Palouse - 34. Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Whitman String Quartet – November 1995

Six Months Later

Best gains must have the losses’ test,

To constitute them gains.

– Emily Dickinson

“I have a proposition for you, Micah,” David announced one day the following November as he came through the door to his apartment where Micah had been studying, a fixture in David’s apartment since the middle of their sophomore year.

Micah turned from his textbook, raising his eyebrows. “You want to take our relationship up another step?”

“Not exactly, but I’ll think about it. No, this is different. Our first violinist is writing a symphony for his senior thesis and wants to leave the quartet – which, at the moment is in danger of becoming the Whitman String Trio. We need a replacement to make a quartet. Are you interested?”

“I’ve never played in a quartet. The nearest thing is playing duets with you.” Micah walked to the window and stared out for a few minutes. He turned and smiled: “But I think I’d like it.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“That means yes if you’re still going to be in it.”

“I will be.” David hesitated. “There is one complication.”

“There’s a hitch?”

“Remember Yuki Hashimoto from the Youth Symphony?

“Not really.”

“Well, you chewed her out royally one day when she played with her viola out of tune. She’s the Asian girl – now woman. She’s a member of our quartet.”

“I kind of remember her. It was when I was soloing, wasn’t it? When I was being a prima donna. Maybe a little shit, too.”

“Yes. She remembers you. She says she has put that incident in the past, and I hope she has. You just need to be a little careful when you deal with her till things settle out. Okay?”

“I’m not exactly the same person I was. I hope she recognizes that.”

“I think it will work out.” Hopefully, David thought.

The quartet’s first practice was several days later. An hour before the scheduled session, Micah parked his pickup at David’s then joined him as they hiked across the Whitman campus to the music department. The practice room was designed for a small orchestra, with two sets of risers coming off of the main floor. The four chairs arrayed in a square in front of the first riser were the only ones set up; there were four music stands in front of the chairs. The chairs looked lonely.

They had gone early so that David could get the music out of the library for Micah and for Micah to have a few minutes to acquaint himself with it.

“We don’t expect you to be fully proficient this first day,” he said. “We’ll just practice a couple of pieces while you sight-read your parts.” Of course, Micah’s sight-reading and a lesser artist’s practiced playing were not that different, as David and the other members of the quartet were soon to learn.

The other two musicians arrived a half hour after Micah and David. Micah immediately recognized the woman whom he had criticized so sharply as a girl with the Spokane Youth Symphony. She hadn’t grown much taller if Micah remembered right, and her face and figure had filled out. Micah reintroduced himself then offered an apology for his earlier behavior. Yuki accepted it.

The second violinist, Ben Claridge, watched the interplay between Yuki and Micah and was puzzled, but Yuki and Micah would not reveal what their conversation was about. Finally, he introduced himself, and they shook hands. Ben was a tall, lean blond 19-year old with short-cropped, very un-musician-like hair. He looked like the engineering student that he was.

David and Micah had started to tune their instruments before Ben’s and Yuki’s arrival, but the latecomers joined them in the final ensemble tune-up. Micah took a few glances at the music opened up before him. The first piece they planned to play that day was the Haydn Opus 77 String Quartet No. 1.

Micah’s part began to mesh well with the others by the second run-through, and by the third time the playing was almost indistinguishable from the quartet’s normal output. Over the next few practices, Micah caught up with the quartet’s repertoire. David and the other players were pleased that the quartet had lost little capability after the departure of their other violinist.

* * * * *

“This third movement needs to be done differently,” Micah announced at the sixth practice of the group. They were playing Beethoven. “I think the dynamics need to be strengthened.” He put his bow to his violin and waited for the other to follow. The others didn’t move.

“What?” he asked. “Aren’t we going to practice?” He stared across at his colleagues, who hadn’t moved to join him.

David sighed. “Micah, we need to get something straight. We all know you are a brilliant musician.” His hand swept to the other players who nodded agreement. “We know that you played for years as a solo musician, and only you and the conductor needed to decide how you wanted to play a piece. You only had one person to negotiate with, and you had a lot of power in that negotiation.

“A string quartet is a different beast – a very different beast. It is a conversation among equal instruments; it isn’t a lecture by one. There is no leader; there is no one in charge, so we have to make changes by consensus. And with strong-willed musicians, as we all are, consensus is frequently difficult to achieve. As a matter of fact, with your predecessor the arguments got very noisy, and there was a lot of shouting at one another.”

“In fact, Micah, that’s one reason I’m no longer bothered by what you did to me years ago,” Yuki said. “What you said was mild compared to what I’ve heard from my ‘equals’ here.” Ben took this all in and got an inkling of what Micah and Yuki had discussed on Micah’s first day.

Micah turned red from embarrassment. He was taken aback. He didn’t know how to respond. This was not the way he approached music. He knew what he wanted to do, he was certain he knew what the composer had wanted, and he was about to tell the others to go to hell.

“So, Micah, tell us what you are thinking,” Ben offered as a gesture of peace, “and we can talk about it.”

An irritated Micah started to explain how he thought the piece should be played, which started a lively discussion with the others, and after a few minutes he lost his irritation and began to enter into the mind-space of Beethoven in his Harp Quartet and to go beyond the notes and into that realm that had driven him years ago. Micah turned to the movement; he explained how he thought the group’s reading of the piece could be changed. He took his violin and showed the difference between how he thought the piece should be done and how they were doing it. It was the first time that he had to explain to others what he would have done if he had had the sole decision to do what he wanted. It was a tour de force. He was utterly convincing.

“So, I should try my part more like this,” Ben said, playing a few measures.

“And I think this interpretation means that the viola should be stronger throughout this movement,” Micah said to Yuki, who nodded tentative assent.

“Let’s find out. Let’s try it Micah’s way,” a relieved David suggested, and they spent the next hour working to get all the parts to mesh.

“What do you think?” Ben asked after they had had a clean run-through. David held back to let Yuki answer.

“I think it’s much better,” she said.

“I do, too,” David finally chimed in.

“Does this mean I get to be dictator from now on?” Micah asked as if he was hopeful that the answer was yes and before he broke into a laugh as he ducked pencils and chunks of rosin coming his way.

* * * * *

“I hope I’ve learned my lesson,” Micah said as they were walking back to David’s apartment. “Kick me in the butt if I go overboard in the future.”

The thought of kicking Micah, and exactly where to kick him, started to turn David on. It flashed erotically in his mind and caused the beginnings of an erection. He needed to change the direction of his thoughts, so when he saw an empty beer can in the gutter, he kicked it forward like a soccer ball. When he tried to kick it again, Micah stepped in front of him, and they were soon in the midst of a game of their own making, moving an empty beer can down the walkway before dumping it in a trash can outside David’s apartment.

At David’s, they had a beer and sat at the kitchen table, talking about their afternoon of practice. “I’m just amazed,” David said. “How do you do that? How do you come up with those interpretations?”

“Remember when I told you that I learned the notes in the music room and I learned the composer in my sanctuary. The same thing is happening here, except now I do it in my head. I see the notes, but I feel this collaboration between God, the composer and me, and I’m just trying to inject my own views as little as possible into the music.”

“You know that you’re not going to get easy agreement every time like you did this afternoon.”

Micah grinned. “But I’m sure as hell going to make the effort. Then, more seriously, he added, “I had no idea how much fun it would be, discussing my thoughts on musical interpretation with other serious musicians.”