We are in the season of the cello, the last stretch of the dying year where days grow short and our nights broaden and deepen beneath Orion the Hunter, and the bears he chases across the heavens. The fullness of fall and harvest is met by the bareness of winter branches. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, and Edward Snow translated,

“…chase the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Who has no house now, will never build one.

Who is alone now, will long remain so, 

will stay awake, read, write long letters

and will wander restlessly up and down

the tree-lined streets, when the leaves are drifting.”

(Herbsttag, Autumn Day)

The season of the cello is above all else a season of longing, which is why the instrument so keenly suits the darkest evening of the year. Traditional Chinese Medicine associates fall with the emotion of grief, the element of metal, and the condition of the lungs, and all of these sensations are present in listening to the cello. The cello and cellist draw a single breath, the instrument seeming to mirror the tender shape of a human body with every sighing pass of the bow. The essence of precious metal smolders and glows at the center of a cello composition, radiating heat like a beacon as the music builds. And despair is never more gorgeous than when played on the cello.

 This yearning aspect of the instrument is at the center of what now brings the cello into the popular imagination in ways that Casals and Rostropovich would never have dreamed possible, starting with Yo-Yo Ma’s Cello Project. Ma initiated the project in 2018, two years before Covid-19 would reframe life as we know it. The Bach cello Suites are the central repertoire for any cellist, and Ma began playing them at age 4. However, Ma’s Cello Project and the repercussions it set off took this cultural chestnut out of its nest as a comfortable standard into a daring new realm, sharpened by the world-crisis of the pandemic.

Ma began his 2018 tour of J.S. Bach’s 6 Unaccompanied Cello Suites as what he called a research project, dedicated specifically to how listening to these compositions might serve as a source of comfort in the midst of grief, and serve as a reassuring companion in difficult times. He performed the Suites as a solo in a single, 2 ½ hour sitting, without an intermission, in response to decades of letters he had received from listeners who described how hearing the Suites “…got them through cancer, radiation, chemotherapy, studying for exams, a divorce, a death, a loss,” Ma told The San Francisco Chronicle in September 30, 2018.

Ma’s explanation of how and why the Suites and their designated instrument produce this human response is poignant. The lone cello plays a single line, although the musical concept is polyphonic. Bach’s compositions ask more than the instrument can technically deliver, says Ma: the suggested presence of notes that are implied, not heard, summons the listener to complete Bach’s thought.

This transaction moves the cello into the realm of the sublime. The original alchemical definition of “sublime” referenced matter being transformed by high heat, morphing into vapor, then condensing and returning to a solid state in purified form.  The original Latin also meant to send spirits up from the underworld (sub, below, limnus, doorway or threshold.) This transformation is evident when even in the skilled hands of the world’s most recognized cellist, the cello’s sound conveys an element of struggle. Ma suggests that hearing the Suites gives the listener the experience of straining to reach the impossible, and then finding solace in that resolution. The listener participates by imagining the notes that the composer and cellist can only partially express. We, as the audience, must fill in the blanks as we cross the threshold.

The first musical instrument used by our ancestors was the human voice. No doubt they hooted challenges to each other across the African savannah, imitated the calls of prey animals, vocalized alarm-signals, cooed sweetly to their babies at bedtime, and began making pure sounds as expressions of fear, wonder, pain, joy and love, long before these sounds could correctly be called words. Today, we might call these “nonsense-syllables”, except that they are not nonsensical at all.  

In his 2007 book, “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body”, Harvard University Press, author Steven Mithen theorizes that these initial systems of sounds were organized into songs, and were sung, rather than spoken in the modern sense. Mithen further argues that the capacity to make music and respond to it is what most absolutely defines us as human, moreso than problem-solving, tool use, or any other conventional developmental markers. This thesis is a daring contradiction of more mainstream anthropologists, notably Steven Pinker, who tend to dismiss music as a functionless byproduct of evolution.

Mithen reasons that music as a system of controlled sounds predated formal verbal language, which explains why our eyes may fill with tears during a Puccini aria, even though we don’t speak a word of Italian. And because the timbre of the cello can sound so much like a human voice, a cello solo may seem to sing notes of intimate, remembered breath so profound that they transcend the need for words with literal meaning.

Traditional cultures around the world fully understood music as medicine, even though contemporary science has just begun to consider this as an actual possibility. Surviving indigenous societies including those of the Americas and Australia maintain their pre-written history through collected and memorized songs for hunting, blessing, offering, trade, property, prayer, and storytelling of every kind.  Sadly, in the industrialized world, this knowledge of music as a healing force seems to be largely lost. One exception is the nigunim, often-wordless Chasidic melodies which begin as vocal music where the singers chant dream-like syllables in hypnotic, repeating waves. 

In this soulful musical form, yearning becomes messianic, treasured as a tool to heal inner dissonance and ultimately deliver musician and listener into a literally divine ecstasy. Mostly melancholy and meditative, nigun also lends itself easily to the searching quality of the cello. The cello’s uniquely conversational ability to mimic the human voice is brilliantly put to use by masters of the nigun form, creating a sighing, sobbing cry of the Jewish Diaspora. 

Some nigunim, like the classic Hungarian piece “Gules, Gules”, trace their origins to a secular, non-Jewish source. According to tradition, a devout Hasid was walking through the forest of Ukraine when he heard the voice of a heartbroken young shepherd singing a lament of lost love. The plaintive melody moved the Rebbe, who freed the song of its earthly connotations and dedicated the new nigun to the soul’s longing for the Shechinah, the supernal mother and most mystical aspect of the Almighty. When the Rebbe met the shepherd-boy again and asked him to sing the song, the boy had forgotten it. This legend illustrates the process of the sublime, elevating the familiar into the cosmic realm – similar, incidentally, to the trajectory of the beloved Christmas hymn “What Child Is This?” which finds its Elizabethan melody in “Greensleeves”, an earlier secular tune that most historians parse as frankly bawdy.

Yo-Yo Ma and “Petunia” (his favorite of his several cellos, built by Domenico Montagnana in 1733, now valued at about $3 million) are undeniably jaunty, but the younger generation of cellists push the instrument into terra incognita. Rock cellists 2Cellos, two irreverent, charismatic young cellists named Stjepan Hauser and Luka Sulic, have toured with Elton John, and leave audiences gasping at their covers of hits by U2, Guns N’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Sting, Coldplay, Nirvana, Muse, and Kings of Leon. Notable for their high-voltage theatrics, they merge the hoofbeats of “The William Tell Overture” with licks from Iron Maiden, and their rendering of AC/DC’s classic “Highway to Hell” went viral as the performers paid homage to the iconic metal-rock band’s lead guitarist Angus Young by duckwalking the cello across the stage.

Even more radical is emerging interest in the neglected legacy of organic minimalist Julius Eastman, a queer, Black, African-American conductor, singer, pianist, choreographer, downtown NYC bon vivant and composer for cello who died unhoused and alone at age 49 in a Buffalo hospital in 1990. Eastman’s work was recently included in this year’s “Tune In Festival” offered by Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, and Eastman’s central work, “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc”, is the focus of an upcoming documentary by cellist, producer and director Marika Hughes for Looking Glass Arts. 

Of the erratic Eastman (he astonished one audience by painting his face silver onstage while performing), Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote, “The brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound.” Although the frequently-homeless Eastman barely left a paper-trail – so far, the scores for only 16 of the estimated 58 pieces he composed have been discovered since his untimely death – a new generation of music-makers continues to excavate and illuminate his legacy. 

Soolip recently spoke with Julliard-trained cello soloist Wendy Law via Zoom from her Manhattan apartment. “I could smell the smoke from Lincoln Center,” she says of a day that changed the world and transformed her life as a young artist. The day was September 11, 2001. Two years later, because Yo-Yo Ma was unavailable, Law was asked to play at the memorial ceremony, “A Tribute to Our Fallen Colleagues” at the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, honoring UN staff and family members of those who lost their lives in the attack on the UN compound in Baghdad. 

A week later, she received a letter from the Secretary General who wrote, “Your cello gave a voice to our emotions at a time when words were simply not enough to express how deeply we mourn the loss of our colleagues, friends and loved ones. Your performance was a vivid demonstration of the power of music to transcend language and culture and bring people together.”

Today, Law is camera-ready, cheeky, chic and sleek. She creates user-friendly phone accessories inspired by her cat, Lucky – the collection is called “Cello Kitty”, cleverly punning on the Sanrio superbrand. She’s an Instagram and TikTok Super-Influencer, with a following that initially exploded because of her online makeup tutorials featuring her own line of color cosmetics. She’s inspired by Beyonce’s “Lemonade,” and is delighted to get out of Dodge after nearly two years in lockdown (she’ll soon be entertaining on cruise-ships).

“The sense of rebellion in me makes me want more than just traditional success as a solo artist,” she says. “I come from a very achievement-minded family background, but my experience at the UN gave me this astounding clarity, that I have a responsibility as an artist, to advocate for others, and to serve.”

As 2021 comes to a close, Law’s mastery of her art could not be more immediate, or more relevant. Her visual album, “Pasión”, reveals the cellist barefoot on a windswept beach in a flowing pink gown. Gulls on the wet sand form her rapt audience as she glides through a silken rendering of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, then circle over her as the surf rolls in. Filmed across Greece, Spain, Italy and New York City, Law’s sultry selections span the genres of Tango, Bossa Nova and Spain’s classical music.

Her YouTube channel called “Cello Healing Music”, #SongsOfComfort, ranges from the inevitable cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and the Forest Gump “Feather Theme”  to “Après un rève in memory of George Floyd” and a version of “Nessun Dorma” that could squeeze what Oprah calls “ugly-cryin’ tears” from Mount Rushmore.

Law is what she calls “a recovered prodigy,” and describes her process as one of matching up sounds. She clearly hears the sound in her head, she says, before she ever lifts her bow. “There’s a soul imprint I have with the piece of music,” she says. “My challenge then becomes a kind of reverse-engineering. I already hear how it wants to sound. Then, I do everything in my power to match my technique and the capacity of the cello to that imprint.” 

Of the current culture of music, she adds, “People actually have the nerve to say to me that classical music is dead,” she says, her long-lashed eyes widening in disbelief.  ”Like, what planet are they on?  What’s dead is the snooty aspect, the perceived privilege that was once associated with hearing the cello. But now, the classical jam is everywhere, and we’re playing the music of the whole world.”

https://www.youtube.com/WendyLaw
https://www.instagram.com/cellistwendylaw/
https://www.facebook.com/CellistWendyLaw/
https://www.tiktok.com/@cellistwendylaw
https://wendy-laws-store.creator-spring.com

All images of Wendy Law courtesy of the artist.
All other images courtesy of pexels.com and unsplash.com.