Digital boy, analog world

[jazzfish]

A month or so ago, while I was staying at Stephen and Shondra's, I broke out my cello. Tuned it up, surprised myself by still being able to do that much. Played a few songs. Determined that I'm at about a second- or third-year level. My fingers still know where first position is, and with only a little time they find second through fourth alright. I can't shift nearly fast enough to play anything for real, though.

I was never a very good cellist. I practiced (not nearly enough), I took lessons for many years, I played in orchestras and quartets, but I was missing something. Partly it was the practice. More of it was a lack of any kind of soul to my playing. I always secretly suspected that you could program a robot to play the cello as "musically" as my teachers were telling me to play it. Notes, dynamics, tempo, it's all reducable to digital eventually.

Point of the story: that night, in the middle of a Gavotte from Suzuki book 2 or 3, I shocked myself by actually playing the dynamics (volume changes) as written. Not because they were written, but because I could tell, for the first time in my life, that that was how the piece was meant to sound. I'm no longer remotely in practice, and who knows if I'll have the time or inclination to play once I'm moved in, but I seem to have some sort of intuitive grasp on the nebulosities of music now. I'm honestly not sure what to make of that.

---

I took a semester-long photography class in high school. It was easily the single coolest class I had. Playing around in the darkroom is its own reward. More than that, though, there was the sensation that I could draw a box around a scene and have it be Art, have it evoke an emotional response. I even shot a couple of pictures that succeeded in that goal.

But it's not something I've ever understood. I look at pictures other people have taken, and I catch my breath. They're just that damn good. I know it's all in angle, and lighting, and subject matter, and focus, and frame, and I still have no comprehension of how they work.

Case in point: this photograph. The post is worth reading, too, but the photo caught me for unrelated reasons. It's beautiful. The light, the positioning. I could take a thousand pictures and get that lucky once-- and maybe, maybe, recognise it and not throw the picture away with the other nine hundred ninety-nine. Technique, yes, but more importantly knowing how to apply it. Seeing the photograph that will be, and saying "This is good."

---

Words are easy. I know how to make them do what I want. I should; I've been busily surrounding myself with them from the time I was five.

Yet I can't explain it. I can't tell other people, "This is how to write." Words about words fail me, as do words about music, or photography.

Ultimately the world is analog, after all.

Comments

[rbandrews]

I think since that was an eight-hour exposure, I wouldn't be so fast to throw it away even if it were ugly.

I can't really say this without sounding arrogant, but I feel the same way about programming. There's a lot to it that you can't teach, that I understand, that most people just don't. They were taught by the same kind of person who your music teachers were, I guess.

Coincidentally, I decided this morning that one of the things I'm going to get once I get an apartment is a dulcimer, and learn to play it. The only instrument I have ever known how to play is the trumpet, which isn't so great since I loathe trumpet music.

[laughin.livejournal.com]

I guess all of us have "that thing" that we cannot explain to others. I have it with writing for TV and editing for video.

But I am that way with photography too. I know what can make a pretty picture and I can see it in my head, but I cannot DO IT.

Understanding at 26

[vdriscoll.livejournal.com]

I have been a math geek all of my life. I knew the rules, the procedures, and how to get the results.

I was taking a Teaching Middle School Mathematics class a couple of years ago, and all at once, out loud, in the middle of instruction, I blurt, "I understand fractions!"

I turned red and apologized, but the teacher made me explain.... I realized I never had innate number sense for them before.


Same thing happened in Modern Geometry the semester before.

Not the same as music and art, but it shows that our brains change as we age, and once we have experience we can start to understand those nuances that adults were always trying to get across to us.

I think I started to finally understand art around 9/11/1 when I was working off some stress and angst from the Two Towers incident. I had never really felt anything in my art before. I was ... well, it freed me up a lot.

Glad you finally felt the music.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I just don't see it in that photo. The fact that it's an 8-hour exposure, fleeting life and solid buildings and whatnot, sure, that's kinda neat from a metaphysical standpoint--but I don't find the photo itself, in its own right, even particularly appealing.

[idoru.livejournal.com]

Music, or indeed any innate [or nurtured] crafting ability, is not easy to explain to those who don't immediately understand it.

Jen, the roommate of 4 years, has always had trouble shaping phrases out of saxophone music [her instrument]. She always attacks it from the rhythms and then the notes, then dynamics, but building and decaying mostly escapes her without input from an external source.

I've learned with vocal pieces that one cannot create music until the notes and words are memorized, committed to muscle- and mental memory, so that you no longer have to concentrate on what comes next; you only focus on connecting the words and musical arches to emotion and shape. ;] This is why student recitals are terrifying, as you never have enough time to have all your rep freely committed to memory -- I perform petrified, desperately not forgetting words, while throwing meaning into them. It's gotten easier/better over time.

It takes a deep understanding to turn music into more than just notes and rhythms. Sometimes it takes years of aural inundation; how would you ever know the right way to shape a phrase in a cello concerto if you've never spent time listening to classical cello? Feeling how a line builds tension into its release is one thing to technically understand. It's another thing entirely to feel it.

[jameshroberts.livejournal.com]

Ultimately the world is analog, after all.

Well, actually quantum mechanics tells us the world is all quantized at some level. But it appears analog in the realm we can perceive. That's one of those things that I learned to do mechanically, but never developed an intuitive feel for.

[ancientsong.livejournal.com]

That moment of finding the music is fascinating to me. When I work with my voice/guitar students, I tell them time and again that the day will come when what we are painstakingly going over will become second nature and that at that point, they will have the opportunity to see the music from this side of it (the part that is felt and intuited rather than learned). It will no longer seem a stranger or an exercise because it will flow from them and through them. The day they "get" it and feel it is one they remember forever (I think).

I feel that way about singing (and sometimes even guitar). Nothing in the world fulfills me like singing a song I love to sing (and particularly if I can do it singing in harmony with someone). Unfortunately, even though I've played the violin since I was five, I have never loved it enough to get to that point with it. I can recognize someone else's brilliance, but while I play it with a passion, I simply, sadly, don't love the instrument itself enough to really get to that place with it. I teach it. I recorded a CD using it. I've been playing my 100+ year-old violin since I was nine, but I just don't love it.

As for photography, a friend taught me darkroom techniques (I've been taking photos since I was 12 and I love it) and the most amazing time warp happens when I'm in the darkroom. Twelve to fourteen hours can pass and for me, it's been maybe an hour or two. There are so many fun and incredible things to be done with black and white and I sigh, often, that I don't have room to have my enlarger up and running in my house. Someday....

[vond.livejournal.com]

I would love to learn an instrument but I don't have the time or the patience. It's really extremely frustrating for me since I love music, and I think being able to perform would help me appreciate music even more.

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

I've found that my taste in writing style (voice?) has changed dramatically over the past ten years. Writing that I used to think was beautiful seems melodramatic and cloying now. I don't know if I've developed a more sophisticated taste or just become jaded.

[playing-tragic.livejournal.com]

Ultimately the world is analog, after all.

This reminded me of a favorite quote by Muriel Rukeyser: "The universe is made up of stories not atoms." I think I like it before I do believe everything is more than the sum of their parts.

I'm deeply fond of cello music. A friend recently introduced me to Zoe Keating's One Cello x 16: Natoma album. There's something "vocal" and "throaty" about the sound of a cello. I imagine if the human soul has a voice, it would sound like a cello.

[playing-tragic.livejournal.com]

correction: "before" should be "because"

[dasphios.livejournal.com]

No. The world is made up of what the world is made up of. Digital and analog and quantum and twilight zone and atoms and molecules and flogiston and caloric and friction and goats and a million other things besides.
We never will be able to fully understand it- but don't let that take away from the wonder of it.