Was at an orchestra concert the other day watching my favorite cellist and noticed that her cello does not have any frets. Huh, really, no frets. No tactile points of reference to rely on. No guidelines. No visual place to shoot for to hit a high C. There’s none of that, you have to know the way, and octave up and down on your own…
There’s a lesson in there somewhere. You have to play with others in your section, and then in turn your section plays with all of the other sections, reading a piece of music (meaning a bunch of dots on paper) that you must create to actually hear, all guided by someone waving a wand somehow keeping time. It’s completely insane when you think about it. All of it, every bit of the experience, is open for interpretation: each note, played by a person’s hand gliding across strings on an instrument, each one unique, tuned by different ears, to a rhythm set by one person and followed in unison by all. Seriously…
And how does that end up moving me to tears? Or to laughter? And why does it so? How can it come from a thought to sound to an experience so far beyond words? And then why does it disappear? It’s just gone! Not there anymore. It comes from nowhere, flies in from out of the blue, stays for a bit and then goes away again…
My cellist is brilliant. She understands. She knows. She connects the dots, on multiple dimensions, all at once. I don’t have to worry. Fret not…
Onward->
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