(Cello)
Passion and music have been deeply interwoven since a bird first sang to attract its mate, if not before. Shakespeare's remark about music being the food of love captures the idea nicely, and my own experience at Jewish summer camp when I was still in junior high brought the point home to me: I played my accordion during meals and prayers and at services, and Julie noticed.
Julie thought I was cute, Julie thought I was especially cute when I played the accordion, and I couldn't get Julie out of my mind. Even then, at the passionately romantic and hormonal age of thirteen, I took time to note to myself that music can be a very seductive activity.
I should add that the accordion is not the instrument I associate most strongly with passion, nor is it my own beloved double bass.
I have always envied cellists, not only for their musicianship and the wondrously soulful sound of their instrument, but for the beautiful music that the great composers have created for them. Brahms and Shostakovich consistently exploited the passionate quality of the cello, and Bach's celebrated suites for unaccompanied cello are extraordinary masterworks of passion and beauty.
In writing this chapter about musical passion, I could no doubt have drawn my anecdotes from any instrument or part of the orchestra. I feel, though, that the cello is the most passionate of instruments and the cello repertoire the most passionate of instrumental repertoires—and it is to the cello and to my cellist friends and colleagues that I turn to explore the topic of passion in music.
I would like to talk about three kinds of passion (apart from the kind I felt for Julie) which can touch the lives of those of us who make music: the passion for life, the passion for music, and the passion which music expresses.
The passion for life is the hardest of the three to talk about, and it's also the most inclusive and least directly focused on music making of the three. But I have put it at the top of my list, and although I shall only touch on it briefly I would like to signal its importance by quoting the legendary cellist, conductor, and self-exiled Catalonian icon of culture and humanity Pablo Casals, who once said:
Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love—love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.
Life itself can be a passion. I cannot improve on those words from the great Maestro Casals, and I shall not attempt to, but I would like to tell you one story about a cellist who brought his passion for life quite uniquely into his playing. It was during the early 1990s while the city of Sarajevo was torn by war that for twenty-two days in a row, Vedran Smailovic dressed for a solo concert in full formal evening attire and walked out into the middle of a street with his cello to sit down and play Albinoni's lyrical Adagio. Smailovic played the Adagio in front of the same bakery each day, played it against a background of sniper and artillery fire and in the lulls which pass for silence between lethal exchanges. He played it each day for twenty-two days straight, because twenty-two human beings, Sarajevans like himself, had been killed when mortar fire hit a bread line outside that bakery, in that Balkan city already worn down by centuries of war.
When a CNN reporter asked him if it was not crazy of him to play his cello in the street while Sarajevo was being shelled, Smailovic replied: “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello; why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?”
This cellist is just an ordinary person, but his passion lingers; his courage, his defiance, his imagination, his playfulness, his art, his intention, all of these live on.
Smailovic's story exhibits his passion for life, and the way in which he translated it into the voice of his instrument.
This leaves two forms of passion for us to discuss: we can have a passion for music and music making, and we can play music with passion. Music can stir passions in others, I believe, because music can be an expression of our own souls. And I don't mean those words lightly.
A few years after that summer in camp with Julie, I began my own love affair with music. I was playing bass by then, and it lured and seduced me all the way through our fine high school orchestra, the all-state orchestra, and the school jazz ensemble to the All-Southern California Hollywood Bowl Jazz Ensemble! All of a sudden I felt something special in music that kept me going back for more and more. I had to be there. I was in love, and this was a love to last a lifetime.
The love affair can be total. Janet Suzman once wrote of the brilliant cellist Jacqueline du Pré, “Music is life, breath, food and inspiration to her, the element she swims in like a lovely trout.” Du Pré debuted at the age of sixteen and was an international star by her early twenties—before multiple sclerosis cut short her career as one of the great musicians of our times.
I have spoken with many cellists about falling in love with music, and each of them spoke of some special memory he or she had of being drawn to music or the voice of the cello. Perhaps their stories will remind you of your own experience when you first felt the seductive power of music in your life.
Joan Jeanrenaud, the cello soloist who recently retired from a twenty-year chamber career with the world-famous Kronos String Quartet, is experiencing a new phase in her love for the cello and music, but when I asked her about the first time she experienced the love for music, she recalled a time when she was studying cello with Fritz Magg at Indiana University:
I came right out of a cello class where I hadn't played well at all, into a rehearsal conducted by Fiora Contino. We were rehearsing a baroque cantata, and I was playing the continuo cello part. All of a sudden I found myself playing with great emotion, freedom, and passion. I was not thinking about what I was doing, I somehow transcended my personal situation and felt I was caught up in the entire ensemble experience—and I was taken to a higher place with the music. I loved being part of the group, and losing myself in that larger musical whole.
Bonnie Hampton is a distinguished soloist and chamber music performer, and professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Her story credits her own teacher, Margaret Rowell, as her inspiration. Bonnie remembers herself as a somewhat rebellious teenager, struggling both with herself and with her instrument. She recalls both her mother and her wonderful teacher pressuring her to be a cellist, but it was when she “caught the bug” around the age of fifteen that she first really determined to be a cellist herself.
Bonnie told me that playing the cello helped her understand and communicate with others:
I was shy and not very verbal, and there was never any question that my best mode of expression and communication was through the music. I found that when you talk with someone, you don't really have to know them, but when you play music with them, you do—so music is a kind of expression that demands honesty. We all tend to wear masks of one kind or another in social situations—but when we play music, we have to make ourselves more vulnerable, more open to each other as well as to the music.
I consider myself very lucky to have had the cello as my “voice.” The instrument's vocal color and expression was always the big draw for me, and it is still what means the most to me.
The wonderfully creative cello soloist David Darling is an ECM recording artist and director of Music for People who began his career with the Paul Winter Ensemble. David and I were classmates at Indiana University, and he has been a passionate musician for as long as I've known him. Dave's original compositions and his playing are reflections of what he sees in the world and how it affects him. I asked him about the cello's natural capacity to express pathos, and he told me:
I'm always on the edge of my emotions. When I visit large cities, I see people all around me in desperate need of help. I do not and cannot understand hunger, and poverty, and crime, let alone crimes against humanity and war—but I can feel them. And the pathos that comes out of the cello is so expressive. It allows me to express my feelings and my attitude to life.
The cello immediately puts one in a place of pathos. And it's not just the instrument, but also the person who plays it. How can we play a sound that makes an audience weep? When we play the opening of Bloch's Schelomo or the second movement of the Shostakovich cello concerto, it can be so astonishingly evocative….
Carter Brey, distinguished principal cellist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, believes that music offers a more direct language for the emotions than any other art. He recalls first feeling a passion for music at age fifteen, when he first played the Schubert C Major Quintet. He told me:
It hit a button in me—but that barely expresses the strength of what I felt. I needed to dedicate my life to playing this kind of music.
When you are an adolescent, you are able to experience erotic love for the first time, and that is a spiritual and emotional opening which goes in tandem with becoming physically mature. That certainly helped me understand the greatness in this music.
Carter experiences a similar excitement whether he's listening to Schubert's C Major Symphony or the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Music gives him both euphoria and intellectual engagement.
Euphoria and intellectual engagement, the plight of humanity, pathos, honesty, transcending oneself as part of a larger musical whole—these are not small matters. Once the musical bug bites you, you have experienced something in music that is not as readily available on evening soap operas, in automobile maintenance classes or sales meetings, or at the checkout counter of Macy's department store.
Passion isn't just something we do with feeling or emotion, it is something that compels or defines the artist. At the highest level of artistry, when we experience this passion in our music, our lives too are touched by the love that Casals describes.
This brings us to the passion within the music, the composer's passion which music alone seems able to express, and the player's passion which expresses that passion.
Music touches feelings that words cannot. Music has the power to reach directly into the soul of everyone who participates in this experience. It is inspired by feelings and has the power to communicate the emotions better, perhaps, than any other form of communication. It is truly the international language that needs no translation. Most musical masterworks are inspired by the human condition as it is impacted by the beauties of nature, love, birth and death, and historical occasions.
When Bach wrote the sarabande of the Second Cello Suite, when Brahms wrote the opening cello solo in his Piano Concerto, when Copland penned the beginning of Appalachian Spring, and when Rodgers and Hart conceived “My Funny Valentine,” each one was in touch with something immaculate, something perfect. As musicians, we get to put our daily lives down, set our personalities aside, and jump into the middle of that perfection, to join with others in re-creating these great moments in musical history. This is way beyond fun. At its best, it is a spiritual experience, an act of human passion and skill that can be as beautiful as a crystal, a rainbow, or a brilliant sunset.
One way to bring more passion to your music making is to ask yourself the question “What's the most passionate and memorable musical experience I've ever had?” Once you've figured that out, you'll probably recognize there was a specific trigger or triggers which gave that time its emotional intensity and passion.
I know that my own most memorable breakthrough occurred at a time when several important influences came together—my practicing, my teacher, and a very special place. If I was forced to say which was the most important influence of all, I'd probably say it was that special, sacred space. It all started for me in 1988, at a concert given by my teacher at the time, the world-renowned bass virtuoso François Rabbath.
During a historic concert he gave at the International Society of Bassists Convention in Los Angeles, my hometown, Rabbath premiered an original composition of his own called Reitba. In words almost as inspiring as the music itself, he told us how he had been traveling in the African desert and seen heat waves pulsating above the white desert sand: in the distance, he could make out what appeared to be a rose-colored lake surrounded by snow crystals (he later found out the sparkling ice crystals were in fact the lake's salt banks). This unique image, in which a cool jewel of rose-colored water and snow seemed to beckon across an arid expanse of sunbaked sand, inspired a no less mysterious music in the master—aflame with passion and anguish, yet cooled with contemplation and consolation.
Reitba brought Rabbath's audience to tears—and after hearing this performance, I vowed I would study more intensively with the master and someday be able to play this piece of music for myself.
Studying with Rabbath was a painful process; I had to allow myself to learn an entirely different way of playing the bass. And change didn't come easily. It took years for my left and right hands to adjust to using different muscles, while relaxing others that I had used over a lifetime, but over the course of many trips to Paris and one leave of absence from my symphony job, I persevered. Yet while I was anxious to learn to play Reitba with all the evocative magic that goes with Rabbath's interpretation and fingerings, François was in no hurry for me to play his music. In fact, after years of technical study, there was not a mention of my playing Reitba. Our study was about discipline and not about playing evocative solos. François told me that when I was ready to play his music, I would know.
Eventually, one of my Inner Game seminars took me to a wonderful music course outside of Barcelona called Stage 92. I had been hired to coach chamber music and conduct Inner Game of Music sessions for talented postgraduate students. I borrowed a bass from the local teacher.
Finding myself in a new country where I didn't know the language, I missed my wife, Mary, and felt alone with only my bass and my music to comfort me. That's when I found my own special and sacred space. I took the beautiful old bass I had borrowed into a dark chapel with high wooden pews and stained-glass windows. I wanted to find the notes on this strange and lovely instrument. At first I played the prelude to the Bach D Minor Cello Suite; the tones of that bass resonated through the chapel unlike any other I had ever heard. I felt as though my breath had been taken from me. I was playing with new freedom and passion, and every note seemed to hang in the air in an endless expression of beauty. I thought to myself, If only François could hear me play like this! I was so inspired I had to put my bass down and take a walk outside.
It was a hot summer day as I walked out into a meadow of dead brown grass and sand. There was a mountain in the distance, with what I later learned was a historic monastery perched on its peak. I could feel the heat, the wind, and the guiding spirit within myself. Something told me to sit down on the sand and meditate on my own breath. As I breathed in, I could hear the strains of Reitba begin to pulse in my heart. Tears came to my eyes and I began to cry—and as I cried, a sense of calm came over me, and I found myself humming and then singing the melody of Reitba.
I knew this music was now inside me, and was ready to come out. I went back inside the chapel and began to play Reitba with the passion I had felt that first time I heard François play it several years earlier. Since that day, I have continued to play this wonderful piece, and I have been able to recapture and preserve the special soul quality that I had never experienced in my own playing until I visited this sacred space in Barcelona.
Now when I need inspiration, or feel that my playing lacks passion, I take myself back to that chapel and that meadow, and refresh myself at the source.
Many things may come together to create this kind of magic in your life: your own preparation, your emotional makeup at the time, and endless other factors. It may seem that a particular “sacred space” is the final piece of the puzzle, but more likely it is the interrelationship of many factors that creates these special moments.
In telling this story over the years, I have discovered that this kind of experience is far from unique. When I asked the celebrated English solo cellist Steven Isserlis to tell me about one of his most passionate moments, he told me several things that contributed to his best music making.
For Steven Isserlis, Wigmore Hall in London is the sacred site, his own equivalent to my chapel in Spain. One of the highlights of his solo concert career was playing his favorite music on his cello in his favorite hall.
Stevens preferred cello is the “De Munck” or Feuermann Stradivarius, dating from 1730. He tells me that all he has to do is dream of a sound and his cello can produce it. He loves the historic ambience of London's Wigmore Hall, which compares in tradition, beauty, acoustic excellence, and spirit with America's Carnegie Hall, and on whose stage so many distinguished cellists have made music, Casals, Rostropovich, du Pré, Starker, and others, for decades of the most appreciative audiences and critics. The audience at Wigmore is there to listen and be involved, and they make up a big part of the musical experience, Steven says. And his favorite music is Bach, the Bach of the six great unaccompanied cello suites.
It was here in Wigmore Hall that Steven pulled off a great feat of concentration and artistic achievement, performing all six of the Bach cello suites on his Feuermann Strad in one day; it was a memorable musical event, one that he still carries with him.
We cannot visit our favorite chapel or concert hall, or the desert fields and monasteries of Spain, each time we want to make music, but we can create a sacred space in our own imaginations.
Visit and practice in a chapel in your own neighborhood, and use your imagination to transform it into the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Or play outside on a high school football or soccer field—and transform the greenery into an imaginary place among the clouds, on water, or in the mountains or desert. You can imbue your instrument or voice with a sense of history and your responsibility to the great musical traditions of the past, honoring others who have come before us in your own imaginary concert setting. With imagination, you can create a sacred environment so filled with feeling and meaning that it can overcome and transform any feelings of doubt, anxiety, or loss of self-confidence.
And here is a secret that artists, musicians, and poets perhaps know better than most: imagination is not some gossamer web of illusion, it has the power to transform reality.
Natalie Clein, the talented young award-winning British cellist, learned about egoless cello playing while playing Bach at a memorial service for a dear friend who had passed away.
I realized I was playing both for my deceased friend and for his wife, sitting in front of me—and what struck me about the experience is that it was a sort of communion with them. I know that sometimes in a concert I'm thinking about how I'm playing, and it can all be quite ego-centered—but in this very powerful and moving situation the ego disappeared completely, and I felt the music had an extra poignancy and beauty.
For people who are grieving, music can be a really beautiful thing. It can be a chance for beauty and optimism to blend in with the tragedy of loss. And I believe I learned a lot from this particular experience. I always try now to forget my own security and ego, and turn my music making into a human situation.
Grief at the loss of a friend or family member is among the sincerest expressions of love. It is a pure gesture from the heart, and reaches into the emotional depths of the soul. Playing in memory of a loved one can inspire a calm expression of passion from deep within your soul, and playing from the place of love or honor can be the purest and most honest kind of musical communication.
Lynn Harrell, the great concert cellist, lost both of his parents when he was very young. He was raised by friends of his family and lived out of a suitcase until he was eighteen, at which point he joined the Cleveland Orchestra. Lynn said it took a long time for him to come to terms with the death of both his parents, and that it was an experience that he wouldn't wish on anyone. But in his loss, he learned about the resilience of the human spirit.
In an interview for the Internet Cello Society, he told Tim Janof:
I think now, due to much introspection, and with the help of self-help and psychology books, that I have learned to recognize the pain that we all experience and that none can escape. Some people have more than others, but we all have it. Part of the artistic process is to channel these feelings of pain and sadness through music to the listener. In my teen years, when I awoke to music, I didn't really share it with my parents because I was very inhibited, since they were professionals. When they died and I couldn't share it with them, there was this need to really give to others, a need I now try to fulfill by giving to the audience.
One of my own beloved teachers, the celebrated concert cellist and professor Janos Starker, told me about losing his two brothers in the prime of their lives. He said that you become aware there must be a reason why you are still alive.
I was further reminded of this by my mother's passing, because the concert I played on the next day was one of my most emotionally charged concerts ever, and this concert in turn reminded me of playing one particular concert with the Chicago Symphony on tour in Dallas, Texas, with Antal Dorati.
We had already played more than ninety concerts with the Chicago Symphony that season, and I couldn't understand why Dorati was suddenly doing some things with the Brahms symphony that he had never done before. He was a very private and distant person, but a great genius. After he finished the performance, he passed me in the hall, and said to me in Hungarian, “My father died yesterday.”
These things make one aware of one's own mortality—and other considerations like career and money become less important.
Playing in honor of a loved one or friend has the emotional and physical power to take our music making to a higher level. In a sense, grief gives us a more urgent appreciation for life, and channeling this energy and emotion into our music will intensify and even purify our reasons for playing. The ego takes a backseat, and we can tap into a very deep place in the soul where the music resides in all its glory.
Anytime you are playing music, it can be an opportunity to dedicate your performance to a friend, whether living or dead, and to connect with that place of honor and spirit.
I have often wondered how environment, family, genes, instinct, or even cultural background can contribute to someone's ability to make music. It certainly seems reasonable to suppose that both family and cultural environments may exert a strong influence on love or talent for music at an early age, and who knows what other influences may or may not play a role? Even a particular instrument may be a vehicle for musical passion.
My friend and colleague bassist Glen Moore, who plays with the eclectic New Age ensemble Oregon, makes music on a three-hundred-year-old bass. He feels his bass is a “living spirit” and has a voice of its own. And my own great teacher François Rabbath has only allowed a few people to play his treasured Quenoil bass. Rabbath feels that when someone else plays his bass, the instrument takes on a different energy from his own. He claims he can even tell if someone else has touched his bass by accident!
Given the bewildering variety of possibilities for transmitting sound, spirit, and musical passion through inheritance, family expectations, environment, tradition, and even concrete objects, I trust you will bear with me if I express my pride in the distinctive musical heritage of my own Jewish upbringing.
On the one hand, the large number of outstanding Jewish string players and composers might suggest that perhaps there is something in Jewish culture which supports the passing down of a style of playing, as demonstrated by such celebrated musicians as Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Robert Cohen, Leonard Bernstein, Gustav Mahler, George Gershwin, and Daniel Barenboim. That's a thought that I take pride in.
On the other hand, I have heard numerous non-Jewish musicians play with the same spirit. Yo-Yo Ma and Rostropovich play with a soul that would be the envy of any Jewish musician. Bach certainly wasn't Jewish. This passionate style is then in no way exclusive to the Jewish people. Do I take less pride in that? No, because I am human. And perhaps that's the point.
Each one of us may have a “local” culture or tradition in which we take pride, and from which we derive strength. But we are all also heirs to the great human tradition of music making, and Carlos Nakai's Navajo flute can be as rich an inspiration to me as Perlman's violin.
Having said that, it is also very likely true that music which expresses grief, persecution, and pathos may attract and reflect the imagination of people from a familiar cultural background. The brilliant English cellist Natalie Clein believes Jewish musical tradition closely parallels that of the Eastern European Gypsies. She explains that the Gypsies—a people without a land to call their own—have also found a special sense of community in music, using it as a way of holding themselves together and expressing their sorrows.
It's a sentiment that Robert Cohen might well agree with. Robert certainly acknowledges his Jewish culture, and also identifies with the spirit of the roaming Eastern European Gypsies and their music. He talks about the feeling of rootlessness, and the poignant way music can address suffering:
I'm Jewish, and there is no question for me that what I have to say in music reflects my understanding of humanity, suffering, and communication. In a very subtle way, I think I identify more with music in a minor key. In the Bach suites, when I hit the minor keys, I feel it's more poignant. The pain that's expressed in the minor keys is somehow acute for me. I am sure that every musician's makeup includes cultural and historical dimensions, and feelings deepen as we develop as individuals. The better we can understand our feelings, the better we can express ourselves, which is why it is often more interesting to hear people play as they get older.
Jacqueline du Pré converted to Judaism when she married Daniel Barenboim—and in her case, Judaism and music seem inextricably intertwined:
Life is incredibly important, and one must try to cherish every minute. Since I changed my religion, I don't think I've made any leaps in character. When asked if my Jewish faith helped me cope with my MS I always reply, to be quite honest, not as much as music, because for me the Judaism is almost bound up in the music. I just cannot separate them or indicate their boundaries. I know through all my troubles, I could never say that I am not a lucky person, because I am blessed.
And perhaps it's in religion that the passions and emotions—and thus the music—run deepest. Daniel Rothmuller, associate principal cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, comes from a Middle Eastern Jewish background, and he spoke to me about the Jewish liturgy:
On your knees you are either praying, or giving thanks. The history of the Jewish people is a history of suffering and prejudice, and that's reflected in our prayers, and also in our lives.
There is enormous emotion in Jewish liturgical music, he explained, the prayers that are sung are prayers of pleading, mourning, or praise and thanksgiving—but always full of emotion and yearning.
Gypsies and Jews have long experience of struggles and horrors and dispossession which enrich their music making, but what of others? How can one bring passion, suffering, and other deep feelings into music when one has less experience of these qualities in one's life?
These things are not culturally exclusive, but they may be culturally influenced, so the answers have to be found in your capacity to empathize. Spend time looking into the history of any culture and you will find war, prejudice, and persecution. The history of every population has its times of struggles. Feel globally, dig locally is my recommendation. Value your own cultural history, dig into it, learn its sorrows and its triumphs, and, at the same time, foster a global awareness within yourself of humanity's social interactions with humanity worldwide.
And, of course, listen passionately to passionate music. If passionate and expressive music is not a part of your culture or family background, you can expose yourself to the anguish and joy of the blues and jazz, or the spirit of flamenco guitar. The quickest way to learn the style and nuances of any kind of music is simply to listen to it—whether it be jazz, popular, sacred, folk, rap, or classical music.
Indeed, Daniel Rothmuller believes that listening is an absolute prerequisite for musical artistry.
Without immersing yourself in a style of music, you can only play the notes. Whatever repertoire you are working with, you must understand its language to the point where you are able to speak it fluently You must understand music if you hope to interpret it, and that's when you need immersion.
Some wonderful teachers have integrated cultural sensitivity and an awareness of humanity and the beauty of nature into their teaching of musical expression. In this section we will meet several inspiring teachers who on occasion ask their students to put down their instruments—to find inspiration in life and nature which they can then bring back to their music.
Margaret Rowell (1900–1995) was a remarkable teacher who lived in Berkeley, California, and taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She was an extraordinary human being who touched the lives of many cellists, both celebrated and unknown. Studying the cello with Margaret was not just a matter of the mechanics of playing, fingerings, bowing, and dynamics; it was more about life, it was about the human spirit, it was about inspiration, and falling in love with the world around us.
Bonnie Hampton studied with Margaret Rowell and recalls how Margaret would open doors to broader horizons of culture and spirituality:
Margaret opened up the world of books and literature to me as a person. She really wanted to develop musical characters as richly as possible and was always working away at her students’ artistic and cultural sensitivities. She took us to art shows, nature was very important to her, she liked to take walks after a lesson, and she would talk about Einstein and Gandhi. Her physical energy came across both in her personality and in her teaching: there were no barriers. When I was studying Bloch's Schelomo, she so much wanted the human expression to come through—and wouldn't stop until I got into the spirit of it.
Margaret was never trying to create the perfect instrumentalist—it was the whole person she was after. She wanted me to grow as a human being. She felt that whatever maturity I might achieve would ultimately be reflected in my music making. In later life when her health was on the wane, I would want to visit her to lift her spirits, but I was always the one who left with the gift. Her company was always such an inspiration.
Margaret Rowell knew that expressing love and passion with music means loving life and living passionately too.
Inspiration often comes through others: partners, teachers, coaches, ensemble colleagues, and producers—even perhaps from a higher power. David Darling, a cellist and man of great passion, told me the highlights of his musical career came via the production, coaching, and encouragement of his ECM record producer, the brilliant Manfred Eicher. He said Manfred somehow had the ability to take him deeper inside himself so that he could come up with music that was passionately fresh. Simply finding himself in Manfred's presence is enough to take David to a different place to find his musical voice. David himself also produces recordings for other musicians and draws on Manfred's spirit as he coaches others to access their own inner resources.
When David was invited to record his first solo record with Manfred in Stuttgart, Germany, he was very nervous. He brought all his music and laid it out on the floor. Manfred first asked him to play anything he liked, and since David had been experimenting using the cello as a guitar, he started with a cute, funky piece. I didn't hire you to do that shit, Manfred commented, I hired you to go as deep as you can go; just play your cello! At which point David put his bow to the cello and dug in.
This made me go into my inner drive. Rhythmic strumming has something to do with cute dollar signs, perhaps, but it's not the same as diving into the soul—what a lesson! Manfred demanded a direct line to the heart or where your real emotions lie.
For me the cello is the clearest instrument to sing through. On my first record, he made me recompose on the spot. The music had to come straight from my feelings—and the result was something that made everyone cry.
Robert Cohen loves to experience the extraordinary chemistry that can arise between two musicians—even for a few bars. He says that when two people play together, they can be so closely bound together it can be a spiritual experience. You can actually sense yourself being elevated by the power of two as opposed to the power of one.
It seems that whenever I play with Italian violinist Massimo Quarta, we are each always reaching to play with the qualities of the other person—but then realize that we are doing the same thing. It's an uncanny experience to strive for unity and find that every vibration matches, that each of us is doing exactly the same thing as the other. It is like playing with a soul mate, with a brother, perhaps.
Carter Brey recalls that the most passionate highlight of his musical career was inspired by a perfect combination of colleagues: the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Zubin Mehta conducting, and Carter himself playing the solo cello part in Strauss's Don Quixote.
Carter said he felt very much at home with Mehta directing such a great piece of music and an orchestra of such high caliber behind him.
I felt so much at ease that I was able to play at my very best during three straight performances. I felt as though I was actually creating the music as it went along, able to do anything that I wanted to do. I could play around with my basic mind-set each night, and was able to subtly alter the quality of each performance—but I knew it would still be together Maybe the moon was in the right phase—it was like riding a wave or being in a groove. I felt a profound happiness, and it came from my sense of being with all the right people, in the right place at the right time.
Janos Starker told me of the immediate bond he felt with colleagues who had studied with his chamber music teacher, Leo Weiner. He said that when he was with the Roth String Quartet in 1950, they performed six Mozart string quartets after only one day of rehearsal.
Because we had all studied with Weiner, his way of music was embedded in all of our minds. Leo Weiner taught us how to hear and listen; he taught us the difference between a rhythm line, melody line, bass line, and middle harmonies. He taught us how to evaluate a dot, and how to play an agogic accent that created freedom within the phrase.
Finding great chemistry with special partners was no accident in this case, but working with companion players who share cultural background and family history can generate electricity between performers. And while studying with the same teacher may promote a very close-knit sense of unity, when two people fall in “musical” love, it could just as well be diversity and contrast that draws them together. Contrasting and complementary styles can bring drama to musical partnerships when one player contributes a quality to the whole which the other partner lacks.
Special moments inspired by people, partners, or ensembles may still be few and far between, but it is important to keep oneself open to receive the unique spiritual gifts of collaboration which other musicians can offer. Seek and ye shall find. Everyone is unique, and has an individual chemistry which can add its own effect to any relationship. Being open and available to receive the guidance, imagination, inspiration, and direction of others, you may find you come in touch with qualities in yourself that you did not know you possessed.
The real art of passionate expression—the trick that allows you to let passion pour through you in a way that can reach and move others—is the art of balancing emotion with discipline. Passion without technique can sound terrible, unless you're the loving parent of the one who is playing. And technique without passion doesn't sound much better; it's a dry, formal, pedantic way to play music. So the art lies in finding a balance, and allowing your passion to speak through the discipline of your technique.
All musicians have to strive for a balance between their own love of the instrument, the voice they have chosen, and their responsibility to communicate the message of the music. And this may be particularly true of the cello, which is a very romantic instrument not only because of the sumptuous sounds created by its resonance but also because the cellist must literally cradle it with his or her body. I'm teasing a little here, of course, but the cello is a very lovely and beautifully voiced instrument, and I'm serious in saying that all musicians need to avoid falling so deeply in love with their instruments that they lose sight of the music.
Once you understand the music and how to communicate it, don't get so emotionally involved with your own playing that you absorb it into yourself and can't transmit it to the audience. If you step back just a little, all of a sudden the music will take on its own power and personality and have the potential to project even better to the audience. This balance is one of the hardest things to master, even with years of experience. Both teachers and performers are constantly challenged to sustain a relationship between music and emotion without going overboard on one side or the other.
Different players naturally have different ways of talking about this kind of balance. Pamela Frame, soloist and teacher from Rochester, New York, believes that the performer needs to be in the driver's seat with a piece. Technique should be taken care of first, she feels, and students should not need to focus on technique while they are playing the music. When a musician looks at a page of music, the process should start with imagination and finish with a technical solution. Rather than playing through a passage for bowing or dynamics, she recommends students start in the imagination, deciding what would be the best possible sound for the piece. That way, the entire process is aimed at the musical goal of the imagination.
The music must be dominant, not the technique. The two things are not of equal importance. You have to have both craft and emotion to make art, but when you focus on your goal, you had best see it as a musical goal. When I'm playing, I don't want to think about technique.
A true artist is someone who can express emotions in such a way that it creates those emotions in others. When my seven-year-old throws a tantrum, that's not art. You can't just throw paint at a canvas and say that's art. You can dump a paint bucket on the floor in a fit of anger and say it expresses anger—but it isn't art. It takes organization and discipline to create art.
It's a paradox: discipline needs passion to bring it to life, and passion requires discipline to give it expression.
I asked Carter Brey how he helps a student find passion in his playing, and his response was quite the opposite of what I expected, though very much in line with this paradox. Carter told me he would work like Socrates, questioning his students to ensure they would understand that music making was an art, not just an emotional display onstage.
My ideal conception of an artist is one who has balance. Mozart was able to balance technical perfection with expressive power. So I would discuss the decisions my students have to make and how each one affects the music. It is a mysterious process to explain, and difficult to teach, but it can definitely be fostered.
Janos Starker has yet another approach to the same issue. He tells his students he doesn't believe in expressing his own emotions in a piece of music; he believes the appropriate emotions are already in the piece. During his interview with Tim Janof, he said:
Whether it's Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky, I allow the composer and the piece itself to set the emotional tone of the experience. My obligation is to do the most I can with a given work. To put it crudely, I don't want to be one of those musicians who seems to be making love to himself on stage. And my approach must work for audiences, or I would not have been invited to give so many thousands of concerts throughout my life!
Starker is another who points out that discipline gives the musician freedom—that it is mastery of your instrument and technique that leaves you free to serve the composer and the piece.
I'm an ideal realist, he said with conviction.
You may have the greatest musical thoughts in the world, but if you haven't got the muscles to press the strings down in the proper places, all your idealism is for zilch.
Cellist Carter Brey of the New York Philharmonic says his favorite instrument, and the one he feels is the closest to the human voice, is the saxophone; he loves it for its flexibility and natural lyric tendencies, and as a cellist he envies what sax players can do. The great operatic tenor Plácido Domingo once told Jacqueline du Pré that the cello is his favorite musical instrument, and that he loves to imitate it with his voice, especially during legato passages. When he told her this, Jacqueline at once began to teach Domingo to play the cello.
Cellist Danny Rothmuller's father was the celebrated Metropolitan singer Marko Rothmuller. At Indiana University, Marko's studio was located next to that of Danny's cello teacher, Fritz Magg. One evening Janos Starker, who also teaches at Indiana, was talking to Fritz Magg and commented that the most important thing was to put the cello down and sing it, dance it, but not be bound by instrumental constraints. To this the voice teacher Marko responded that he would tell his voice students to sing like a cellist!
Cellists that love saxophones, tenors that love the cello, cellists that sing … maybe the lesson here is that you shouldn't think of music in terms of your own instrument, because your technical knowledge is all bound up with your own instrument, and the expression of music is a purely imaginative idea.
As a bass player, I have heard it said that the cello is an instrument that falls nicely in the register of the human voice, but obviously it is not the only instrument that can claim this register, which is proudly shared by bassoons, basses, horns, English horns, clarinets, and saxophones. The cello does, however, have a range that spans baritone, tenor, and soprano vocal ranges, an almost complete sampling of vocal arts. And there is no doubt that the music written for cello in the orchestra as well as in the solo and chamber music literatures values and emphasizes the expressive vocal nature of the instrument.
It seems to me that the common thread here is that all musicians, instrumentalists as well as singers, strive for the vocal quality of singing, regardless of what instrument or voice they want to imitate. Furthermore, most of the great conductors usually express themselves in some kind of vocal style. The musical art, I'd suggest, is in some sense basically vocal in nature.
Janos Starker taught me that the string instruments should always sing. He said it's a daily chore for him to persuade students to breathe according to the phrase—and this is one of the major principles in his teaching. Starker believes that all musical functions are controlled by the breath.
David Darling is very much at home integrating voice with his cello playing, and in teaching people to find passion and expression in their music. He tells me that the most powerful technique he teaches at his Music for People workshops is based on the principle: Sing what you play, play what you sing. David finds this creates the perfect timbre and allows his students to tap in to their most expressive feelings.
Cellist Lynn Harrell is one of the most animated and colorful performers on the concert stage today. He freely shows his feelings in his facial expressions, in his body movements, and in the great dynamic intensity of his performances. At times he seems more like an opera singer than a cellist, almost as though he were getting into character for each piece. You might find him smiling at a theme, or even laughing with the audience throughout a performance. When Lynn played the Shostakovich cello concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony, I saw his bow fly off the strings as if he were waving a sword in triumph at the audience!
Lynn responded to a question about these extroverted displays of character in his interview with Tim Janof by saying:
Every piece moves me in such a way that I act it out. It's a bit like method acting: once I get into this state, I don't have to act, I'm there—and if I don't get into this state, then my performance is just a bunch of empty gestures. I have enough maturity and confidence in my career and in my musicianship at this point to let myself go and let my inner self speak—even if it upsets my control and playing technique at times! I know that I sometimes hit the cello a little harder than maybe I should, but that's how the music moves me.
And if the music doesn't move me … where's the music?
When all's said and done, it is love that brought most of us into the wonderful world of music in the first place. One of the greatest challenges, whether in life, work, or relationships, is to keep the love alive.
I asked the distinguished San Francisco cellist and teacher Irene Sharp what she would like to be remembered for when she is no longer around to play or teach, and she replied:
My love and passion for music—that's what I want to be remembered for.
And I also want to be remembered for a lifetime of learning. I'm so excited by human beings and what they can do. I couldn't live without music, it is such an amazing thing. It can enhance the human soul.
Music brings beauty to the world.
A famous Israeli critic known for destroying artists in his reviews once described one of Robert Cohen's performances of the Dvorˇa´k cello concerto with the words Cohen is a musician of love. Robert felt this was an important comment, and he showed the review to his agent, saying he had the feeling that for the first time in his life someone had written some-thing about him that he really believed in. Interestingly enough, his agent didn't want to use this quote; he felt it was too soft, that people wouldn't take it seriously, that it might make them uncomfortable! And yet for Robert, it was probably the most important thing anybody could have said.
He told me:
That's one of the things that matters to me most about making music—and about life—the uninhibited feeling of love. I see love as the central point which everything stems from…. I'll communicate love through the music itself, or my love of the music, or the love and passion of the composer. And when the note comes out in a way that is truly thrilling, even for me perhaps—it's like I have found the core communication of love.
I feel this is what music is really about—in the most serious terms. When music goes straight into your heart and gives you a feeling that is beyond what you could feel at any other point.
Why not call this passionate love?