We were waiting for it to begin:
His clarinet teacher is a graduate student and the recital was one of the requirements he has to fulfill in order to get his degree. The recitals are sparsely attended--we were two of perhaps twenty people in the hall that seats a hundred or more--as they tend to be.
Dave has been playing the clarinet for a couple of months now. He started taking lessons a few weeks after getting a working clarinet (an online find from shopgoodwill.com). His teacher started him on "America the Beautiful" but they have thankfully moved on. (Inspiring song if you hear it once in a blue moon. Less inspiring hearing it again and again and again and again during practice time.)
Dave picks up instruments all the time. He has a violin, a trumpet, a flute, three (!) clarinets, and a gazillion ocarinas of course. Me? I've stayed away from music, playing it anyway, since giving up the cello many years ago. Every once in a great, great while, I think about picking up an instrument--probably cello again if I am honest (nothing else has ever really called me, there is no more beautiful instrument)--but I never do.
Anyway, I don't miss the world of lessons and recitals. I never minded playing with the orchestra, but playing solo was ridiculously stressful. I never felt as though I were accomplished enough (not as though it ever inspired me to practice more) and I was already in the habit of letting every little mistake make me feel horrible. I was way too hard on myself too often.
What did I enjoy about playing? I loved the certain kind of intimacy that develops between a musician and a musical instrument, a relationship that is often only tangentially related to the music. (Maybe that's why I never really felt or was truly accomplished, because the idea of mastery over an instrument was verboten to me in that kind of relationship.) I did love certain composers, especially those who focused on the cello. I liked the calloused fingertips that came along with playing a stringed instrument. I loved translating the music on the page into music in the ether.
When I walked away from the cello, I did it as I walk away from anything: Completely and unforgivingly. I almost never look back at all, and I never look back with regret. It was years--years and years--before I even listened to cello music again. I was brought back into the fold when Mstislav Rostropovich died and I suddenly wanted to listen again to the Dvořák piece Rostropovich made famous--but only that piece. Sometime later, I was driving around one day and I heard a slip of Vivaldi's concertos for cello and orchestra on the radio, a piece I had never heard before, and suddenly I wanted to listen to cello music again. One of my favorite new (to me) pieces came from Chopin. Chopin never interested me as a teenaged cellist--too slow, too measured, not enough of the clumsy, fiery desire that defines adolescence--but a quarter century on, I am able to listen and appreciate it.
Maybe in another decade or so, I'll be ready to take up the cello again.
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