He laughed as his manicured hands came to rest gently on top of the spotlessly clean book on top of the stained mahogany coffee table. Gracing the cover in a clean, San-serif font, the text became indecipherable as he picked up the book and fanned the pages. Though it wasn’t as if I really needed to read it, as if I hadn’t read the title a thousand and one times. If the stories surrounding him were true, and part of me hoped they were, I was in the presence of a god. Legend goes that he trained at New England Conservatory for undergrad, then Julliard for the MFA. He had soloed with all the major capital orchestras throughout continental Europe and done a short stint in Seoul. Now serving as the concertmaster for the National Symphony Orchestra and founder of a very avant-garde trio, there had been murmurs of him accepting a handful of select students.
“Can we try this?” I repeat.
“As a fellow artist, I do understand your conundrum. But as a violinist, your situation is going to challenge me significantly.”
“Well, you share the name with Galamian. I think we should try,” I replied, proud to show off my hastily-gained violin pedagogue knowledge.
“Just for that, I’ll take you,” he says.
“We’ll start next Monday. You need to go get your own violin. Go see Craig, he should be able to help you out.” He wrote a telephone number on a crunched-up napkin covered in pocket lint.
I exit his studio with mixed emotions. Awed and thankful that my plan worked. Nauseated with fear, because I was about to attempt something extremely difficult.
“Your work is crap, Xavier, and you know it! It’s been crap for two whole years!” I paused the movie. Two years. Xavier, I feel your pain. It had been two years since I had published my first novel, and the world had moved on since then. I had a day job as a political columnist, but hopeless romantic that I was, I wanted to write stories with happy endings. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any pet projects going on, owing to the writer’s block that attacked with vengeance six months ago. Life is supposed to mirror art, but unfortunately, it seemed like my art was mirroring life, and too closely at that. Which is why I decided to take a new approach to writing. Writing stories is all about voices, and the violin is said to be the closest musical imitation of the human voice. And that’s how I found myself exiting the studio of the venerable Ivan Encheve with a phone number of a luthier minus a 100-dollar deposit check.
“Nia, why are you doing this to me?” My long-suffering, pragmatic roommate was very much against the idea. When I was writing my novel and working to get it published, I was nothing less than savage. I nearly got fired because I kept falling asleep in meetings owing to the all-nighters I pulled editing to perfection. I got lucky when my book hit the best-seller list and the newspaper decided they couldn’t afford to lose me to a magazine.
“You have a day job,” she continued. “Which means you’ll be practicing at night. Which will disturb the neighbors, in addition.”
“I’ll just practice for an hour right after I get home from work. Shouldn’t be too late. And you like classical music anyway.”
Liz threw her hands up. “Alright. But if the neighbors complain ONE TIME, I swear I will make you get rid of it.”
I went for my first lesson the next week. “We are going to start at the beginning,” Ivan said. “First, let’s hold the violin correctly.” He positioned my hands on the neck of the violin and instructed me to adjust my feet for optimum balance and playability. “No, no, like this,” he kept saying, moving my arm one millimeter at a time until I was stiffer than after one of my long-haul transcontinental flights. Then, he demonstrated how to tune, followed by two octaves of the A, C, G, and D scales. And then—“Voila! That’s enough for today. Now, go home and practice. Every day for no less than thirty minutes,” Ivan stated firmly as I zipped and latched the case. I nodded. It didn’t sound too bad. It was only half the practice time I was expecting from myself.
It turns out, however, that I had wildly underestimated the length of a thirty-minute practice session. It was torture, absolute torture. I played in front of a mirror, to make sure my posture was correct, but it was so uncomfortable, I resorted to slouching with both feet pointed forward with the violin on the collarbone, rather than the shoulder. Then there were the actual scales. I drove myself crazy climbing up and down an endless staircase of notes with minimal changes, again and again and again. I had to set the timer for fifteen minutes, take a short break, and come back for another fifteen.
“Please kill me,” I begged Liz. “I can’t stand another minute of practicing.”
“No. Blood is almost impossible to remove from carpet, and I want to get the deposit back on the apartment,” she said heartlessly.
The next Monday, I went back to Ivan.
“How was it?” he asked, with a lifted eyebrow, as if he already expected the worst.
“It was really, really hard. I almost didn’t come today.”
Ivan smiled. “You’ll get the hang of it. Now let’s hear your scales.”
After ten minutes of being reproached for sloppy posture and undergoing a ritual of adjustments, I finally eked out half of a scale. Ivan cringed and stopped me after just a few notes.
“Out of tune. Try again.”
I started from the beginning, and this time, I got all the way to the end of the first octave. After he stopped me, he put on a tuning drone. A horrible, monotonous sound that bored a hole into my brain.
“Listen. Your notes should have a harmonic match to this sound. If you hear the sound waves, you’re out of tune.”
Traumatizing seems a bit too dramatic for this relatively short exercise, but that is the word that I thought of later. Every molecule in my whole body was tensed and bristling as I held the notes until I ran out of bow, each one ending with a scratchy, wispy sound. It was an exercise in introducing a paralyzing tune paranoia. I kept looking at Ivan, waiting for him give me some sort of clue of whether I was in or out of tune, but his face remained maddeningly inscrutable.
And just when I didn’t think things could get any worse, Ivan opened his cell phone and a “click-click-click” noise started coming out.
“You are holding the notes too long,” he said. “Try to hold each note for only two counts on the metronome.”
“So…metronome means the clicking noise?”
Ivan nodded.
I tried again. The drone and the clicking evoked a visceral need to punch someone in the face extremely hard. I gritted my teeth and tasted blood. The pain from my tongue was diminished by my relief when Ivan turned off both noisemakers and pronounced that it was time for his own practice session, and that I was welcome to go home.
“I HATE THIS!” I shouted loudly to no one in particular when I finally stumbled into my apartment. I tossed my instrument on the recliner, then collapsed on the couch. I turned on the television. The station was broadcasting an interview with an Olympic ice skater.
“Would you walk us through your mental preparation before your skating routine?” The interviewer was wearing a patterned skirt and a black short sleeve top with a cowl neck.
The skater laughed. “I try to focus on beautiful things that have some sort of relationship with the theme of the presentation. For example, last year, when I skated to the piece by Sarasate, I would focus on the Sagrada Familia, because it is also from Spain. I would imagine the axel spins and the twists and the stretching as building an intangible cathedral of skating, with music as the foundation.
“What an interesting answer!” The interviewer seemed genuinely intrigued. “You make the art seem so effortless.”
I turned off the television. Effortless. I murmured it over and over to myself. This was definitely the opposite of Jack London’s take on things.
The daily practice didn’t get any easier, but that was to be expected. I went back to Ivan the next week with muted enthusiasm, and more than a little distracted. Effortless. I couldn’t get the word out of my head. Effortless was really not what I was experiencing with this violin learning, or writing, or commuting, or working, or anything, really. I thought about the ice skater and the Sagrada Familia. In the Barcelona versus Madrid battle, I was Manchester United all the way, but the Sagrada Familia was nevertheless remarkable. I wondered if Gaudi would have described his building as effortless.
“Nia, please focus. You are still out of tune and out of sync.” Ivan’s voice drew me back to the studio.
“Ivan?”
Ivan paused the drone and the metronome. “Yes?”
“Will you walk me through your mental preparation before you perform a piece?”
Ivan was taken aback, but not for long. He took out his own instrument, tuned up, and then proceeded to play something with such intensity and fervor that I imagined a tiger had composed it.
“What…was that?” I asked in a small voice when he had finished. I was still too startled to even clap.
“Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane,” he pronounced.
I move my left hand in small circles in front of me to suggest he continue talking.
“To answer your question, I don’t really think much before I perform. If I did, I might be frightened. Instead, I am thinking when I practice, and feeling when I perform.”
“You are feeling when you perform.” I repeat slowly, nodding my head.
“Yes, yes! Music should be about emotions, my dear, if it were all about technique, we would have performers named Jarvis.”
“Or maybe C3PO and R2D2,” I added, grinning. Ivan cringed. “All right. Time for you to leave.”
“Wait, I have one more question. Is playing the violin effortless to you?”
Ivan paused, holding his instrument by the scroll, his arm hanging by his side. I put mine away, I was still afraid of dropping it.
“Effortless? Hardly. I have been with my instrument for maybe forty thousand hours, Nia. I have struggled with scales and etudes and strict teachers and snapped strings and incohesive quartets and insensitive orchestras and dull pieces and terrible salaries and dim-witted managers. I have struggled with phrasing and timing and critics and rosin and bowings.” Here, Ivan paused and laughed gently. “And now I am struggling with my new students.”
“Then…if you have to struggle so much…why do you play?”
“Why do you write?”
I did not see that coming. “Because it’s my job.”
“Yes, I know. I read the newspaper. Why do you write stories? I have your book, I have read it. My wife has read it. My manager has read it. The story is good, very good. I can imagine myself in it. It almost seems like the story wrote itself—as you say, like it was effortless.”
I nodded, waiting for him to continue.
“Actually, not everyone is happy to rehearse for six hours every day. Or to twist in infinite circles on an ice rink at five in the morning. Or to stay up all night dreaming on paper. But we do it. Why do we do it? What else would we do, Nia? You came to learn the violin not to be a violinist, but to continue as a writer. You love writing enough to work at it insanely hard. Effortless art, this is an illusion. Now, leave my studio. I trust that you have work to do.”
I gather my case and leave. Stepping out, I notice that the leaves have begun to change color. Suddenly, I knew what I was going to write next. Eager to run home and get started immediately, I did an effortless little dance.
Laborum Dulce Lenimen.
The End.
Fiction and Company 