Hamlet: Will you play upon this pipe?
Guildenstern: My Lord, I cannot …
Hamlet: ’Tis as easie as lying. Governe
these Ventiges with your finger and thumbe,
give it breath with your mouth, and it will
discourse most eloquent Musicke …
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet III. ii
We started with recorders, the practice instrument on which one makes practice music. The sound is that of a rough sketch, of unseasoned breath. We brought our recorders home from school and played, but never together. Only later, once we could read music, were we given instruments of our own and expected to play with other people.
I was allocated the violin. My elder brother played the trombone, my sister the flute and my little brother the cornet. This child’s trumpet suited him. I could see him crossing a battlefield protected by his perpetual jeunesse, his air of being exempt and elsewhere. The cornet depended upon a subtle control of breath that I could never have been expected to master. My brother, though, suited the restraint and complexity of the instrument, and in relation to him I think of it not as flaring open but tapering back towards the mouth – a reverse megaphone for someone who knows that to speak quietly is to be heard loudly.
I once took my sister’s flute from her hands, but could not make a noise. She, of course, had the instrument that looked like a wand. It suited her combination of steeliness and modesty, her air of knowing more than she was saying and of being capable of more than one might expect. I led our adventures but depended on her to realise them. I went first over the wall or up the tree but she had to help me up and then manage by herself.
Both cornet and flute concern the angle and strength of breath, and the Little Ones, as they were known, were more subtle than us older two. My big brother played the trombone, which was all comic potential and swagger. The trombone evolved from the sackbut, the name of which derives from Old French: sacquer and bouter – to push and to pull. This was my brother – granting the rest of us an audience, the chance to participate in his world, and then dropping us with a shrug and a smile.
I cannot remember the sound I made on the violin and I did not enjoy trying to play it, but I liked to hold and carry it. The weight of the case in my hand felt just right – significant but not onerous. The case itself was pleasing with its flaking black exterior and sumptuous trashy crushed-velvet lining. I enjoyed greasing the bow with rosin, stuff that was sticky and dry at the same time, and marvelled that the bow was horsehair – I had never seen any such hair on a horse.
Playing the violin hurt. I had to clench it between my left shoulder and chin, and my right arm had to keep the bow lifted. When I read the story of Orpheus and how his lyre was grafted to his body, I thought a lyre must be like a violin. Your own arm disappears and is replaced by the instrument, which is grafted to your collarbone and chin. In keeping with any curse, you cannot speak, you cannot move, you can only play. Recently, I was watching a chamber orchestra and thought that, more so than with any other instrument, the violin becomes part of the body. A good musician is physically dissolved when playing and for violinists, who cannot see where to place their fingers, and have nothing to guide them through touch, music must be more than ever about memory rather than fingertips and breath; the ventage is deeper, more of the self, closer to singing.
With this instrument I had to imagine making music. I found it hard enough to learn how to sense where a note would be, let alone to give it any character. The sounds I produced were those of physical failure: my pizzicato notes were as raw as my fingertips, and my bowed notes as thin and shaky as my arms. Instead of making music, I was struggling to manage an instrument. It seemed so sensitive and conditional that I began to understand how notes took shape and how little their shape had to do with dots on a stave. I was beginning to learn this about language, too.