Ah! well a-day! what evil looks

                             Had I from old and young!
                             Instead of the cross, the Albatross
                             About my neck was hung.

                                        The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

                                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

                                   

 

            The cello, the cello… my blessing and my curse, my squawking albatross.  I took it up as I entered my teens, and the guilt still hangs over me.  To wit:  A few months ago, I settled my 99-year-old mother into a rocking chair near the piano and played a few pieces for her:  some easy Chopin and a few old-time songs.  I thought it sounded kind of nice.  “Did you enjoy that, Mama?”

            “Yes… yes,” she answered rather absently.  She opened her eyes and frowned at me.  “But your sister Carol used to play so beautifully.  And whatever happened to your cello?  You were so good at the cello!”

            What happened to my cello takes some telling. 

            Music was always important in our family.  Dad was so proficient at the piano that when he went to college, he intended to become a concert pianist.   It was a treat to listen to him play, or gather round the piano for a sing-along.  As well as showy classical music, he had an extensive knowledge of chords and music theory, and could improvise complex renditions of any song.  He expected his four children to play instruments. 

            When I was in third grade, a little tonette was my pride and delight, but this was soon eclipsed when my mother started me on piano with one easily located note:  “I am Mister Middle C; Take a good long look at me.”  Mama guided me through the early Thompson piano books for children, and soon I could manage some simple duets with Carol, who was three years older and already quite adept. 

            In fifth grade, when we had moved to Rochester, New York, I started taking piano lessons with the grade school music teacher.  Under her benevolent guidance, I managed to play a solo at our seventh grade graduation.  By this time, Carol was taking lessons at the famous Eastman School of Music, and played very well indeed.  I listened with envy as her cadenzas and chords rolled up and down the keyboard.  In my mind, she set the standards, and they seemed impossibly high.

            When I turned thirteen, and could no longer take lessons at the grade school, I followed Carol’s example and signed up for lessons at Eastman.  A scowly teacher listened to a few bars of my recital piece and then cut me off.  “Your technique is all wrong.  You have to start over again with scales, scales, scales.”  She sent me home with a dreary book of Czerny exercises.  Unhappy and intimidated, I begged my parents to let me switch to another instrument.  The high school needed cellists; since I had a good ear, the parents let me take lessons at school on a rented cello.

            I was pleased to have an instrument that no one in the family knew how to play.  It was impressively big!  I liked the reddish glow of the wood and the curvaceous sides.  I liked unpacking it from its canvas case and unscrewing the peg at the bottom.  I liked tightening the horsehair bow and smearing it with resin. 

            But then things got tricky.  It was difficult to draw the sticky, powdery bow across the strings without producing really awful sounds.  And how was I supposed to find notes on the strings?  On a piano, each note was clearly identified and always made the same tone.   But with the cello it was hit or miss:  my left hand had to grope up and down unmarked strings, where each note seemed more elusive than the next.  Then if the left-hand fingers didn’t press down hard enough on the strings, the right hand might as well toss the bow out the window -- it would produce only squawks.  Pressing the strings hard made painful welts in my fingertips, so I had to develop and maintain protective calluses.  Then if I didn’t practice for a week, the calluses grew soft and the fingertips hurt again.   I often became discouraged.  But we were a musical family and I had agreed to learn the cello.  I had to get good at it.

            At the beginning of ninth grade, we moved to New Jersey.  I lugged my cello back and forth to school and began to identify with the instrument, even though it gave me more pain than pleasure.  I became second chair in Madison High School’s dinky little orchestra.  Our repertoire was limited to selections from Broadway musicals, which we played mostly out of tune and rarely with a sense of common purpose.  My only consolation was the handsome first cellist.  He was two years older and wouldn’t look at me, but I found myself humming “Once I Had a Secret Love” as I tightened my bow strings.  The sweet smell of resin on horsehair took on new significance.

            Every year in the spring, I tried out for the New Jersey All State Orchestra.  Why did I put myself through that ordeal?  I have no idea.  In April our high school music director drove a few of us prize, sacrificial maidens down to Trenton for the try-outs.  Quaking in our penny loafers, we waited outside the rooms of doom.  Finally, summoned inside to face four unsmiling judges, I coaxed my reluctant cello through a recital piece, then attempted to sight-read a diabolical piece of sheet music -- a veritable thicket of notes.   A week later, the bad news arrived in the mail.  But I struggled on.  I was a cellist.

            I was also something of a nerd.  At home we played almost exclusively classical music, and I looked down on the rock & roll that all the other kids liked.  Admittedly, I did indulge in “Your Hit Parade” on Saturday night television, while other kids were out on dates.  But the songs I liked, sung by Rosemary Clooney and her cohorts, were a far cry from rock & roll:  “Shrimp Boats Are A-Comin’,” “I Love You, A Bushel and a Peck,” “Love and Marriage… Go together like a Horse and Carriage.”  When Elvis Presley hit the scene with his fabled hip-swiveling, I turned off the television for fear it would be too shocking.  In fact, I never saw Elvis gyrate until the 1970s when I belatedly turned on to rock & roll.  Zowie!  

       

            Meanwhile back in the early Fifties, my mother had persuaded me to go to a beauty parlor and get my only claim to beauty cut off -- my blond pony tail.  Now, straddling the cello with my big feet sticking out at ridiculous angles, I felt less and less attractive.  So why did I stick with this unwieldy and provoking instrument?  Perhaps my ongoing struggles with it distracted me from other adolescent miseries.  Yes -- I was a social misfit, but I was a cellist. 

            At age fifteen, I took up a second, jauntier instrument:  the clarinet.  Why the clarinet?  I have no idea.  Like the cello, it frequently squawked when asked to make music.  And it necessitated rolling my lips in taut over a bulky mouthpiece, thereby looking more unattractive than ever.  Nevertheless, to the myriad problems of my teen years – acne, lack of dates, late term papers, peeling calluses on the cello-playing fingertips -- I added the ongoing challenge of selecting and moistening reeds, then blowing my brains inside-out.

            I played clarinet in the marching band, which meant that I had to wear a really, really ugly maroon-and-white uniform.  The skirt fell just below the knees and just above the white bobby socks that I wore stretched up to mid-calf and held in place with a rubber band.  The tacit dress code of the Fifties was exacting.  I rolled the top of the sock down a sixteenth of an inch to cover the rubber band, and then rolled it over once more to hide the evidence.  All the girls at Madison High wore their white bobby socks this way except for the Italian “hoods,” who, shockingly, wore nylon stockings with flats instead of loafers! 

            A couple days a week I stayed after school to practice marching in formation, and Saturdays attended all the football games to do it in earnest.  So was it my love of football that kept me going on clarinet?  Definitely not.  A teen-ager’s motives are probably not worth probing, but I’ll give it a try.  The hot dogs with mustard were pretty good, and I liked the way the drummers clicked and clattered and then launched us into a rousing Sousa march.  It felt good to be part of a group, even if I disliked all its members, and I liked yelling and singing lustily out the bus windows as we drove through town after a rare victory.  And I did manage to get into the Regional Band of Northern New Jersey on my clarinet, which was sort of cool.  But let’s face it, the clarinet just didn’t wind my watch – a Bulova, with a wristband of Black Watch plaid, a pattern that suddenly every girl had to have in some form, whether dress, purse, suitcase, or underpants.

            But I digress.  Let us return to the essence of my developing selfhood – my vital musical calling as cellist.  For some reason, and I can assure you that this was not based on reality, Mama became convinced that I played the cello “like an angel.”  At her parents’ golden wedding celebration in 1953, Carol and I had performed Hayden trios with our fifteen-year-old cousin Claire.  Carol was an impressive pianist, and Claire was a violin prodigy, who went on to become concert mistress in several symphony orchestras in California.  Perhaps our trio-playing, gilded by Claire’s and Carol’s musical talents, had etched some idealized version of me onto my mother’s brain -- Joanie the Angelic Cellist.  At the end of my sophomore year, she and Dad decided to foot the bill for a good cello teacher rather than continue my free lessons at the high school.

            The new teacher was a real, live cellist!  For the first time in my life, I heard my little rental cello sing its way through “The Swan” with a rich, quavery tone.   Wow… vibrato!  I was enthralled.  Maybe I could sound like that, too!

 

            Alas, vibrato did not resonate with me.  I found it to be impossibly self-contradictory:  I had to tense up the arm muscle in order to shove the hand up and down in place, yet relax enough to let the quavers flow smoothly.  Occasionally it worked… eureka!  But most of the time it came across as an uptight mess.  At sweet sixteen I had never been kissed, but I was too preoccupied with vibrato to worry about that.

            In April of 1957, I returned to Trenton for the third time, to face those same four All State judges.  I could see their looks of amazement, if not anticipation, when they saw me lug my cello through the door, yet again.  She’s back!  I had not morphed into Pablo Casals, not by a long shot, but I had improved. They told me right then and there that they were impressed by my progress, and even more impressed by my (seemingly insane) perseverance.   A week later, the letter came:  I was in!

            All State Orchestra!  Though I was thirteenth chair out of fifteen cellists, I was ecstatic.  Saturdays I took the train to Newark for rehearsals under the baton of an impassioned conductor with long hair, named Achilles.  It was so thrilling to play real classical music in a real orchestra!  It felt as though I, personally, became part of the inner workings of Cesar Frank’s “Symphony in D Minor,” Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio Italien.”  A lot of the music was too hard for me, but I joined in with gusto and did a lot of faking.  Several times at each practice, Achilles became furious at various orchestra sections.  Symphonic crescendos became even more exciting when, in a fit of pique, he yelled, “NO!  NO!” and hurled his baton – usually at the drummers.  The one time he threw it at our cello section, it broke on the ninth chair’s music stand.  I picked up the splintered tip and took it home for a souvenir.

            The grand crescendo of my cello career was the All State Orchestra concert.  It took place in Atlantic City on a bleak February weekend.  Two other Madison High girls had made the Allstate Band; our music director drove us down on Friday to overnight in a huge hotel right off the boardwalk.  The hotel made a fitting backdrop for my climactic experience:  a magnificently chandeliered lobby led to a glowing Art Deco terrarium.  I’d never seen anything quite as enchanting as that twenty-foot long azure pool surrounded by tropical trees and plants.  I bought a Pepsi and sat by the steamy blue water, elated, perhaps high on chlorine fumes.

            After my initial bedazzlement, reality sank in.  It hit me that I was all by myself in a very strange environment.  I’d been assigned to share a room on the sixth floor with two sophisticated Madison High girls, who barely tolerated my presence.  I had no one to share my excitement with, and I missed my parents.  Go figure:  despite the fact that All State Orchestra was a huge deal for me, and despite my alleged angelic playing, they did not come to Atlantic City for the concert.  I don’t remember why.  As the middle of four children, I was typically neglected, so their absence felt pretty normal.  But now, sitting by the pool, I began to feel alone and bitterly disappointed.  Am I still bitter at age 69?  Yes!

            The Madison High music director, a paunchy fellow in his fifties, evidently noticed my loneliness, and invited me to come to his room to get something.  That something turned out to be a wet, disgusting kiss.  In those days, abusive behavior by teachers or priests was not a known topic.  I assumed it was my fault.  Filled with shame, I ran down the hall to my room.  Thankfully the other girls weren’t there.  I went to bed and wept into my pillow.   The triumph of my weekend seemed ruined. 

            Saturday morning after orchestra practice, I struck up with a nice girl from the cello section, another be-pimpled outcast.  We wandered down the boardwalk, pushing against the cold wind.  In February of 1958, Atlantic City was a wasteland of dilapidated buildings along an abandoned seafront.  We struggled out to the end of a long pier to visit the only open concession, a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum, featuring ghoulish oddities from around the world.  Shrunken heads stared back at me from a dusty shelf.  What were they thinking?

            Happily, having a friend served to dispel the gloom and weirdness of the weekend.  Over lunch we got more and more excited about the upcoming performance.  The concert took place at 2:00 p.m. in a big hall, filled to capacity with enthusiastic families.  Achilles beamed at us – something we’d never experienced – and raised his nice, new baton with a spectacular flourish.  For the last time, I became part of the huge sound of a full orchestra.  Afterward, to my surprise and delight, Carol appeared out of nowhere to hug me and tell me how great we sounded.  When she had heard that the parents wouldn’t be there, she had driven over from her college outside of Philadelphia.  That really meant a lot to me.  And we did sound terrific!  I kept the souvenir recording for years, tears welling up every time I listened.

            If only my career as cellist had ended on this more or less high note.  But no… the cello was destined to become my albatross, a permanent burden of guilt and obligation.  At the end of that school year, I was asked to play a solo for our senior recital.  Talk about anti-climax!  Here is a faithful narration of what happened.

            Toward the end of the recital my name was announced.  An accompanist sat down at the piano, enviably located in the safety of the orchestra pit.  No such luck for me:  I had to lug my instrument up the stairs onto a brightly lit stage.  I jammed the peg into a crack on the floor and sat down at an angle to the audience.  There was no music stand to hide behind, since I’d memorized my selection.  There I sat, straddling the cello, with my by-now, size-ten dress pumps sticking out at either side.  The accompanist played the opening chords; with a confident swoop of the bow, I launched into my solo. 

            Suddenly it occurred to me that I was playing cello by myself, on a stage in front of a big audience.  I looked up at the rows and rows of expectant faces.  I had no idea what notes came next.  “Oops!” I murmured, quite audibly, and stopped playing. The audience response was equally audible:  titters and giggles, followed by rustling and shuffling of feet.  I could have perished on the spot and been eternally grateful, no matter which direction I found myself flying, but this was not to be. 

            Fortunately, the experienced accompanist kept right on playing.  Her chords began to sound familiar, and I relocated myself in the music.  Despite my trembling – which perhaps enhanced my stiff vibrato -- I managed to scrape through to the end of the piece.  Wonder of wonders:  my mother, who actually attended this recital, somehow managed to be thrilled by my performance!

            Did I get to stop playing the cello after high school?  Are you kidding?  With my angelic playing?  That summer, my parents took me and my younger siblings to Heidelberg, Germany for a sabbatical year abroad, and there, wouldn’t you know it, they signed me up for lessons with a fine professional cellist, Herr von Bulow. 

I hated practicing and hated going to the lessons, because I knew that the poor man hated listening to me.  He hated it so much, that he generally grabbed my instrument from me after a few bars and spent most of the hour talking or demonstrating.  I was very grateful.  To make matters worse, my parents decided to splurge on me at this point and buy me a good German cello.  They asked Herr von Bulow to help with the selection.  My fate was sealed. 

            When we returned to the States the following summer, I happily prepared to leave for Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota.  The parents didn’t have time to take me out to the Midwest, so I took the train by myself, loaded down with two suitcases, a few smaller bags, and of course, my accursed cello.  I had to change not only trains, but stations in Chicago -- and then got on the wrong train to Minnesota!  The conductor discovered this when he punched my ticket, and heroically righted the wrong.  At a small way-station, he had the engineer stop our train as well as the train I was supposed to be on, which was running on a track parallel to ours.  He took the big suitcases, I grabbed the cello and the rest of my bags, and we ran across a train-yard full of tracks to get me onto the right train.  Somehow, having to carry my stupid cello across all those tracks and then through the narrow aisles of several train cars, with people staring as we banged along, brought my resentment of the beast into focus.  Here I was, setting out on a great solo adventure, and I had to lug along this tiresome burden from my past.

            The cello soon disappeared into the closet.  After one semester of college orchestra, I stopped playing it completely -- even though my husband-to-be played the bass viol, and very beautifully, I thought.  After he and I were married, we played some duets, and I played with occasional small groups.  The best part was being able to assure my parents that, yes, I was playing my cello.  However, when my husband got a job teaching at Oberlin College in Ohio, I stopped playing altogether.  In Oberlin, folks who were interested in playing trio music were Conservatory musicians, way above my league.

            The cello sat forlorn and forgotten in one closet after another, while I went back to piano.  It was much easier and more gratifying to fumble around on an old upright than tackle those four strings.  But there was no escape!  Every time I visited home, and sometimes on phone calls in between visits, Mama would ask me if I was still playing the beautiful cello she and Dad had paid so much money for in Germany.  “Now and then,” I would say, “but I play the piano a lot.”

            “You were such a good cellist,” she’d scold.  “I hope you will keep it up.”

            When I was a divorcee in my forties, my sons left home for college and I moved from financial security in Oberlin to a new home in Massachusetts, with no source of income.  Desperate for money, I pulled the dusty cello out of its latest closet and decided the time had come for a complete break with my unwanted soul-mate.  After all, it was a valuable German instrument.  Maybe it would bring enough money to pay the bills for a few months while I looked for work.  At that time, my parents had separated after fifty years of marriage, and my mother was living nearby in Northampton.  I certainly had no intention of telling her about this minor rupture.  She was already suffering from a major one. 

            I drove to a stringed instrument shop in Amherst with my cello crammed into the passenger seat beside me – our last trip together.  As it turned out, it needed extensive repairs and wasn’t that valuable to begin with.  I gratefully accepted a few hundred dollars and set out for home.  On the way, I picked up my mother, who was coming for dinner.  Admittedly, I was feeling guilty… but I wasn’t worried.  Mama hadn’t mentioned my cello for a year or two, and there was no way she could know of the crime I’d just committed.     We drove up the mountain road to my house, admiring the fall foliage.   Suddenly she turned to me. “What was the name of your cello teacher in Germany?”

            If there had been an air bag in the steering wheel, I’m sure that my dropped jaw would have detonated it.  “Herr von Bulow,” I croaked.

            “Where is your cello?  You still have it, don’t you?”

            I hedged.  “Well, it’s out of commission right now.  It needs a lot of repair work.  So… what would you like for dinner?”

            “What do you mean, it needs repair?”

            “The neck is out of line, and it would cost a lot to fix it.  That’s not something I can take on at this point.  So… what do you want for dinner, chicken or fish?”

            When I finally confessed a few years later, she was, indeed, very upset.  “You were so good at the cello!  How could you give it up?  How could you sell it, after we paid so much money for it?!”  As she went on and on, I started to realize that there would be no getting rid of my albatross.  It was with me for good, beyond rhyme or reason.  Otherwise, how could you explain this anomaly:  My siblings had become more proficient on their instruments than I ever had on mine.  They, too, had been given expensive instruments and private instructors.  Then Carol quit playing the piano, Ruthie abandoned her clarinet and Ron gave up his oboe.  But it was the demise of my cello that Mama would lament, over and over through the years, repeating her refrain at one family gathering after another. 

            My son, Pete always found this musical guilt trip hilarious.  What could be more entertaining than to see his mom scolded by her mom over something as ludicrous as a cello?  Despite my frantic signals and grimaces, he still loves to get her going.  “So, Nana… whatever became of Mom’s cello?” 

            My mother gives me a look of reproach, as though I’ve betrayed her on some deeper level of morality than I could possibly fathom.  “You were so good at the cello,” she moans.  “It’s such a pity you gave it up!” 

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