Davis Concert Hall is packed. Next to me, my two ten-year-olds settle
themselves into plush seats. Lizzy
wiggles. Her legs dangle. She lets the seat fold her up like a fetus,
then unfolds it again. Molly peruses the
program -- thick, shiny, color-printed. Her
brow furrows slightly over the long lists of musicians as she parses the
multi-syllabic ethnicities of America. The
house lights dim, and the stage brightens, highlighting a tidy array of black
and white, skirts and trousers, gleaming curved wood and resting bows. The seat
reserved for the concertmaster – the principal player of the first violin section
-- waits, portentous. The podium is as
yet lacking the dash and verve of its black-tailed conductor.
In the anticipatory hush, a lone
figure scuttles out, thoroughly un-conductor-like, from stage left. There
is no way for a tardy performer to cross this expectant and unforgiving expanse
unobtrusively, but he tries. He scoots
into his seat, which is tucked away at the back, right of center.
Nine hundred people giggle at the
late violist.
Q:
What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A: A viola player.
Giggling at violists is a long and
revered orchestral tradition. The instruments themselves are awkwardly large
for their shoulder-held position, acoustically too small for the deeper tones
they carry, and utterly unfamiliar to the general public. Those who take up the viola are relegated to reading
the obscure alto clef, playing mid-range harmony, and sitting behind the bulky
cellos. As such, they are often
suspected of being a pack of underachievers – perhaps failed violinists who
snuck into the orchestra for the free cocktails and Brie appetizers. They are the odd ducks and the orphaned
cousins.
Or should I say… we?
I played the viola from age eight to
fourteen – long enough to demonstrate no particular innate talent, but not long
enough to gain mastery through brute determination. As such, I’ve spent three decades assuming
that the viola didn’t make much of a dent in either my musical knowledge or the
clay of my character. But is my violist nature
something that could ever be obscured by the dust on my battered black
instrument case?
Q:
Why don't violists play hide and seek?
A: Because no one will look for them.
The stage lights in Davis brighten a
bit more, and the concertmaster appears.
He leads the tuning – an effort that seems more ceremonial than indispensable
– with flourish and aplomb. Lizzy leans
toward me to whisper: “He sits at the front because he’s the best, right?”
Lizzy is often anxious about who is
the best. When string lessons were first
offered last year at University Park Elementary, Lizzy took up the violin.
“Yes”, I tell her. She jiggles her legs some more, nodding.
Lizzy’s twin is more likely to
compete with herself than to compete with others. She is he kind of kid who wants to create a
science fair project that no child has ever created before, and select a
birthday party theme for which no company has ever dreamed of printing
napkins. She is not jiggling.
At my own elementary school, budding
violinists and cellists abounded, and at least three kids were drawn to the
impressive upright bass. But no eight-year-old
wanted to be a violist – except for me. The
orchestra teacher seemed perplexed, albeit willing to accommodate my peculiar
choice. Lacking any actual small violas
in the school’s limited collection, she restrung a three-quarter-size violin. The tone was poor, but not as terrible as it
would have been if she’d tried to do the same thing with one of the half-size
instruments the other kids were playing.
“It’s a good thing you have long arms,” she remarked, assessing my
scrawny frame. It was true; sweaters
invariably crawled up my wrists, leaving gaps of pale skin and blue veins. I was perfectly suited to apelike brachiating
on the monkey-bars – and to the viola.
The conductor takes his stand with
satisfying pomp and emotionality. He,
like the principal violinist, receives applause just for existing.
Q:
How do you tell when a violist is out of tune?
A: The bow is moving.
A college friend of mine knew dozens
of viola jokes, all of which made himself the butt of his own intensely nerdy
humor. I didn’t fully understand the context for this until I met his equally
musically talented but much more self-consciously-cool identical twin. The
viola can be a state of mind.
I chose the viola for reasons that
were obvious, and reasons that were not.
My dad played the cello. My big
sister played the violin, and although I admired her, years of being
accidentally called “Sarah” had made me wary.
The viola lacked the high E string of the violin. Having listened to Sarah’s efforts, I saw
that as a plus. The bass seemed both too
unwieldly and too attention-grabbing.
That kind of difference – the class-clown kind of difference -- was
merely another kind of sameness. I was differently different. I was a seemingly innocuous eight-year-old
who occupied a mental island all my own.
I was a violist.
The music swells around us, well
balanced. Lizzy is now avidly watching
to see whether any of the violinists mix up their bow strokes. She is the arbiter of synchronicity.
Molly has put aside the program and is
leaning back in her seat. I have no idea
what she is thinking.
All through third and fourth grade,
my odd instrument set me apart only in that nobody could share my music
stand. My version of “Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star” sounded precisely as bad as everybody else’s. We played “Lightly
Row” and “Christmas Songs I” and “Israeli Songs” and “Americana”. We played our fourth fingers painfully flat
and our F-naturals erroneously sharp. We
played slurs as staccato and staccato as slurs.
We let our wrists slump, let our bows slip miles from the bridge, and
got hopelessly lost on the sixteenth notes.
With the exception of two small virtuosos, Hannah and Atara, we were
unequivocally dreadful -- violins, cellos, basses, and lone viola alike.
Q:
What is the range of a viola? A: About
thirty feet, if you kick it hard enough.
In fifth grade, though, I found
myself with a stand-partner: a boy named Ray with a sweetly unassuming manner. Ray went
to a different elementary school, but he and I ended up sharing a stand for
four years. We were cautiously friends,
across the treacherous divide of gender.
My partnership with Ray was not due to any increased interest in the
viola among the diminutive local population, but rather the result of an
unearned promotion. The All District
Orchestra was primarily comprised of sixth graders. The precocious young Hannahs and Ataras were
invited to join -- and so, it seemed, were Ray and I. Because, talent or no talent, real orchestras
need violas.
Q:
How do you get two viola players to play in tune? A: Shoot one of them.
Brahms’s German Requiem is a complex
piece of music for an orchestra and choir to tackle in Fairbanks, Alaska. I will not be surprised if there are a few
flubs, a few squawks, a few off-key notes.
I also know that, barring someone outright dropping their instrument, I
probably won’t notice. I never learned
to tune my own instrument by ear alone.
If I was out of my league playing
with slightly older kids from five different elementary schools, I was even
more misplaced the following year when I was tapped to join the elementary
section of the Long Island String Festival.
The combined population of Nassau and Suffolk Counties in 1984 was 2.6
million people. From this population
base, the directors of the event were able to pull children of astonishing
experience and talent – pigtailed starlets and freckled prodigies with shiny
instruments and proudly hovering parents.
They were also able to scrape up a few violists.
I did my grade-school best to
practice the music in advance. I stared
in confusion at different keys. I tapped
my foot to different time signatures, got lost, and started over. Playing repetitive rest-laced harmony, I
wondered what the songs actually sounded like.
I showed up, quaking slightly, for our
single day of rehearsal. It was easy to identify
the violists; we were the awkward little bunch who didn’t recognize a soul –
not from private lessons, or recitals, or invitations to entertain foreign
dignitaries. Out grubby instrument cases
bore rental codes etched by public elementary schools.
Even when tested among my mediocre peers,
I merited only the ninth seat out of eleven.
I knew that this made me, officially, the third-worst musician in the
room, but I was glad to be at the back, safely hidden. At the ripe old age of eleven,
I was one of the oldest people present, and my long right arm would no doubt
flail away on the upbow when I should have been on the down.
As our conductor led us into the
first piece – as, at the wave of her hands, the music poured from beneath the
deft little fingers of the doe-eyed people around me – she started crying. I’m not talking about a slight glint in her
eye; these were full-on mascara-smearing tears.
“It’s so beautiful” she wept.
“You’re all so little… and it’s so beautiful!”
This, of course, was totally weird
and embarrassing. For one thing, adults
weren’t ever supposed to cry, and for another, who the heck cries because
something is lovely? But even as the
tears of the conductor were horrifying, so too were they magical – so magical
that I remember them, thirty-three years later, with a strange luminosity. Perhaps I hadn’t known, prior to the sixth
grade, that beauty could be so intense that it could overflow -- but I learned
it that day. I saw artistry running in
rivulets down the face of a stranger.
And, although I did not deserve it, I was part of that exquisite
joy. I was part of the music.
At about 80 minutes, his German
Requiem is the longest piece of music Brahms ever wrote. Toward the end of the concert, Lizzy is half
asleep in her overlarge seat. I glance
over at Molly. Her head is not nodding,
but she mouths, “How much longer?” I
grin, and indicate that it won’t be long now.
Molly nods, phlegmatic. Molly can
wait. Molly is not one to demand
excessive attention. Molly is, as of the
inception of her orchestral instruction last year, a violist.
Q:
Why are viola jokes so short? A: So
violinists can understand them.
Spurred by a properly parental
instinct to encourage my kids, I took my viola out of hibernation last
year. I tightened the loose pegs, tuned
it up with the crutch of a digital tuner, and sat down to share Molly’s music
-- in the alto clef. I played. My fingers fumbled, remembered, fumbled
again. As I sawed my way through “Happy
Birthday” and “Country Dance” I felt duty falling by the wayside and happiness
overtaking me. Not tear-soaked joy, no –
but perhaps the shadow of the memory of it.
Violists don’t get many solos, but
they are nonetheless in the thick of things.
The heart of things. They are the
subtle undertones, the harmony, the fabric of the music. They do not soar, they do not trill, and they
do not boom. You may not have noticed
them, but that’s okay. They are part of
the music.
