Lost

I rented a cello the fall of my sophomore year. Took an Uber to the shop fifteen minutes away, picked it up, Ubered back, placed it down in the center of my spacious Minden double where it sat untouched for the rest of the semester. Didn’t even open the case.

Avoidance is a cruel offense to inflict upon an instrument. Guilt gnawed dully as the cello slowly became another piece of decor, akin to the rug I’d bought at HomeGoods, or the poster of Van Gogh watching from the wall. Instruments aren’t meant to sit unused. They fall into disrepair. The wood expands and contracts with the changing humidity, in turn altering the tension of the strings. Slack strings can translate to a whole host of other issues. A certain tautness is necessary to keep the bridge in the right place, to keep the sound post in the instrument’s hollow center from collapsing. 

The bow yearns to move, even if in the wrong direction, poking stand partners, to fake difficult passages, to be the lone voice coming in during a rest, to lay with the tip in the air and the screw on my knee, and, very occasionally, to play the right things. Very occasionally to create vibrations that dissolve into the triplets of the rest of the section, the section itself in harmonic vibration with the rest of the orchestra, to become Les preludes, or the second movement of Beethoven’s fifth, or New World Symphony. Or even to contemplate in the solitude of my room the haughty chord progression in Saint Saens’ cello concerto in A minor. But the only sounds that would reach the bow for months were muffled and unmusical. 

I began playing cello when I was ten or eleven years old, so bad at the piano that my teacher had gently suggested I might try something else. One lesson, instead of reiterating the same old motions of clumsy fingers on keys, I borrowed one of her cellos, just to see how it felt. Before I had so much as memorized the names of the four strings, let alone fingerings, thumb position, tenor clef—before the cello was even properly in tune—I sat there with its wooden body lying against my chest and knew it was something different. The tense metal strings dug into my fingertips as I pressed them onto the fingerboard, my left hand slow and graceless as it slid up and down, learning the first few notes in a D major scale. But the cello sang like a human—smooth, deep, melodic in an almost narrative way. Or like something above human-ness, a voice that squeaked and moaned for my first few weeks, but held the promise of an elevated ballad.

Cellos, however, are difficult to transport. I didn’t touch the instrument once throughout my gap year—a matter of practicality, given my travels and the constrictive size of the instrument. In most cases, you have to buy a plane ticket to take your cello with you, and they don’t exactly fit in your average hostel locker.

But then I came back home, cello waiting patiently for me in my childhood bedroom, and didn’t pick it up there, either. The time between us stretched larger than any physical distance ever had. As it turns out, Sevilla to San Francisco is less than August to April. 

When I did finally open the case up in the spring of my sophomore year, I was confronted with my carelessness. The cello was so out of tune that the strings were nearly slack, the tuning pegs unwilling to wind them back into place, coming unstuck every time I tried to fix the flats. I snapped an A string trying to get the right pitch to stay. 

The bow, at least, showed no obvious signs of neglect. It was, however, thinner, longer, ill-suited to the thick cello strings—a bow meant for violins. Dennis, my cello dealer, had mistakenly given me the wrong kind. It seemed far too late to call and tell him this now. 

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There are a few things you can do to try to recover when you are lost. 

You can pray that the conductor will give you a cue—a nod, a slight flick of the baton in your section’s direction—to let you know it’s time to transition to what comes next. But cues are more often given following long periods of rest rather than a series of whole notes tied together. In any case, we won’t get one today.

You can try to play more quietly while you gauge the position of your fellow cellists to pick up wherever they come in—assuming they aren’t just as lost as you are. 

My stand partner flips the page. More whole notes. Should I be right at the top, or did she turn a few bars in advance?

I have no idea. Still lost. 

The last thing you can do is resign yourself, accept the inevitability of playing the wrong things, disrupting the collaborative magic that is the chamber orchestra. But this perhaps also means accepting a broader incompetency, maybe one fueled by a long period of absence. Or accepting an even more terrifying character flaw. 

Is it a question of figuring out where to pick up where you left off in the music, or a question of how to pick up the cello again at all? Is it a question of how to get back on track with the right quarter notes, or how to get back on track to avoid a full-blown quarter-life crisis?

What to do when you are lost in music, what to do when you are directionless in life?

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The music camp I attended the summer between ninth and tenth grade was large enough to get lost in the first couple of times you walked through it. This was something of a marvel to me at the time, an entire 1,200 acre campus dedicated to the arts. Nestled in the woods by a lake in Michigan, we were frequently told to let our surroundings inspire whatever it was our classes instructed us to create. The ballet studio overlooked the water; the visual arts building sat across from the picturesque woodsy Writer’s House; the acoustics at the camp’s three indoor and outdoor theaters nearly acted as instruments themselves, the finishing auditory touch tying symphonies together. 

Lost on the walk to class, we could hear everyone practicing scales, excerpts, arpeggios in their outdoor practice huts. Past the art building and the artists, the writing building and the writers, the various indoor and outdoor theatres, the cabins where we slept in bunk beds, twelve to a room. The crunch of twigs beneath our feet and the chatter of excited students and the flute drifting through the trees. 

I was one of the weakest cellists there. My first three weeks that summer, I was seated second to last. I got the sense that I’d barely gotten into the program at all. I found my ego crushed by how difficult I found the music, how short the distance between first rehearsals and performances felt, my moments of bad intonation, my poor understanding of theory, my disharmonizing, my inability to conquer the measures the way my peers could—triumphantly, like the final chord progression of confident horns at the end of a 16-minute symphonic poem about life itself. 

About three or so weeks into the program, the director handed out parts for Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka. I had long adored Stravinsky’s ballets for how cleverly dramatic they were and yet—the second I stared at the pages I would have to perform in one week, the black notes seemed to blur before my eyes, an overwhelming onslaught of rapid time signature changes, accidentals, technical chord progressions. Impossible for me to master before the concert. Just looking at it, I knew—I don’t belong here.

Still, collaboration was encouraged—at the end of the summer, all of the music students would come together in a combined orchestra to perform Franz Liszt’s symphonic poem Les preludes at the Interlochen Bowl, one of the camp’s large outdoor amphitheaters. The musicians would play beneath the open gable ceiling facing the audience while all the dancers leaped and twirled with ribbons on the roof of the auditorium. To this day, it is my favorite piece of classical music. It starts out soft, quiet, almost tentative. Unified pizzicato in the strings—we rehearsed the opening countless times to get us all together, making sure dozens of us plucked at the exact same moment. And then, the introduction of the first theme, slow slurred arpeggios, rising and falling like a question. More pizzicato. Transitions into a sentimental longing section Liszt composed to embody love, and then faster, frantically, allegro tempestoso—storm. Chromatic triplets on repeat, such a strong evocation of desperation that when the brass section finally declares the triumphant finale, we feel as though we’ve battled something and won. 

I didn’t play it perfectly, but it enveloped me just the same. When we hit the right notes on the chromatic triplets we’d spent hours practicing, it wasn’t just the music ascending. We climbed with it. When us cellos got the romantic legato melody of the “Love” section, we dissolved into it with each long bow movement; the resonance felt like being in love. More than that, the skill and expertise with which the notes around me were played reminded me that the girl sitting four chairs up from me was determined to study music, and the boy a chair or two up from her would go on to play professionally, and the principal—well, he was just brilliant. My friends are prodigies—how cool is that? Weak link or not, I was right there with them, buried in Les preludes, breathing it. I was playing in their midst.

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The conductor—a student himself—taps his baton against the stand carrying the score and we stop playing. 

The inevitable has happened—we’ve come apart. Not just me mistepping through the measures; confusion has spread through the entire section. None of us are in the same place. I’ve moved on from the whole notes to the eighths, unsure of whether or not I did so too early or too late. 

In a concert, this would be a disaster. But today is only a rehearsal. 

It’s only a Sunday afternoon in the Lindeman. It’s a casual group, so I am surrounded by musicians of varying levels of experience. Some music concentrators. Some relative beginners. We are united for this hour in Riley Hall by only our love of music and dissolution: we are not a group of cellists, but a cello section. Not a cello section, but a chamber orchestra. 

Several weeks earlier, I bought peg drops to help the tuning pegs stay in place. I had my bridge adjusted, got a cheap new A string and twisted it gently into place, put rosin on my bow, tuned. I play imperfectly, but then, perfection is not why anyone in the orchestra plays. 

“I think we got a little lost there,” the conductor says. “Let’s try it again from measure 180.”

He picks up his baton and we pick up our bows, and after two measures of preparation, we count more carefully and play again.

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