The air conditioning hums in B flat

Writing and music

When I opened my cello case for the first time in sixteen years, I worried the cello would be cracked, broken. I don’t know exactly where this fear came from, but when you grow up playing in orchestras, everyone talks about the importance of humidifiers for your instrument case, warning that if the temperature or humidity are not quite right your instrument will come unglued or crack at the hilt. But I can’t remember where I first heard this. Maybe it’s the same people who tell the story about the girl whose head is sewn to her neck with a ribbon or how Marilyn Manson removed two ribs so he could perform self-fellatio. 

At any rate, the cello was not unglued or undone and there were no fissures in the wood. Not only that, the strings were mostly in tune. After sixteen years! 

The bigger question was, in that time, am I the one who’s come undone? Have my memories of playing cello unglued themselves from my fingers? The answer is no. And yes. I knew how to hold a bow and maintain a consistent vibrato. When I played slowly and carefully in first position, high up on the neck, I sounded kind of… good. 

That’s the thing about cello, why I love it more than any instrument. You don’t have to be a genius to make a cello sound beautiful. It simply is. Play an open string and you’re there. 

Feeling confident, I signed up to audition for the local community orchestra. In fact, I remembered, I used to be not only good, I was almost great. At my peak, I was second cello in the state youth orchestra. I performed in a quartet that made a little bit of cash at weddings and holiday parties. I bragged about all this in my note to the people running the audition. 

Then I received the audition pieces. 

And panicked. 

The excerpts they provided were impossible. One piece was in tenor clef, which felt like reading in a foreign language, and even after I jogged my memory, the notes were far too high. The other had simple notes but the tempo was so fast I thought my fingers would fall off. 

This also happened to be a period where my writing was adrift. I’d turned in the rewrite of my forthcoming novel, which had taken absolutely everything I had to get it done in six weeks. Then I had a month before getting the revision letter from my developmental editor. During this time I tried to work on a different project but sputtered out. I tried to work on other things, but I can’t remember what—poems? social media posts? more personal essays?—because they all failed. My brain was exhausted from the marathon of rewriting and also resting in preparation for the forthcoming edits. So I decided to give up on writing and play cello instead. 

I bought a scale book. I remembered how to arpeggio. 

Also tennis. 

While I was once good at cello, I was never good at tennis. But that’s okay. Neither is Seth; we’re perfectly matched in our terribleness. We’ve been playing about every other day, feeling ourselves get slowly better. And yet. On a night in which we were feeling particularly good about our skills, successfully hitting the ball back and forth, a Slavic man in a bucket hat playing in the next court came up to us and said, “You’re beginners, right? Good for you! Might I suggest getting lessons so you don’t learn bad form?” 

These two things happened simultaneously: cello and tennis. I’d play scales and arpeggios, slowly and scratchily, then go to the tennis court to wrestle with a ball. The fact that I was bad at both cello and tennis didn’t bother me in the slightest. This was a period of beginning. Basics. Where to put my fingers. How to hit a ball. 

Seth and I once argued over what is the better sport, basketball or tennis. I said basketball because I like putting the ball in the hoop. The satisfaction is simple and the points are frequent. I said tennis is bad because you only get a point when the other person misses. It’s a negative success, contingent on the opponent’s failure. 

But I’ve come around. Because tennis is not about getting the points, not really. Every time you hit the ball is a success. A good hit? A strong hit? Pure victory. And it happens again and again. When we play, we never keep track of our points. We don’t keep track of anything at all, other than the current moment when the ball is in the air and anything could happen. 

I half-wonder if all this has to do with my having moved back to my hometown. The combination of nostalgia and openness—nostalgia for things I thought I knew, openness to re-learn as if I know nothing. Every time I pass the old WYSO building downtown, I think of the many Saturday mornings I got dropped off with my cello for rehearsals. I remember the way we crowded around the vending machines during break and shared our Cheetos. I remember running through the hallways and sneaking onto the roof. I also remember the moments of transcendence during orchestra concerts, when the music would make my scalp tingle. I loved it so much I thought I’d study it in college. Long before I started writing fiction, I was curious about the stories music can tell. When I played a song that felt sad, I wanted to know what the composer thought: was this a lament for a lost love? Or grief for a future that can never be? I wondered if the chords or intervals between notes meant something permanent. If a minor sixth chord means the same thing in Beethoven as it does in Taylor Swift. I wanted to combine it with my love of math and discover how numbers—because music is made up of counts and pitches, all of which could be quantified—could create meaning. I thought I would study sheet music and uncover secret stories. Mostly I wanted to understand why I felt the way I did when I heard something beautiful. 

So the basics. I’ve been getting back to basics with the scales, arpeggios, and bowing exercises. Hitting the tennis ball over and over. I’ve also been thinking about how to get back to basics with my writing. As I mentioned, I was completely unable to write for weeks, which is a state of being that makes me very uncomfortable. But getting back to basics in writing was not so simple. I tried finding simple writing exercises but they all fell flat. None of it interested me. My head didn’t want to think about what word to put next. 

But I did read a lot. A LOT. Which I suppose is the very beginning of all writing. And I spoke with Seth about my writing. Like, what am I really trying to do? How do I see my writing fitting in with the state of the world? Thinking of my writing as having ‘a place in literature’ is definitely putting the cart before the horse, but it’s still worth thinking about. I want to make sure I know what I’m doing and why it’s worth it; why I’ve repositioned so much of my life around writing. 

But I felt, again, adrift—there’s so much I don’t know about movements of literature. I studied math in college and got no MFA. What does postmodernism actually mean? Does post-postmodernism exist? What about post-post-post... Seth, on the other hand, is not only the smartest person I know, he was an English major. So with him I ‘studied’ literary theory in the most general terms, in gentle conversations as we rode our bikes downtown, pausing mid-sentence to watch a family of baby turkeys cross the path. Eventually I decided that my writing is Romantic. Like, 1800s Frankenstein Romanticism. Maybe that’s obvious to you. The focus on nostalgia, selfhood, nature, sublime, science as wonder, the small things that mean everything. I have more thoughts on how my version of Romanticism is not simply retreading old ground but rather fits as a response to the current zeitgeist, but I’ll spare you—this is already getting too long. One thing I will say is that, funnily enough, the sole writing class I took in college was on Romanticism. 

I wrote that I was nearly great as a cellist in high school. Nearly. Not quite there. I had a certain lack of discipline that was easily overlooked when I could blend in with a quartet or orchestra but revealed itself when I performed solo. I ended up dropping out of my senior recital—a great disappointment to my cello teacher—because I was so frustrated that my solo piece refused to coalesce. I’ve been thinking about that a lot as I get back into practicing. I’m trying to be patient with the scales and arpeggios. It’s tempting to jump ahead because my body remembers how to play with emotion. I could skip all the boring parts and play loud and soulful. I could overlook the fact that one note is slightly out of tune because the next one is perfect. I tell myself, music isn’t meant to be perfect. That’s why autotune sounds so lifeless. Real music is made of imperfections. Music, after all, is just a vibration. The tuning app on my phone is highly sensitive; I can be completely silent and it picks up the note of the ambient air. My air conditioning hums in B-flat. My fingers snap somewhere between F and G. But when I play an open string on my cello, a single note, the tuner shows how it varies up and down. The reason we play vibrato is not to avoid the note, but to be truer to it. The tone swirls up and down around the note because everything is already always vibrating. So—there was a part of me that didn’t really want to become disciplined. Because isn’t that what music is? A letting loose? An explosion of the mind? 

Yet there is a difference between being imperfect and being out of control. 

Music and writing feel connected in ways I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t start playing cello again as a way to learn more about writing. I played to get away from writing. But did you catch what I said earlier about playing orchestra in high school? Transcendence. In music, I sought transcendence. It just so happens Transcendentalist writing is a subset of Romanticism, and that’s where I find myself most at home. 

All I want is to find the sublime. To find connections between this life and eternity. I can find it in Barber’s Adagio For Strings, both in the silence between notes and in the climax of noise. I can find it in the finale of Dvorak’s cello concerto, where emotion overwhelms. I want to feel every instrument vibrate with every aspect of the human experience. I want the same in writing and language. I don’t care about words so much as I care about the vibration of emotion that can thrum through a story. I feel this as a limitation of writing that I yearn to overcome; yet this very yearning is a feature, not a bug. Is it too much to ask for a piece of writing to make you feel everything and nothing and the past and the future and the now, now, now? Yes? No? Can I make you cry or make you laugh? Can I scare you, anger you, make you drift away? Can you see yourself from above yourself, or from deep, deep within? Do you feel life as a picture frame through which your soul peeks, from which it tries desperately to escape? 

Maybe not today. 

In the meantime, turn on the air conditioning. 

-Denise

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Recommendations

Thank you for making it through this long one! I thought I’d start sharing a few recommendations, like links and books and things at the bottom of these newsletters. 

• The bit about turkeys crossing the path reminded me of the essay “Road Ecology” by Jason Anthony that I found very affecting and also inspiring 

• I recently read a series of article by Sam Matey of the Weekly Anthropocene—a great source of info on climate change—as he traveled through India to study their animal wildlife conservation programs, massive solar fields, and more: Investigating India 2024: Collected Articles

• I’m currently reading Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard and enjoying it, though it’s a slow burn—the kind of writing I’m happy to move slowly through as I just enjoy his style and view of the world

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Cats

These days, the cats support my cello playing

while kindly telling me to stop writing