The Cello

There is no instrument quite like the cello. Its voice lives in the same register as the human chest — that low, moody hum that seems to rise from somewhere older than language. It can keen and it can pray; it can rage in one bow stroke and dissolve into a whisper in the next. The cello does not perform an emotion so much as it remembers one.

And its form — the long curved waist, the scrolled neck, the warm varnish catching candlelight — is among the most beautiful objects ever made by human hands. To hold one between your knees is to hold a small, breathing architecture; to draw the bow across it is to feel the wood answer back.

I studied cello all through high school and college, and I have never stopped being a student of it. Every silence between the notes still has something to teach me.