Driving the last mile or so through a part of town I never visited before starting my lessons, where I still have to keep an eye out for the Walgreens at the light where I need to turn, I wondered: Am I doing this just so I can say I’m doing it? Is this about my self-image, about wanting to seem cool in some way, the SO-not-a-musician who plays the violin on the side? Is this about wanting to feel like I still belong in my circle of old friends who were (and in some cases still are) deeply involved with music? Is it about feeling like an insider when I go to a classical music concert or just read a blog about classical music? Is any of this actually about getting down to the business of lessons and practicing? Isn’t there something wrong if lessons and practicing aren’t motivating and rewarding enough in and of themselves?
(That lesson actually went well. I think I just needed some
encouragement, which Ms. L. provided, whether she knew I needed it or not.)
Today, my attitude going into the lesson felt totally different. Leaving work, I fired up my MP3 player in the car, in random mode. What came on first? The first movement of Bach’s A minor violin concerto—currently my main squeeze, repertoire-wise. What are the odds?
I am a total sucker for these sorts of
coincidences, so I chose to interpret it as an affirmation. Should I be doing
this violin thing? Yes. The gods of MP3 randomness say so. As a grown woman of
a certain age with a fairly respectable set of accomplishments in life, I find it a
tad disconcerting to need this sort of affirmation,
but I’ll take it.
The affirmation strengthened as I arrived at the music school. As
I pulled into the parking lot, the song playing was the Rolling Stones’ “Start
Me Up.” The significance? One thing that pushed me to return to the violin this
fall was reading Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life. I hung on the passages where Richards described what playing
with the Rolling Stones feels like. In one such passage, he said:
“I can hear the whole band take off behind me every time I play ‘Flash’—there’s this extra sort of turbo overdrive. You jump on the riff and it plays you. We have ignition? OK, let’s go [….] Levitation is probably the closest analogy to what I feel—whether it’s ‘Jumpin’ Jack’ or ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘All Down the Line’—when I realize I’ve hit the right tempo and the band’s behind me. It’s like taking off in a Learjet. I have no sense that my feet are touching the ground. I’m elevated to this other space.”
Odd as it may sound, I identified with that. Yeah, that’s pretty
much how I felt playing the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah back in the day with my college
orchestra. We’d move from the incisive, fast-paced, grimly Old Testament, minor
key tenor air “Thou Shalt Break Them” straight into the bright, major key “Hallelujah.”
Winter clothes rustled and auditorium seats flipped softly upward as the
audience stood. They were still awake, after all! Maybe the sudden reminder of
their attention pushed us into another gear. In the best performances, the piece built, layer by layer, until
each stroke of my bow matched a syllable sung by the choir, a tone sounded by
the trumpet, a blow booming from the timpani. It was as though each up and down
motion of my arm, in synch with my violinist friends around me, generated the
exploding, pressing, pulsing, surrounding sound of the 40-some instruments and
a couple of hundred voices. The stage vibrated through my shoes and chair. It
was powerful stuff.
Richards’s book reminded me of that feeling. So that’s why I’m
doing this violin thing. I need to get back in shape, get with a community
orchestra of some type, and aim for that feeling again. The practicing and
lessons produce some rewarding moments, but there’s potentially another thing
out there to aim for.
No comments:
Post a Comment