Music and intimacy [corrected version-w/musicians' names]

Music and intimacy [corrected version-w/musicians' names]

Thank you for responding to my musings about intimacy and memory. It means a lot to hear from you.

Music and intimacy go together like waking up and coffee. I’ll never know why that is, but I do know that my first goal in writing fiction has been to get music on the page. It’s an impossible quest, but so be it.

As a young person, I thought I would be a professional viola player. I trained through my early twenties; practiced, practiced, practiced; and performed frequently. By frequently, I mean that at one point or another, I have performed or sightread much of the familiar classical canon.

As a college freshman I rotated as first chair viola in our orchestra.

What is the viola?

Think alto in the choir, the middle voice that buttresses—and often creates—harmony. The instrument that must attune to melody and bass.

The viola is bigger than a violin, and strung a fifth lower, which turns out to be an octave higher than the cello. The viola lives in the musical interior.

In chamber music (music meant for a living room, small ensembles), you play with three or four or five other musicians, no conductor, guided by what the music tells you. On rare, memorable, occasions, you have liftoff—your viola is in full embrace, you’re in sync with the other players, and music overtakes your body.

The first time I heard the Schumann Piano Quartet (E Flat Major, Op. 47) was when I sightread it. During law school, I played chamber music weekly with members of the MIT math department. These players may have been world famous mathematicians, but I was oblivious to their status. We were about the music.

When we got to the third movement of the Schumann, I was stricken. Where had I been that I’d never heard this piece, let alone played it? It felt like love and longing, sorrow and memory. Marked Andante Cantabile, the movement is meant to be played “singingly” at the pace of a stroll.

If you have 7 minutes to watch/listen to this incredible piece, you’ll hear the viola undergird the melody, and then pick it up 4 minutes and 10 seconds in. (In the recording the violist wears a navy blue gown.) These four musicians performed at the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival in 2014 (Joyce Yang piano, Amy Schwartz Moretti violin, Beth Guterman Chu viola, Carter Brey cello). I love this recording.

Listening to this music is, for me, an indescribable intimacy. I hope it speaks to you.

Love, Martha

P.S. My conversation with the four ballerina Swans of Harlem at Politics & Prose, was extraordinary. Here’s the event on YouTube, if you want to check it out.

The Swans of Harlem author Karen Valby.

Prima ballerina Lydia Abarca Mitchell.

Ballerina Sheila Rohan.

Ballerina Karlya Shelton-Benjamin.

Ballerina Marica Lynn Sells.

P.P.S. If you’re in the DMV, please join us Friday night, May 10, at Potters House in Adams Morgan at 6 PM. I’m interviewing Julia Ridley Smith about her new short story collection, Sex Romp Gone Wrong.