During the summers after fourth and fifth grade, my mom signed me up for lessons with Miss Blakesley, who lived in the California desert town of Ridgecrest, where I went to school, in a trailer cluttered with music books, magazines, houseplants, and cat toys. In her living room window, an air conditioner kept up a continual, comforting whir. She taught the Suzuki violin method, starting with that anthem of beginning violinists everywhere, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and its variations: taka-taka-ta-ka, and taka-taka-taka-taka. Eventually we moved on to “Lightly Row” and “The Happy Farmer.” Shinichi Suzuki developed the Suzuki method in Japan as a way to teach children music through immersion, saturation, and ear training, and it emphasized recitals and group playing. Miss Blakesley arranged regular, Suzuki-style recitals for her beginning students to play their pieces together in neat rows, but she also used the Suzuki music books to teach her students how to read music. And in her weekly lessons, we worked slowly but surely through Suzuki Book I.
I learned one main thing in these early lessons: violin is hard. To begin with, there’s the way you hold the instrument and the way you hold the bow. Hold either one wrong, and your teacher will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that you will never be able to play beautiful music. So, wanting to play beautiful music, you focus on bending your thumb on the bow just so, placing your pinky just so, holding your left wrist just so, and bending your fingers onto the fingerboard just so. As soon as you focus on one, though, another inevitably goes out of whack. Bend your right thumb, and your left wrist creeps up. Hold your left wrist down, and your left fingers flatten on the strings, your right thumb straightens, and your right pinky flies off into space.
All this happens before there’s any consideration of sound, let alone music. That comes lessons and lessons later, when you work on tone, and pitch, and the pressure of the bow on the strings, and the running of the bow hairs parallel to the bridge, and all the other thousand things that you must learn to do if you ever want to make beautiful music.
I played and played, most of the time getting it wrong, but after every lesson, getting it a little more right. Miss Blakesley gave me a sticker for each piece I completed, and I especially liked the strawberry scratch-and-sniff ones. My sister, Ann, who took lessons with me, favored plum. She liked it so much that she peeled one off her practice sheet and stuck it on the chin rest of her tiny one-tenth-size violin, where it remains to this day, announcing its cheerful message of “Great job!,” the paper worn thin but still smelling faintly fruity. Ann’s lesson came before mine. While she played, I waited, sitting on the brown plaid couch, reading a book, looking at an old issue of Reader’s Digest, or just gazing out the window at the trailer next door. Ann often got frustrated, and Miss Blakesley would end the lesson early, looking over at me exasperatedly. But I sympathized with my sister. Though five years older, and a bit more patient, I knew.
Violin was hard.
Really hard.
Eventually, Ann gave up violin for cello. I kept with it, though, taking lessons, going to orchestra practice, and gradually improving. In junior high and high school, my friends and I listened to Journey, The Cars, The Who, and Pink Floyd, but secretly, I really loved the music we played in orchestra. I loved Bach, Corelli, Barber, Stravinsky. In high school, I worked my way up from fourth chair, to third, to second, and finally, in my senior year, to concert mistress. I loved how the music flowed through me and around me, and I relished orchestra’s peculiar combination of competition and art. Orchestra was my home, my second family. My best friend, Michele, played cello, and we hung around each other all the time, before, during, and after orchestra practice, our friendship growing out of our shared love of orchestra.
I grew up on land my parents had bought in the early 1970s in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, about thirty miles from Ridgecrest, where I went to school. On weekends at home, I liked to take my violin down by the creek, prop a green and off-white book of Bach’s unaccompanied violin sonatas up on a rough granite boulder, and play. My music echoed through the canyon, into the wilderness beyond. The sun heated the wood of my violin, and I smelled the rosin on my bow, which was the same smell as the pitch from the piñon trees that covered the mountains by our house, pitch that covered my hands with dark splotches when Ann and I searched for piñon nuts, digging them out of the small, stiff cones. The violin’s wood smelled like the pine, maple, and willow trees all around me. And the horsehair bow, warmed in the sun, smelled like the tail of Trixie, our horse, when she stood in the sun in the meadow, swishing at flies. Playing my violin there by the creek brought all these elements of my life together, and at the same time it took me beyond them, into a realm of pure music, pure light, pure beauty.
It was such difficult music, though. Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas have triple and quadruple stops, three or four notes played at a time in impossibly complex chords, sixteenth-and thirty-second notes swirling like a raging, black river across the page. I loved those pieces so much that I’d try, over and over, to play them, knowing exactly what I wanted the music to sound like. I knew my interpretation was only approximate, but I kept trying.
Sometimes, when Bach got too hard, my eyes wandered from the page, and I’d play new notes and melodies, improvising on his basic melodies and chords. My notes, now my truly mine, wandered on the pine-scented air through the canyon, echoing off the granite cliffs.
As a freshman at UC Irvine, I signed up for orchestra, which allowed me to receive free private lessons with a violin professor. At my first lesson, the kindly looking, white-haired professor asked me to play something for him. I brought out my book of beloved Bach sonatas, placing it tentatively on the black music stand next to his wooden shelf heavy with theory and history books. I turned to a movement in Sonata IV called “Ciaccona,” one of the most beautiful, and most difficult, pieces in the whole Bach repertoire. I’d never really mastered any of these sonatas, and out in the woods, by my home, that didn’t matter. But here, with a real violin professor, it did.
As I played, I put everything I had—my heart, my soul, my whole body—into the music. I must really be impressing him, I thought. I swayed and strained, yearning for the music I knew Bach intended. I was so deeply involved in my interpretation of Bach’s bewildering beauty that it took me a moment to feel the professor’s hand tapping my shoulder.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “That’s fine now. Okay.”
He spoke in the tones one uses to comfort an accident victim.
“That’s a difficult piece for you, no?” he said.
I nodded meekly.
“And I see that you love it very much.”
I nodded again in vigorous agreement, not quite seeing where he was going with this.
“But you shouldn’t play it.”
I stared at him, aghast. Didn’t he hear what I had been playing? The beautiful music? Bach, for God’s sake? The “Ciaccona”? What didn’t he understand? What kind of professor was he, anyway?
“For you, it’s too hard,” he went on coldly, methodically, as if diagnosing the probable cause of death in a cadaver. “You need to work on technique. You need to work on skills. And I don’t think that piece is what you need to work on now.”
I went back for a few more lessons with him, and I stayed in orchestra until the end of the semester. But I felt defeated, and before long I put my violin away and didn’t crack open its case for many years.
I studied English in college and moved to Ohio for graduate school at Ohio State. I met a lovely twenty-one-year-old boy in Larry’s Bar, near the university. He was an undergraduate student at Ohio State, and he had long, blond hair and wore a black leather jacket, looking like a cross between a biker and a choir boy. I was smitten by his sweet badness, by his intelligence, by his daringness. In one of our early conversations at Larry’s I told him I played violin, and so for our first date he arranged for us to see the Columbus Symphony, which played Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” and Vivaldi’s