There was no performance this spring. There will not be a performance this summer. We’ve had no rehearsals since early March. I’ve had no company since March 10th. My son is particularly vulnerable, so I don’t grocery shop. We order food and bar soap and my mom leaves things on our front porch. What do I do with these days, spilling out of time in dish-washing and cleaning behind the stove and deleting “rehearsal” from my calendar? It looks like musicians will be the last service back in the public sphere. What are we to do? It’s a risk to have an audience. The simple intimacy of being together in my living room is a danger.
And what is making music but being close together, one moment to the next through that Schumann quintet, one held silence between movements of the Telemann? When we play together, I listen for Joel. He cues me silently, with an inhale or even leaning in his chair. I don’t know if it’s on purpose. Sometimes it certainly is. Sometimes, though, it’s just the presence of himself: the steady, stolid presence of a cello and Joel there…a beating heart for us. At my house, I usually can’t see him. He sits behind me. But I listen for a gesture and I can be right, exactly next to him.
How strange not to have them here on Tuesdays. Having beers over Zoom instead. What can we talk about, really? We talk about face masks. And software for recordings. And we all skirt around this sore place of not being able to communicate in the ways we know best, in the ways that count on chemistry and the woodsy smell of a room and the pop of a perking coffee machine.
At rehearsals, the dialogue of the string players is usually beyond me. After all these years playing together, I still feel that new-kid urgency: please let me stay near you. It’s a kind of perpetually unfolding miracle of my life that I’ve been so near music. My daughter mixed up “musicians” and “magicians” for most of her third year. The magicians were here so frequently. Magicians. It still kindles my heart, even though she says “musicians” reliably well now. I once mopped my sun room while they rehearsed a quartet in my living room, and I cried and scrubbed my floor because life was so big and so drab, tedium and repetition and also absolute gladness.
That is what practicing is for me. Tedium, yes. Repetition, yes. And then somehow the fusty scales and the never-really-perfected fugues give way to contentment. There is great gladness in the fiftieth take, the metronome finally silent because something that had to be counted—scrubbed down, washed, and rung out and patiently reckoned against notation—is finally, finally, internal. Oddly, when it is finally part of you, you get to fade into it and your blundering life is submerged into an absolute belonging. You are so near to something else, closer than anything else could make you.
How I’ve longed for that easy contentment in this lonely time.
So I keep practicing. And here’s the thing I discovered: playing for no one is where most of playing happens. Music is only kind of for being heard. There’s of course something beautiful about being moved with a group, being in an audience, being before an audience, but the music doesn’t need it. Bach is still his inutterably beautiful self in solitude. He’s even more him at times. He wrote “to the glory of God” on every scrap of music he scribbled (except the Brandenburg concertos, which he wrote for Brandenburg). This is not here for you, he could have added.
Reams and reams of music have been written for no concert hall, for no “chamber.” It was written for the instrument, for the clangy, temperamental pianos crammed into practice pods at music camps and college campuses. For the narrow dining room in a colonial bungalow. For the console instrument tucked away in a back bedroom, or the failing upright lodged between bookcases in a rowdy living room. It’s not for Steinway or Bosendorfer; it’s for the moment of solitude and concentration when you can perfect triplet passages or disentangle broken octaves across registers.
We’re social creatures, yes? But sociability is a funny thing: maybe it is fundamentally performative. Trying to be funny, having a battery of opinions about new records or new movies, knowing just what to say about them Yankees. In the quiet, in the stillness, that is where music exists, like some bizarre creature of the abyss we sometimes glimpse in the lamplight of Cousteau.
So I’ve been suiting up and diving in on music not meant to be heard. Exercises, etudes. It is entirely mine, my discovery of some flitting bioluminescent thing flickering in the dark. I cast my small part of the spell. I play alone. But I’m not lonely.
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