Atlantic Classics
9781465505491
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Musical adventures largely depend on your instrument. Go traveling with a bassoon or clarionet packed in your trunk, and romance will pass you by. But far otherwise will events shape themselves if you set forth with a fiddle. The moment I turned my back upon the humdrum flute and embraced the 'cello, that instrument of romance, things began happening thick and fast in a hitherto uneventful life. I found that to sally forth with your 'cello couchant under your arm, like a lance of the days of chivalry, was to invite adventure. You tempted Providence to make things interesting for you, up to the moment when you returned home and stood your fat, melodious friend in the corner on his one leg—like the stork, that other purveyor of joyful surprises. One reason why the 'cellist is particularly liable to meet with musical adventures is because the nature of his talent is so plainly visible. The parcel under his arm labels him FIDDLER in larger scare-caps than Mr. Hearst ever invented for headlines. It is seen of all men. There is no concealment possible. For it would, indeed, be less practicable to hide your 'cello under a bushel than to hide a bushel under your 'cello. The non-reducible obesity of this instrument is apt to bring you adventures of all sorts: wrathful sometimes, when urchins recognize it as a heaven-sent target for snowballs; or when adults audibly quote Dean Swift's asinine remark, 'He was a fiddler and therefore a rogue.' Absurd, sometimes, as when the ticket-chopper in the subway bars your path under the misapprehension that you are carrying a double-bass; and when the small boys at the exit offer you a Saturday Evening Post in return for 'a tune on that there banjo.' But more often the episodes are pleasant, as when your bulky trademark enables some kindred spirit to recognize you as his predestined companion on impromptu adventures in music. I was at first almost painfully aware of my 'cello's conspicuousness because I had abandoned for it an instrument so retiring by nature that you might carry it till death in your side pocket, yet never have it contribute an unusual episode to your career. But from the moment when I discovered the exaggerated old fiddle in the attic, slumbering in its black coffin, and wondered what it was all about, and brought it resurrection and life,—events began. I have never known exactly what was the magic inherent in the dull, guttural, discouraged protests of the strings which I experimentally plucked that day. But their songs-without-words-or-music seemed to me pregnant with promises of beauty and romance far beyond the ken of the forthright flute. So then and there I decided to embark upon the delicate and dangerous enterprise of learning another instrument. It was indeed delicate and dangerous because it had to be prosecuted as secretly as sketching hostile fortifications. Father must not suspect. I feared that if he heard the demonic groans of a G string in pain, or the ghoulish whimperings of a manhandled A, he would mount to the attic, throw back his head, look down upon me through those lower crescents of his spectacles which always made him look a trifle unsympathetic, and pronounce that baleful formula: 'My son, come into my study!' For I knew he labored under the delusion that I already 'blew in' too much time on the flute, away from the companionship of All Gaul, enteuthen exelaunei, and Q.E.D. As for any additional instrument, I feared that he would reduce it to a pulp at sight, and me too.
