Still-Life with Cello | Credit: Sxc.hu | Click to embiggen
Today is this first day of the first session of 30 Days to Creativity an eClass created by my friend Debra and myself. In keeping with the spirit of the class, I’m actually participating – and I’m up before seven AM and feeling “writey,” so I think it’s working already.
One of my on-going projects is a piece of fan-fiction set in the Star Trek: the Next Generation world. It’s something I started because of an Idea niggling at my brain, and something I continue because playing in someone else’s sandbox can be a way to have fun writing without the pressure of publication. I’m enjoying the exercise. In any case, my main non-canon character there is a cello student, and that story, combined with today’s prompt, has me thinking about my own first cello teacher: Dan Guillian.
I was nine when I met Mr. Guillian. My best friend Jill was taking violin lessons, and I was obsessed with her violin. Sensing that she’d never be able to practice without something to distract me, she told him that I might be interested in learning an instrument. A few days later, I was called out of class, and asked to visit the basement of the school.
In those days – Colorado in the 1970′s – music lessons were offered by the schools, and we could rent instruments for just a few dollars a month. Mr. Guillian and I met, and I remember taking an instant liking to the merry twinkle in his eye, and his impish sense of humor. I wanted to play the violin, but so did everyone, and really, I’m too short to be a decent violinist, so he suggested I try the cello. “You,” he told me, as if he were reading my future, “have Cello Hands.”
And so, I became a cello student. One of only two young cellists in our school – the other was a sixth-grader named Connie – I got to leave my regular classes for an hour each week, and make my way to the basement music room, where we’d have our group lesson. Mr. Guillian was demanding, but made the process fun at the same time. “I have a jar,” he would tell us, in a tone that was never entirely joking, “full of pickled thumbs. It’s where I put all the thumbs that aren’t holding instruments correctly.” And so we’d all make sure our thumbs were resting against the necks of our instruments, not squeezing, but balancing the weight.
We used the Suzuki books (really, are there any modern string or piano players who did NOT go through the Suzuki books), which are based on learning to play by ear and by rote, and learning the names of notes later. To this day, the first time I look at a piece of music, I interpret the black notes as fingerings – 4 3 4 2, extend, 1, etc. – instead of G, F#, G, E, (extend) A. I know how it should sound, but have to THINK about the proper nomenclature.
It may not seem like it, but nine is really old to be starting a stringed instrument. Most really good cellists and violinists start when they’re five or six – as soon as they have the upper-arm strength to hold a bow. But my late start never bothered me. The Jefferson County Public Schools were amazingly supportive of all their music students, and Mr. Guillian gave me his daughter’s cello (though I never knew it until years later) to practice on at home, so I wouldn’t have to carry such a large instrument (when I started, my half-sized cello was nearly as tall as I was) back and forth all the time.
The next school year saw my first concert as a cellist and not just a choir member (though choir was always a big part of school, as well). Air on a G String (Bach) was rewritten for a string ensemble, with Mr. Guillian’s son, who was college aged, but seemed so old and slightly exotic, playing the lead melody. (Someone wrote lyrics for it as well, dubbing it “One String Melody.” A Google search turns up NOTHING about this, but I KNOW there were lyrics.) I experienced my first county orchestra (we’d all walk together to the junior high school for rehearsal), my first summer music camp, my first real kiss…(from Gil, a cellist from a rival school). It was also the year I got my first real pair of stockings (as opposed to tights) which I wore to an orchestra performance where Mr. Guillian had a solo on his double bass, and managed to make a tux looked jaunty.
He had a white goatee and twinkling blue eyes, and his voice was firm, but never harsh. To my nine-year-old self he seemed as old as Albus Dumbledore must have seemed to Harry Potter, though he lacked the voluminous robes, and he gave me music in a way no one ever had before, or would again. (In reality, he probably wasn’t much older than I am now, but when you’re nine, and a small nine-year-old, at that, someone in their forties seems positively venerable.)
Years later, at the jaded age of not-quite-16, I would find myself walking out of a master class with Danish cellist Anders Grøn, who was teaching at the National Cello Institute’s summer program in Pomona, CA, and coming face-to-face with one of Mr. Guillian’s colleagues from the Colorado public school system. I would smile at her, and say hello, but just before I had the opportunity to ask her about my old teacher, she would be pulled away.
My cello sits upstairs in it’s special humidity-regulating case, balanced against the back wall of the library closet. I take it out every few months, but my nails are too long to really play (and I like them that way – all my life, the rosin for the bow would give me these incredibly strong nails that I had to keep cutting short, and now I have lovely sparkly acrylic tips, and spend whole afternoons getting mani-pedis a couple of times a month), and writing and voice acting are my biggest creative pursuits these days.
Still, every so often, I’ll see a large jar in the condiments aisle of the grocery store filled with something like marinated mushrooms, something I would never buy, and I can’t help but think of Mr. Guillian and his collection of pickled thumbs.
