Concerto

by

Bryce M. O’Tierney

I. Allegro

You learn a body so well it becomes your own. The fingers of your left hand are longer than your right, lengthened with the stretch of notes across the strings. Your right thumb calluses against the frog of the bow, pivoting motion of the fingers and wrist. Ribs, neck, and back of maple, a front plate of spruce. Maple cut on the slab reveals an undulating pattern of growth: the flame catches and ripples in the light. The wood of the bow: Pernambuco. Supple yet strong, responsive, horsehair runs the length of it. Pine resin is heated, vaporized, and resolidifies to form a cake of rosin. The rosin engages the horsehair, the horsehair engages the string. You vibrate the string, and the wood vibrates against your breast. Your breastbone vibrates with the sound, and the wood responds. The breath (’) marks the phrase. Violin. Without touch, over time the sound will leave its body.

’

A violin is shipped from Chicago to Alaska. From the Fine Arts Building on S. Michigan Ave, William Harris Lee & Co. have sent it, along with two others, in a wooden crate, tucked in its forest green case, swaddled in muslin. Several years later, I will meet the apprentice who made it. Some years after that, I will report for orchestra rehearsal on the eighth floor, three flights up from where my violin was made. I ring the bell for the elevator and it clanks up the shaft; the gold doors open, and the attendant pulls the grate back. The building was once a carriage assembly plant and later housed the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. My high school orchestra teacher used to take the train in from Champaign, Illinois, for violin lessons; she took that same elevator up, staring down at her Mary Janes. She said rumor had it there was a bordello on the tenth floor that Al Capone frequented.

’

You have just turned twelve, and your limbs are growing longer by the day, outgrowing your three-quarter-size loaner violin. You find it hard to imagine a violin has traveled so far. You play each of the three instruments. A G major scale, an arpeggio, something forte, something piano, something legato, something staccato. The violin with the marmalade hue and one-piece flamed back speaks to you—no, with you. A liquid-sweet timbre that gives the feel of capillary action, your fingers drawing your voice up and out. You have found each other.

’

Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major, K 216. Mozart wrote an opera and all five of his violin concertos in his nineteenth year. From his opera, he borrows the first theme of his third violin concerto. Two flutes, two oboes, two horns, and reduced strings: he scores a light accompaniment to the lithe solo violin. The summer before ninth grade, age fourteen, I begin learning Concerto No. 3. The notion that Mozart is “easy” to play, not being as technically challenging as the Romantic concertos (say, Sibelius or Bruch) is a common misconception among young string players. My teacher explains that the challenges of Mozart are of a different order: intonational transparency demands clarity of concept, while sustained phrases call for nuance of color. And then there’s his jocular sense of humor. The first time I listen to Concerto No. 3 is the first time I feel music in cobalt blue.

’

You push open the screen door, violin case bumping against your side, greeted by the scent of lemon, soil, and dander. You kick off your snow boots and wriggle your toes on the heated tile. There is one tomato plant and a calico cat sitting in a plastic lawn chair to the right of the door leading up to the studio. “Do not let cat to go upstairs” reads the sign on the door. A woman with glasses, short-cropped hair, and belted mosquito-repellent pants greets you: “Svetlana!” she calls up the stairs, “Bryce is here.”

’

I am here to work on ideas. The cat is Kisa, and the woman who greets me is Svetlana’s partner, Dr. Sue. Svetlana Velichko is a renowned pianist, teacher, and musical coach. She moved to Anchorage from Moscow after almost thirty years of teaching at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, recording classical piano works by USSR Central Radio commission and serving as official accompanist for the Tchaikovsky International Competition (the Grand Prix of classical violin performance). Due to her husband’s participation in “secret” work, she had not been permitted to perform in the West. Svetlana was educated at the Central Music School for Especially Gifted Children; I would learn that violin, not piano, had in fact been her first love.

’

In the beginning, my mother comes with me, pressing record on the tape player as I tune the strings, and Svetlana sticks her index finger in one ear: “Tsk, you’re screaming, how can you hear this way?” I angle my bow toward the fingerboard for a softer volume. Every moment requires care and attention, requires listening. When the D string is flat, I can hear its sound wave lap against the A string, pulling away from the shore. I turn the peg slowly and listen for the joining of vibrations, no waver between. I move a lot as I play, moving with the shape of the phrase.

Svetlana urges, “Legs like tree trunks, strong, not moving, feel the music.” One time, she asks my mother to hold my ponytail while I play, but only that once. I imagine drawing the sound up from my feet, up my spine, across my shoulders, into my arms. My head buzzes with it. I drink it in.

’

While written for solo violin and orchestra, a violin concerto is more often played by violinist and pianist, in training for that rare opportunity to perform on the concert stage. Together, you summon the acoustics of a whole hall, the breath of an ensemble. “We sing with his angels,” Svetlana says, and you pause to access a different shape, a different arc in your mind; you are always thinking of where the note leads, to which note is the destination within the life of the phrase, the section, the movement as a whole. In Mozart, the onset and ending of a note require a particular suppleness of the fingers and wrist, a careful calibration of bow speed and weight.

Even a slight inflection of your index finger on the bow can create a swell in the course of the note, disrupting the sustain. The trick is catching the body up with the mind: you can hear the tone in your ear. Follow it.

’

When she moves from the upright piano to the grand, you know you are ready. She props the lid at half stick and nods as you plant your feet. Concerto No. 3: I. Allegro. Her fingers delve into the keys and a whole orchestra plays, winds and strings dancing out into the room to cue your entrance. You inhale in time with the beat and stroke the first chord on the exhale, lifting the bow off the string with a flourish of the wrist. Svetlana’s back is stooped, and as her fingers taper the end of a phrase, she bends even closer to the keys, a sly pounce. On a down bow before a hooked staccato, you lean your weight into the violin, relishing the draw of sound before springing off the string.

 

II. Adagio

The tempo slows. Her husband crashes the car. She’s holding their months-old daughter, stumbling out at an angle into the snow. She leaves Russia, an echo trailing behind forever. You wait at the door as a deep purple plume carries down the stairs: Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp minor. The storm builds slowly. She builds the storm slowly and she pushes through it, arms pulling arms up out of snowbanks. Her studio is a sanctuary, tomato plants and a small lemon tree wintering over. In terms of music, Svetlana speaks often of God. You envision less a singularity than a network: guardian tones ringing together.

’

My college teacher assigns me the Bruch Concerto: “Work on technique first, music later.” I am taken aback—expressive playing has always been my strength. What is music without music in it? I work diligently: slow shifting exercises, scales played to a drone, approaching each section of the concerto like an étude. Could I even express my ideas musically anymore? Who was I anymore? When he said, “You’re ready. Play it again with music in it.” I place my bow on the string, and let the Bavarian forest green sweep through my mind; my arms and fingers glide as if not my own, flowing in muscle memory, my thoughts afloat, opening to the room. My mind, entrusted to my body. Trusting my mind through the body of the violin. Over the phone, I speak with him for the last time. He reads comments from my juried performance and my mind gums the words—is this really the end? “You were always working for the right reasons,” he says.

Yes. Through years of auditions, recitals, and adjudications, I was driven by something other than competition, never particularly thrilled by technical challenges or displays of flashy technique, rarely driven to practice by parental force. To practice was intrinsic; to play: essential to me. When you are chasing after your own voice your whole life–to make your sound–there is no other reason but you.

’

From your college practice room, you return in your mind to Svetlana’s studio: green and blue forests, a gold steeple reaching toward a grey sky. The walls are hung with her daughter’s paintings; in fact, her daughter and son-in-law paint side by side on one canvas. Colors slide off the canvas of your mind. You feel yourself losing your grip, losing your grasp on the bow; as anxious thoughts rattle your brain, you feed your body less and less and struggle to pick up your violin. Where the violin had held and transcribed the most difficult emotions, now words just won’t quit. You attempt to practice a passage and are unable to turn off one tongue for another. Her mind drifted to Pushkin—Svetlana told you how her teacher could tell the exact instant, “You’ve lost the idea!” Poetry, sweeping image, romance. She warned you not to get a boyfriend, not to let anyone distract you—from music, from your ideas. You had something to say. You call the number written on the hand-drawn poster in the Music Building: “Violinist wanted for indie folk band.” You spend countless hours away from the violin, hiding out with the boy who answered the phone that day. That you fell in love, and loved him, you don’t doubt. But you were a body displaced. At that time, picking up the violin, holding it in your arms, felt like the rawest confrontation of self imaginable. Picking yourself up, holding yourself in your own arms. You needed your instrument to speak, and you were afraid to tell the truth.

’

That first summer back home, my father yells at me to get out of bed. Me: muddled, bloated, monochrome. My twin sister whispers to him in the other room, “She’s depressed, she can’t get out of bed.” I am within weeks of orchestra auditions with zero notes of the Mahler symphony under my fingers. My father doesn’t recognize me. Somehow, I turn myself around; I get out of bed and practice for four to six hours a day until I get on the plane back to school. What would it have meant to fail to prepare the music? I heard that ticking of words too loudly in my head, and I escaped into the notes. Each passing day the violin warmed more readily to my touch. I had made a promise long ago. It was not only my breath to lose.

’

She would be out trout fishing the day the hall was available, so I played a second senior recital with Svetlana the summer before I left for college. I had been sick the weekend before, in bed with a fever and foggy brain. I phoned Svetlana as if to call it off. I don’t remember what she said, just that we would do it together. I knew the music. Now I picture myself, stockinged feet sinking into the carpet, the warmth of the room, the paintings the same, the plants the same, a handful of close friends and family gathered. Svetlana at the grand piano, a light dusting of sparkle glinting off her blond performance wig.

Last Christmas, I finally call, and Dr. Sue picks up the phone, “Svetlana’s in bed.” And Svetlana says your name: “Bryce—I won’t be around much longer.”

 

III. Rondeau: Allegro

The dance kicks up. You are twelve and eighteen and twenty-eight all at once. When you pick up your violin, you return elsewhere, to a body working through the motions of its own meaning, your purpose, your sound. You hear the sound of you and are reminded: the lights dim in the hall, and you walk out in a red satin shirt and long black skirt, bow to the audience, and the orchestra begins to play. You plant your feet and sway; you ready for the dance.

’

I have just turned fifteen. I won the Concerto Competition playing Mozart’s Concerto No. 3 in G major, and now I will rehearse with the University of Alaska Anchorage chamber orchestra for my solo debut. In the same hall where I will perform with orchestra, Svetlana accompanied me. I close my eyes and she is there, curved over the keys of the concert grand, propped at full stick. I feel awkwardly long-limbed standing in front of this group of adults seated on stage. I am serious, and quiet. I bring my violin up to my chin to take a tuning A from the oboe. There they are, all seated in front of me, ringing around me in a semicircle: two flutists, two oboists, two horn players, violinists, violists, and cellists. My teacher warned me that the conductor, a violinist himself, could be short-tempered. This I don’t especially recall from that week of rehearsal, though he did take frequent smoke breaks.

’

The breath of an orchestra is a powerful thing. The conductor’s hands coax the sound, and you with your bow and body angle toward the group, drawing out the dance, the back and forth, the conversation. With them, among them. You think: this piece of music was written to be played exactly this way, and has been, for hundreds of years. Your violin seems to know this, resonating, vibrating with the other bodies in the room, both instrument and human, joined together, a harmonic organism. The orchestra leads you in, you lead them in in turn. In and out, across and through. A changing of hands without a break in the line. The first two movements conclude with sustained cadenzas: the orchestra falls away and you, the soloist, riff on the thematic material through a sequence of meditative variations. In the third movement, the orchestration gives way to several moments of playful solo. In these spaces you are held: in the hush of the room, audience and orchestra alike. You fill the space. In the space you fill, your violin is most alive.

’

I call to schedule a coaching with Svetlana, and she answers the phone, breathless, “I’ve been hunting mushrooms!” I learn it is a very Russian thing to do, gathering mushrooms before the first frost. Her mother had sent her out to gather mushrooms as a child. She invites me down to the kitchen after we work. I watch as she bows her head over the pot on the stove, beckons me over to see the bloodred color of the borscht. Dr. Sue reads the newspaper at the table by the window. She grumbles, scowls, and refers to herself as Svetlana’s “husband,” and we all laugh. Svetlana, the diva, and Sue, her husband. I marvel at how it’s come to be that I am standing in their kitchen, as if I were an old friend.

’

The other week, I Googled her. One of the first hits: a YouTube video. I expand the window to full screen and unmute my computer audio. Svetlana plays the Adagio from Beethoven’s Sonata No. 11. She leans into the keys, a subtle rocking motion. I note that the father of the violist in my adolescent string quartet video-recorded the performance. The movement unfolds, both melancholy and redemptive. I begin to cry. Her hands move across the keys, between ebony and ivory, a love this simple—movement across dark and light. The piano, I sometimes forget, is also a string instrument. A body of wood, pedaled to sustain, both hands and feet grounded. The sound will go out of a piano left untouched, unplayed, its voice will brittle and warble. I stare into the void of her eventual passing and listen: the sound of a piano or violin sweetens, richens with age, but only with touch, only through an exchange of hands over time, an interlinkage of bodies sounding.

’

Across many human lifetimes, a string instrument’s life extends. Sound expands. In that musical sanctuary, the piano and the violin met, and time collapsed, just as it expanded. Present in the body of your violin are the vibrations, wood altered, transformed by resonance between instruments. She rises from the piano to join you for a bow. And the audience erupts in applause. Your bow arm suspended in the air, its last arc off the string carried by flutes and oboes. In the air, the final cadence suspended. You let your arm drift down, lift your violin from out under your chin, and hold in front of you, take a bow, together. As your ear turns to her mischievous whisper from the wing, “And will we make party after we play?”

Author: Bryce M. O’Tierney is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Anchorage, Alaska. She teaches in the English, Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts, and Music departments at Colorado State University (MFA 2023). She composes, records, and performs with her twin sister in duo maeve & quinn. Publications include About Place Journal, Poetry Ireland Review.

Judge: Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work was included in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. In 2024, she was the subject of an American Masters documentary, “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined,” on PBS. Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  She lives in Vermont.