he told me a million times, he would tell her to practice her bowing.

V Is For Violin, And For Violence

My first violin had tooth marks on the rim, where I had bitten it in a rage.  The bow was missing several hairs from being struck on the back of my parents' sofa, and certain pages of my method books retained the marks of crumpling no matter how carefully I later tried to smooth them out.

I was a violent violinist when I was a kid.  I hated my violin as if it were a living thing, and wanted to kill it.  I wanted to kill it so it would stop making those offending sounds that, week after week and month after month, never seemed to get any better.

Not that the violin had been forced on me.  My music career had begun with the piano.  But after a year of struggling with fingerings and trying to keep my wrists level with my hands and my fingers curled just so, I thought the violin had to be easier, more rewarding.  Besides, studying the violin meant that I would have my father for a teacher.

Why didn't my parents warn me?  Perhaps they did, and I didn't listen.  So on my tenth birthday, I got a violin, and my first lesson.  My father showed me how to tuck the violin under my chin and support its neck with my left hand so the instrument would be parallel to the ground.  Then he told me how to hold the bow, and how to draw it across the A string, halfway between bridge and fingerboard, with the hair tilted towards me at the frog and flat on the string when I got to the tip.  Less pressure at the frog and more at the tip. This I should do very carefully, over and over, fifteen minutes a day, every day, until my next lesson.

"You mean just drawing the bow across the A string?"  I asked.

"Yes.  It's very difficult to do right."   He lifted my left arm, which by then was pointing dispiritedly towards the ground, and left.

This was well before Suzuki, before the helpful fingering tapes on the fingerboard, the accompanying CDs, and the frivolous idea that playing the violin should be fun.  By the end of the second practice session, I was bored out of my mind and longing for the days of the Anna Magdalena Bach piano book, the little Minuets and Sarabandes that actually sounded like regular music. 

A year passed. My father pronounced me to have basic talent and a good ear worth cultivating, and raised my daily practice time to an hour.  Leaving my  mother to enforce the regimen, he went off to earn our keep as a musician.  This required him to work quite hard, and in retrospect I can see that expecting him to give me a weekly lesson, like his regular students got, was perhaps too much.  So I would go weeks, sometimes months, without a lesson.  Occasionally, if he happened to be home while I was practicing, my father would swoop into the room saying "Flat!  You're flat!  Here, let me show you..."  If I was lucky, sometimes these interventions would develop into lessons.

The years passed and, as I advanced, I fell deeper into musical despair.  The more I learned about the violin, the more I hated the way I sounded.  Having heard the sound of his violin from the day I was conceived, I considered my father's playing the minimum acceptable level of proficiency, so by comparison my own playing seemed beyond disgusting.  I was eighteen before I could stand to hear myself.

But by then I also realized what a jealous master the instrument was.  I was in college, majoring in Biology and French, and taking violin for one hour of credit--yet practicing for that single credit took as much time as the rest of my courses combined.  I played for another two years and then, without thinking too much about it, I put away the violin, the methods books, the music stand.  The calluses on my fingers slowly faded, and life rushed in to fill the now-vacant practice hours.  My parents had the grace not to make a fuss.

And after that, for years and years I never gave the violin another thought.

Recorder Redux

A few years ago I began to learn to play the recorder.  Then last year, bedeviled by a damaged neck, a hard-to-milk goat, and Bisou's infancy, I returned the music scores I'd borrowed from T, my recorder mentor, and put the sweet pipes away.
 
These days, however, the nights are long, the goats and the neck pain are gone, and Bisou has settled down, and I have pulled my plastic Yamaha alto recorder out of the closet.  In the evening, before dinner, I set up the stand by the wood stove, open my Sweet Pipes Recorder Book, A Method for Adults and Older Beginners, and practice.

Wolfie and Lexi keep their distance, and Bisou scuttles off to the TV room to watch the news with my spouse.  I try to remember my fingerings, try to breathe at the right places, try, above all, to keep my beginner's spit from clogging up the pipes (I'm told that this problem decreases with time).

Spit is one thing I never had to worry about during my violin-playing days.  But then, the thing I love about the recorder is how un-violin-like it is.  Compared to that sadistic four-stringed sergeant, the recorder is a kindly Montessori teacher.  It rewards your slightest attention with a reasonable sound.  After just a few hours of practice you can play little tunes.  There is no vibrato, no position changes, no bow to confound the player.

At one point during my first attempt to learn the recorder, I became frustrated with its limitations--a less-than-two-octave range, no dynamic range, no bow.  I took my father's violin to a luthier to be reconditioned, bought a couple of method books whose names I remembered from forty years ago, and started practicing
.
It was dreadful.  Not only were my tone and technique utterly gone, but holding my arms aloft was hard on my CFS-ridden body.  I was aware of so much about my playing that needed fixing right away that I would practice for ninety minutes straight--my jaws, arms and upper back rigid with anxiety--and then collapse.  After a few weeks of that I put the violin away and fled back to the recorder.

Now once again, after more than a year's hiatus, it has welcomed me back with open arms.  But perhaps what makes playing the recorder so different from playing the violin has more to do with what's going on inside my head than with the instrument itself.

To the recorder I bring what buddhists call "beginner's mind."  I am free from expectations, goals and priorities.  I barely know what to aim for in tone, and have only the sketchiest notions of breath control and hand position.  Instead, I'm simply focused on getting through the "Bransle" by Michael Praetorius as best I can.

And that's another thing I like about the recorder.  The method books are full of little gems from the (to me) musically hazy times before Bach, by composers I'd never heard of:  Tielman Susato, Claude Gervaise, even Henry VIII.  One of Henry's pieces is entitled "Alas, Madame," to which I mentally add "I'm going to cut your head off."

Right now I'm a couple of lessons into Book II of my "adults and older beginners" method.  Maybe if I practice faithfully, and get enough fingerings into my brain, and do something about all that embarrassing spit, I'll get to play duets with my mentor, T, before spring comes.

Orchestra Tales, Part The Third: The Earrings

Four years after my disgraceful but relieving exit from the Birmingham Youth Orchestra, my father continued to worry about my lack of ensemble experience.  When the woman who played in the last stand of the second violin section of the Birmingham Symphony went on maternity leave, he got me an audition with the conductor, and I was hired as a temporary replacement.

My stand partner was an elderly gentleman--he was probably in his fifties, but to my eighteen-year-old eyes he seemed decrepit--short, round, and balding.  He can't have been a very good violinist, consigned as he was at the very end of the second violin rows, right up against the percussion section, but he knew his way around an orchestra score.

I, on the other hand, did not.  It's not that I wasn't able to play the parts--they were not technically demanding--but I kept getting lost.  If I blinked and missed a single note, I could never find my place on the score again.  The entire string section would be galloping ahead and there I was, embarrassed to be seen not playing along, frantically scanning the page to find something that vaguely resembled the notes I was hearing.  Sometimes my stand partner would take his bow off the strings for a nanosecond and point to the right spot on the score, but by the time I put my bow on my strings, I'd be doubly embarrassed, and behind again.

The long rests were the worst.  In an orchestra score, there are frequently rests of forty measures or more.  One is not during those intervals supposed to take short naps or review the twelve cranial nerves for the next day's biology exam.  One is supposed to count measures:  one, two, three, four;  two, two three, four;  three, two, three, four,  all the way to measure forty-seven or whatever.  Invariably, however, by the sixth measure, I was lost--was it six, two, three, four, or seven, two three four?  My only recourse was to watch my neighbor, and start playing when he did.

But there was one situation in which he could not help me, and that was at page-turning time.  As the "inside" partner--the one playing in the seat farther from the audience--it was my job to turn pages for both of us.  This gave me a great deal of anxiety.  What if I was lost when it was time to turn the page?  What if, while holding my bow  with the last three fingers of my right hand as I grasped the corner of the page with my index and thumb, my bow or, God forbid, the entire score fell clattering to the floor?

My months with the Birmingham Symphony were punctuated with musical faux pas.  There was the time when, daydreaming during one of those long rests, I jumped a foot in the air as the percussionist clashed the cymbals right behind me...and the conductor saw me.  And once I committed that ultimate orchestral sin, the accidental solo.  Thank goodness this happened during a rehearsal early on, after which I rigorously abstained from playing either the first or the last notes of any score segment.

I was a freshman in college, majoring in Biology and French, teaching French and Spanish in the afternoons to school children, helping my mother around the house.  Spending my evenings at rehearsal and my weekends playing concerts was not my idea of fun.

During my stint at the BSO, I don't think I ever talked with anybody, least of all my aged stand partner.  I spent rehearsal breaks practicing whatever solo pieces my father had assigned me. I was tired.  I had homework.  I wanted out of there.

Mercifully, in the spring the woman I was replacing announced her plans to return to the Symphony.  I was elated--just one more concert and I would be free.  

As we were putting away our instruments after the last performance, my stand partner dug a small paper bag out of his violin case and handed it to me.  Inside were two earrings, clip-ons with yellow rhinestones arranged in the shape of a treble clef.  They were clearly second-hand, since they weren't attached to the little cardboard square that store-bought earrings come with.  They looked hopelessly middle-aged to me, and I wondered as I stared at them whether they belonged to his wife.  I remember thinking how weird it was to be given earrings by this grandfatherly person.

Fortunately, the gods who watch over teenagers and sometimes keep them from disgracing themselves inspired me to put the earrings on right there, and say a hurried thank-you.  Then I closed my violin case and walked out of the Birmingham Symphony for good.

Those earrings rattled around in my jewelry box for a while, and then I gave or threw them away.
  
But now that I myself have begun to seem elderly to all but my contemporaries, I recognize the sweetness of the impulse of that long-ago violin player to give a gift of earrings to his hopelessly young and inept temporary stand partner.

Orchestra Tales, Part The Second: Why I Hate Die Meistersinger

At the final rehearsal before one of our concerts, things were not going well.  We were playing the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger, and something we were doing was bothering the conductor.  He kept stopping and explaining--it seemed to have to do with us first violins--making us repeat, beating his baton on the lectern, and explaining some more.

Way in the back of the section, I as usual had no idea what he was saying.  I was counting the minutes until time to go home.  I wasn't even watching the concertmaster, the blue- and brown-eyed boy, very much.  "Let's try it again," said the conductor.  "And this time..." but again, I didn't understand him.

We played a few measures, the ones where the strings go up and up a series of intervals.  "Stop!" he yelled, at the top of his voice.  "You!!  Back there!"  and he jumped off the podium and walked to where I sat with my violin under my chin.  He stood over me in a fury, yelling and jabbing his finger at my music and waving his baton until his breath ran out.

If there is one thing worse than being yelled at in front of an orchestra of teenagers (and I had never been yelled at by anyone before, except my mother), it is not understanding the content of the yells, because then the tone and the body language and the grimacing face convey rage at a much scarier, primordial, animal level.

The rehearsal over, I wept in the car all the way home.  I'd had it with the Youth Orchestra.  I'd had it with sitting all week in school not understanding what anybody said;  trying to keep up and do my homework on weeknights; helping my mother with housework on Saturday; and then spending Sunday morning at Mass and the afternoon in rehearsal, being yelled at.

Miraculously, for once, my parents relented.  My father spoke to the conductor, who played violin in the Birmingham Symphony, and explained that I hadn't understood him.  He, the conductor, in turn apologized to me.  But even then I disliked people who yelled and later apologized, and didn't really forgive him.

Maybe my father got tired of driving me to and from rehearsals on Sunday afternoons.  Maybe he and my mother decided that I had enough on my plate.  In the end, I didn't have to go to rehearsals anymore.

To this day, in a persistent Pavlovian reflex, when Die Meistersinger overture comes on our local public radio station, I turn it off.  I hate the bombast of the opening measures, despise the strings' endless climbing scales.

And every time, as I switch off, I am touched that my parents gave in to me, stopped forcing me to do something I hated and was scared of--that they were soft.  They probably felt guilty at not insisting that I do what was "good for me," little knowing that, many decades later, that single instance of parental indulgence would become one of my most cherished memories.

Orchestra Tales, Part The First: Why I Hate Die Meistersinger

Shortly after we arrived in the U.S., my father, who thought I could use some ensemble-playing experience, signed me up for the Birmingham Youth Orchestra.  Every Sunday afternoon he would deposit me and my violin in a drab, fluorescent-lit rehearsal space in pre-civil-rights downtown Birmingham and come back to fetch me two hours later.

Those rehearsals were a kind of purgatory for me.  Sitting in the back of the first-violin section, I thrashed like a shipwrecked sailor in a sea of sounds and rests and strange notations.  "Watch the conductor," my father would say as he drove me.  "Always keep your eye on the conductor, or you'll get lost."  

As far as I could tell, however, the conductor--a man with thick hair, a big nose and round tortoise-shell glasses--just waved his arms in random patterns, stopping frequently to complain about our playing. Instead, I watched, as best I could, the concertmaster, a curly-haired boy who seemed impossibly mature to me--he must have been all of seventeen.  When he started to play, I started to play.  When he stopped, I tried to stop too.
  
I should note, while we're on the subject of the concertmaster, that he had one pale-blue eye and one eye as dark brown as mine.  I used to sneak looks at those eyes during breaks, which I otherwise spent pretending to clean the rosin off my bow.  I didn't talk to the other players--my English was too rudimentary to understand their chatter, let alone contribute to it.

The only positive aspect of playing in the orchestra, as far as I was concerned, was that for concerts we girls were supposed to wear black skirts, white blouses, and stockings.

Even though I was fourteen and fully equipped to play my part in perpetuating the human race, my mother kept me in short dresses that tied in a bow at the back, and short white socks.  But since the orchestra's dress code demanded it, she had to get me a pair of stockings--and a garter belt to hold them up.

I was thrilled with the stockings (this was a few years before pantyhose burst on the scene), but less so with the garter belt.  For, in order to hold up the hose, the upper rim of the garter belt had to exert pressure on the curve of the lower back, just above the hips.  This produced a peculiar agonizing ache that I recognized a decade later, when I was in labor with my first child.  (To be  continued.)

Five Memories Of My Father

1. The feel of his mustache on my neck.

2. His gray hat and his winter coat, which made his head and shoulders look gigantic.

3. Sitting on his lap and being accidentally burned by ashes from his omnipresent cigarette (he would apologize profusely).

4. In the summer, sitting on a little seat on the back of his bicycle and going for a ride on country roads.

5. Being allowed to make one pizzicato on his violin.

Happy solstice to all!

Words That Stayed With Me

I was eleven years old and about to step on the stage to play a solo violin arrangement of Schubert's Overture to Rosamunde in a recital of my father's students.

My father, who was also my teacher, tuned my strings (I was not advanced enough to do it myself). Then he handed me the violin and said, “serenity, intonation, and a beautiful sound.” And with that he sent me on stage, where I acquitted myself honorably.

Now, a lifetime later and my father long dead, I am revisiting those words, and it occurs to me that they apply to a lot more than to the performance of a student recital piece. In fact, they sound like good advice for how to live my life.

First you have to have Serenity, the clean slate without which nothing good is possible. Next comes Intonation, which means, get it right, be accurate. Then, once you've made yourself calm and gotten the basics right, you strive for A Beautiful Sound. That is the thing that cannot be taught, the mysterious gift of the Muse, made of feeling and talent and luck .

I find that I can apply my father's three precepts to everything from writing to dog training. If I intend to write something, first I have to get calm and clear my mind. (Often, attaining serenity before a writing session means taking a short nap.) As I write, I try to make sure that I get the “intonation” right—not just syntax and spelling, but logic and the flow of ideas. A false note here can cost me a reader's attention. And then comes the Beautiful Sound part--what the cellist Pau Casals used to call “putting in the rainbow”--the part that you never know about in advance, but that you hope with all your heart will somehow happen.

If I am about to train Wolfie, the first part, serenity, is really important. If I am not serene, he won't be either, and the session will be a disaster. I have trouble with serenity when I work Wolfie, because I want too much to succeed, and quickly. I have less difficulty with intonation—stuff like giving clear commands and instant praise. If I get all this right, then on a good day Wolfie and I get to the Beautiful Sound part, where he watches and attends to me and enjoys the challenges I set for him, and I watch and attend to him and manage, for a little while, to speak fluent Dog.

In retrospect, I can empathize with my father at that long-ago recital. He must have felt a measure of anxiety if not compassion on my behalf. And in that last moment before I went in front of the audience he managed to distill into those simple words all his wisdom as an artist, which was also his wisdom as a man.