OF THE CELLIST
Pads like a lemur’s, rounded
ends fat with sense receptors –
Merkels, Meissners, Ruffinis
and Pacinians. She fingers her
way into the music, and the
instrument haptics back, cello
to player. She needs the timber
vibration to quiver through thighs
and chest, the zing of the wire
through ulna and phalanges
for synchrony, pitch, timbre. The
strings sing out loudly, she tests
musicality as she goes along. Bodies
alive, with the intelligence and
lilt of music. She suggests
Bach to the cello, the story they
have shared so often, the Suites
they love to play. She closes her
eyes, no sheet music needed to
draw those luminous strains from
the strings. Each finger joint has
been trained over thousands
of hours, packed with kinetic potential –
strength and control to hold
the superbly vibrating string, to pick, bow,
pluck and finger melody
and percussion from the notes. She
discerns kilohertz, not by numbers
but by feel; exquisite arpeggios, perfect
pizzicatos. You can see the musician’s
brain at work in her movements – how close
the choreography of sound
and action, how the brain lights up.
Her fingers fly over the instrument
in flurries of dexterity. She and her
cello – classic pas de deux.
LISTENING TO FUGUE 18
I pad round the house in stockinged
feet picking up, sorting, making loose
order. My J is learning the pieces
your J has composed. He’s onto the
last six of the second twelve. A run
of notes soars up the staircase, spirals
around the landing to the upper storey.
The old timbers and plasters breathe
it in, the house settles on its haunches.
You would have heard this exact
sequence of notes inscribe the air in
your home, infusing the humdrum.
Almost three hundred years, but if I
reach out, wouldn’t my hand
encounter yours?
.
Note: Fugue 18 is from the first book of the Well-Tempered Klavier by JS Bach. The ‘you’ in the poem is Anna Magdalena Bach, JS Bach’s second wife.