The Yellow Cello: A Mystery

The yellow cello is a big-bottomed narrow-waisted lady with an elegant hand-carved maple scroll. It was probably made in the mid-nineteenth century, during the lifetime of Johannes Brahms, in Germany. It has a spruce table, a maple back and ribs. Its fingerboard and purfling, the thin strand which outlines the top, are made of ebony. June, the woman settling the estate, did not know what to do with the cello, which had belonged to her friend and neighbor, Norma.

Certainly the instrument wasn’t much to look at, with deep cracks all along the belly, a patch on the front, a deep gouge made by the bow, a badly warped bridge and rusty strings. Through the slightest of contacts—the aunt of a fellow cellist learned about the cello when she struck up a conversation with a perfect stranger in her old neighborhood-- Nicodemus heard about the orphan instrument and went to look at it.

June, herself a lively and alert woman in her nineties, said she had often carried the cello to jobs for her friend, who had died, unmarried and childless, at the age of 94. “I guess that part of my life is over,” she said sadly.

Although the instrument hadn’t been played in ten years, “it was the light of her life,” June said. The yellow lady had been left to Norma by her own cello teacher.

Instrument makers and lovers joke about the Strad in the attic. Such is the mystery of stringed instruments that innocents cannot avoid hoping the violin, viola or cello they have found is worth a fortune. In this case, despite a paper stating the modest replacement value of the cello for insurance purposes, the obvious damage made it seem unlikely that the instrument had any value...

Until Nicodemus played it. And fell in love. And gave June a thousand dollars on the spot and brought the cello home.

Even with the rusty strings and the dreadful cracks (they had been patched from the inside and someone had sprayed lacquer on the face to try to make them blend into the wood) the cello had such a big, warm voice that Nicodemus could hardly bear to stop playing. He played and tweaked, tuned and peered, changed a string and played some more.

He took the cello to Carlos, the fine instrument maker in San Francisco. Carlos took in the condition of the cello at a glance, unscrewed the end pin and looked inside. “Not too bad,” he said, though the accumulation of dust showed how long it had been since the top of the instrument had been removed for what Nicodemus called brutal repairs. Carlos played the cello a little. “Beautiful,” he said.

Sleuthing out the history of a musical instrument is usually difficult if not impossible unless the instrument is famous. In this case, June said her friend had played the cello as principal cellist of the Peninsula Symphony, but even the old-timers at the orchestra had not heard of Norma. The cello teacher who willed the instrument to Norma supposedly was principal of the Oakland orchestra, but the orchestra’s archives do not go back very far. The only other clue to the instrument’s history was the figured maple bridge, stamped with the name Salchow, a New York firm.

June believed the cello had been played in Mexico at one point. She said Norma had sold a different cello to someone in the San Francisco Symphony and that she had given another cello to a student. The yellow lady was the one she kept until the end.

Why was the cello’s label removed? Where has it traveled since 1850? All we really know about it is that at least two cellists loved it and played it all their lives, and that despite its age and trauma, it still sings with a beautiful voice.

Forgetting

“Try To Remember” is the first song in The Fantasticks, the long-running musical show.

Try to remember when life was so tender

That no one wept except the willow.

Try to remember when life was so tender

That dreams were kept beside your pillow.

Try to remember when life was so tender

That love was an ember about to billow.

Try to remember, and if you remember,

Then follow....

We try to remember all of our lives: words, faces, names, times tables. But there comes a time when remembering becomes harder. We apologize for our Senior Moments and worry about Alzheimer’s. And by now we all know or have heard of someone actually stricken with severe memory loss and have heard of the anguish this causes them and their families.

We work at remembering. Mnemonics, named for the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, help us to name the colors of the rainbow, the order of the planets, the music lines and spaces, the Great Lakes: Roy G. Biv for red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet. Mary’s Violet Eyes Made John Stay Up Nights Pondering for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto (lately demoted, but still part of the mnemonic.) FACE, Every Good Boy Does Fine. HOMES.

But maybe we should take another look at forgetting. A touching moment in the original Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuseleh” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuQCt5xWeDc) has Dr.McCoy saying of Kirk’s grieving “I do wish he could forget.” And Spock, placing a Vulcan hand on the head of the sleeping Kirk, says “Forget.”

Mnemosyne was a Titan, a predecessor of the Greek gods and goddesses, and the mother of the Muses. Her counterpart, Lethe, was only a river god in charge of forgetting. However, the shades of the newly dead were required to drink from Lethe, the stream of oblivion named for the god, in order to forget their earthly lives before passing into the afterlife.

When the subject came up last week, Bruce, a brilliant young violinist who never forgets anything, said that in the Chinese culture, not so much urgency was attached to the memory facility of the old folks, or even to their behavior. We hold them in high regard for who they are to us, great-grandfather, great-aunt, not for anything they do or did, he said.

Maybe we cause our forgetful family members unhappiness by urging them to remember, I thought. I thought of conversations centering on some symptom of forgetting which caused sadness on both sides. “She couldn’t even remember her brother’s name.”

Shared memories are integral to our relationships, and yet we loved little children before we had any common memories.

Sometimes I think of my friend Arlene as the Defender of the Aged. She has worked with old people for most of her adult life and once did a study where she played music to nursing home patients believed to be in a persistent vegetative state, the end-stage of forgetfulness. Measurable brain wave activity arose in some of these patients after they heard the kind of music they had liked when they were younger.

“You remember Ram Dass’s book, Be Here Now?” Arlene asked me. “We thought that staying in the present moment was philosophically and psychically something we should strive for. Remember how we all worked so hard at our yoga so we could stay in the Here and Now? Well, these old folks, the ones who can’t remember, they are there, right in the middle of Here and Now.”

Mosaic from the first century B.C. depicting symbols of Apollo (center) Mnemosyne (top) and the nine muses. Clockwise: Calliope, Urania, Polyhymnia, Erato and Terpsichore, Melpomene, Thalia, Euterpe and Clio.

Images and Religion

The various religions I have heard about have strong opinions about imagery in places of worship. Sculptural depictions of religious figures are all right in some cases and strictly forbidden in others. The beautiful calligraphy of Islam may stem from the forbidding of actual images. The terrifying images of Tibetan Buddhism are a world away from Michelangelo or a plastic madonna on a taxicab dashboard.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, for ten centuries one and the same with Roman Catholics, does not allow graven images but embraces the flat, stylized style of painting which is ikonography in the Byzantine style. They believe that the first ikon was painted by St. Luke. (I am retaining the “k” in the word to distinguish it from computer pictures.) The images of the saints have been so traditionally depicted down the ages that many are recognizable by certain traits: Paul, for instance, is balding; John has curly hair. Some of the apostles are bearded and others are not. John the Baptist has wild leonine hair and wears an animal pelt.

Ikons are not objects of worship, but rather are foci for meditation. The figures are always painted with their ears exposed, as if they could listen to a prayer. Many ikons have had miracles attributed to them, of course. Fire walkers in northern Greece hold ikons as they walk across live coals, sometimes in socks, and are not singed. Two ikons I saw last year in San Francisco are said to be emerging from what seemed to be bare boards. (Ikons are painted on wood.)

We became acquainted with Eikonurgia, a Greek ikon-painting group headed by the master painter George Kordis, through an Internet bulletin board. Nicodemus posted a question about gilding which was answered by one of the teacher/painters from Athens in the group. We have been to Greece several times to observe the group’s stunning work in churches and monasteries.

Now the group has come to America for the first time and has been painting a new Orthodox church in Columbia, South Carolina. Through YouTube, Facebook and Skype, we have followed the painting all month. The amount of surface covered with raw pigment suspended in liquid glass, their fresco medium, would be staggering even without the images.

But trying to describe the images is almost beyond me. Starting with the dome, 70 feet above the floor of the church, is a Christ image whose halo is probably five feet across. Thie image is circled by scriptural words in Greek. Below the Christ image is a 360-degree frieze of angels and seraphim among the stars, and a circle-framed madonna and child. Below this are the words of Psalm 104 in English, the Western letters painted in the Byzantine style. “When thou openest thy hand all things shall be filled with good.”

The next tier down has 20 windows, and between each window is painted an Old Testament Prophet perhaps eight or nine feet tall, identified by name. The windows themselves are painted and decorated. On the next tier is the story of Creation, replete with the sun and moon, the oceans, plants, birds and animals. A short narrative in English describes each part of the painting, which continues through the eviction of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. On one of the YouTube videos, a photographer asks George why he is putting shoes on Eve after she has left Eden. “Vanity,” George answers.

Now we are almost on the ground floor, and the paintings are of the four evangelists. As of the latest postings, a painting of the Last Supper is being sketched in charcoal, freehand as always, by George, who will complete the sketches, faces, draperies and highlights, followed by the other four members of the team, who know exactly what to do. Every square inch of the church above the ground level has been painted.

The scaffolding alone is an engineering marvel. “This is the best scaffolding we have ever worked on,” my friend Yotta said (even though she stepped on a nail when someone overlooked an upturned board .)

I have seen hundreds of examples of Eikonurgia’s work, but the Columbia project is surely the most beautiful (and vast) project they have created. Every figure is painted with such care and reverence that, even if you don’t really believe in what it represents, you must appreciate the genius, the energy, the discipline and the faith which has produced the image.

I am reminded of the first time I saw Delphi, the site of the ancient oracle and the focus of any number of religions in ancient Greece. It left me breathless. All the reverence which had gone into that rocky piece of mountain was palpable. You could feel it from a mile away.

Ikon painters do not sign their work except for an occasional “through the hand of...”This morning, George posted a photograph of the ikon in the church dome, taken from outside, at night. The few words which accompanied the picture showed so clearly that he does not consider this his work at all, but only something which has come through him. “Is always there,” he wrote. “Taking care of...”

Antonio

“Es muerta,” Antonio says, shaking his head sadly. We look at the tree, trying to see whether any part of it might be saved, but finally decide that it is only good for a little firewood and that it will take two truckloads to cart the rest to El Dumpay.

Antonio only speaks a little English and I speak no Spanish at all, but we manage to communicate through gesture, good will and a little mind-reading. I know that he is not yet thirty but has two sons, one of them twelve, going on thirteen. I know that he is a strict and devoted father who must be home when school gets out and his wife goes to work. He seems to support his parents in Mexico, and more than once has taken in a relative who had nowhere else to go.

Back before he had papers, Antonio went door to door looking for work. I told him I didn’t really have anything, but if he would leave his telephone number, I would call him when I did. He wrote and erased, wrote and erased, and I thought that anybody who wanted that much to get something right would be good to know.

He and several relatives painted my house by hand, with brushes. Antonio didn’t mind washing windows or cars, did all his estimating and billing in his head and never made a mistake, even when he had taken advances for lunch or materials. I worried about how he would keep doing all this when he grew older. I wished he would take an English class or try to get a contractor’s license, but he was too busy working to do much of anything else.

I made business cards for him so he wouldn’t have to keep writing and erasing.

“Maggie, minuto, come,” he says, and I trudge over to the fence where he is cutting up the dead tree with a handsaw even as the sound of chainsaws and chippers blast away from neighbors’ houses. He shows me a decayed stump some eight feet high, two feet in diameter at the top, five inches at the rotting bottom, upright only because it is leaning on branches. The stump had been hidden by the dead tree Antonio was taking out.

“Oh, my God,” I say, picturing orphaned children, Antonio or me squashed as flat as the coyote in Loony Toons. “Be careful! Don’t do anything! Wait until somebody else comes!” Holding my breath, I nervously pull away some logs as Antonio casually clips a few branches, mentally measuring where the stump might fall.

Then he pushes the stump and it falls to the ground with an enormous earth-shaking thud.

“One truck,” he says “for this at Dumpay. Forty-seven dollaria.”

“Not worth it,” I say, and we wordlessly agree to leave the stump where it fell.

Deus Ex Machina

I have an uneasy truce with the machines. This may date from an astonishingly low grade on a mechanical aptitude test I took in high school or from the description of a war against the machines in the Sixties Bible, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf: “(They) praised machinery as the last and most sublime invention of the human mind. With its aid, men would be equal to the gods.”

I have been nudged and bullied into dealing with machines. I had to learn to drive at age 40 because there was no school activities bus to where we lived in the country, and the kids wanted to play football. I can drive if there aren’t too many left turns, but my present car has so many mysterious computerized functions that even the dealer can’t tell why the alarm goes off at random.

In fact, the whole darned house is computerized: The coffee maker, the kitchen range, the television and its remote, the sewing machine, telephones, stereo, alarm clock, answering machine, calculator and camera. Ed gave me a Global Positioning thing after we kept getting lost, and once I get more confidence about left turns, I have every intention of using it.

The turntable which was going to turn all my vinyl records into compact discs, however, I donated to a choir auction. The box had never been opened. Sometimes you have to flat-out acknowledge defeat. I can make compact discs from audio tapes, however, which is a dubious skill since everyone else deals with iPods now instead of compact discs. I have a machine which is supposed to make JPGs from old slides, but I haven’t yet taken it out of the box.

I got my first computer because I wanted e-mail. It took a week to get up the courage to open the box. When I plugged the thing in, it didn’t work, and I phoned up a friend and cried. The problem proved to be the plug, not the computer, and so I have had the usual computer snags and problems ever since.

The newest machine is an iPhone I actually requested for my birthday. To activate it, one had to have the latest version of iTunes on the computer, and to support that, one had to have a more recent operating system than I have. This is what I mean by being nudged and bullied. Meanwhile, I am just using the iPhone as a telephone, and it works just fine.

The phrase “deus ex machina” or “god from the machine”, by the way, comes from Horace, who deplored the Greek tragedians’ use of cranes (machina) which were used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage, where they would neatly wrap up a rambling drama.

Margins

Nicodemus and I are taking a Greek class, and while we are struggling with declensions (don't ask) we are learning some interesting things.

About limbo, for instance. Ever since I read Dante in high school, I have thought that limbo was a place, real or imagined, where unbaptized children went after death. In Dante's Divine Comedy, virtuous pagans and great classical philosophers including Plato and Socrates, joined the unbaptized children in this shadowy place. I worried quite a lot about the children in limbo.

Then it turns out that "limbo", which means "margin" in Latin, was a copyist's mistake. The monk copying the scriptural passage was referring the reader to a margin note. The next copyist incorporated the word into the text, and eventually the concept of limbo entered the Catholic catechism, though it was never doctrine. In 1992 the catechism dropped the mention of limbo and in April of 2007, Pope Benedict officially clarified the matter without blaming the medieval copyist.

Now I want to talk about a different kind of margin. Most of my friends who were church musicians have either lost their jobs or have been replaced by amateur volunteers, playing mostly guitars and drums. Not many churches these days play the great liturgical music of the past. There is a question as to whether this is an artistic or an economic decision.

And...the 54-year-old Coastside Chorale which I accompany fell victim to budget cuts in June of 2010 even though a parcel tax initiative benefitting the school district was passed. The local adult school was axed without an apology or any official notice.

Next chapter: The Chorale starts up again in fall of 2010 under the aegis of the understaffed local Parks and Recreation department and operates for a full semester without a class list or any idea what its financial situation might be. Telephone calls are not returned. Four months after chorale members had paid their enrollment fees, Parks and Rec released a portion of the fees back to the chorus, which had salaries and expenses to cover. And then Parks and Rec closed down and their administration was passed to a city a mountain range away from the Coastside.

The San Carlos Parks and Rec intends to increase fees for the fall semester, and the remote administrators want a 40 per cent cut. The Chorale, which just wants to sing, is balking, but they do not have tax-exempt status and need a sponsor for purposes of insurance, director's and accompanist's very modest salaries, music scores and rehearsal space.

"Do you feel marginalized?" I asked the director, who several years back lost her church job.

"Do I..." she stammered. "Do I..." Finally she was able to finish her sentence. "Ever".

If a Tree Falls in the Forest: A Conversation

“Why aren’t you writing?”

“Because hardly anybody reads any more.”

“I think you’ve got your reward system backward.”

“What do you mean?” (I ask him this very frequently.)

“I mean that instead of doing the crosswords as a reward for doing something you don’t want to do, like the dishes, you should reward yourself for doing something you actually want to do, like writing.”

“It just seems pointless to write when we’re living in a time where so few people have the skill or motivation to read.”

“Well, I practice the cello every day. I practice things nobody will ever hear but me.”

“Oh, that’s not true. Everybody wants to hear you play. You play all the time.”

“But I practice because it is what I do. I think you should write because that’s what you do.”

“O.K.”