Recorder Redux

I have lately, for my sins, started playing the recorder again. This is along the same lines of insanity, though perhaps slightly less drastic, as getting the dog Truffle. What made me think that, with my days filled with Truffle-related tasks, this would be a good idea? To make matters worse, I signed up for private lessons, which means that I have had to start practicing seriously.

Slowly, by sheer dint of making an awful noise unto the Lord, the fingerings have mostly come back and my breath is improving, but how long will it take me to regain what I lost when I stopped playing at the start of the pandemic? I haven’t grown any younger in the intervening half decade. Weird things are happening in some of my finger joints, my memory is less reliable, and I may no longer have the neurological wherewithal to maintain the alertness that music requires.

But even if none of these things were an issue, why bother? And playing an instrument is a lot of bother, at least to me. Making sounds is serious business. Every note should aim at perfection, and if it fails, it should be repeated until it approaches that infinitely elusive goal. If the 20th century’s foremost musician, the cellist Pau Casals, was said to spend six hours practicing a single trill, what does that mean for me as I grapple with a Telemann Fantasia, or even a simple scale?

Does all this sound a little uptight, perfectionistic, intense? Does it put me at risk of throwing the instrument out the window and swearing never to toot a single note again? Yes, to all the above. But don’t blame me. Blame it instead on my early musical training, which took place in the no-nonsense days before the blessed coming of the Suzuki Method.

This was how my violinist father taught me. A kind, mild-mannered man passionately in love with his art, he nevertheless had no idea how to make learning the violin attractive to a child. After the first lesson, he sent me off to practice, for fifteen minutes a day—maybe it was five minutes, but it felt like five hours—drawing the bow across the A string. That was it. No fingers on the fingerboard, no Twinkle Variations, just drawing the bow across the A string, perfectly. So I got a bit obsessive about things. I also got bored, but mostly I became deeply dissatisfied with my own playing. This was not my father’s fault. Whenever I got something right, he would say “very nice!” and when I did something wrong, he would correct but never blame me. No, the reason was that, having heard his playing from the moment I was conceived, his sound became the basic standard of how a violin should sound. Anything less than that—namely all my playing—was unacceptable to me.

In taking up the recorder again, I am hoping to loosen up a bit. After all, it’s not as if I’m aiming to become a professional, or even to play with an accomplished amateur ensemble. So what am I aiming for?

Frans Brüggen, the most influential recorder player of the last century, went on to a distinguished career as conductor of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. An interviewer once asked him why, having attained world-class stature as a conductor, he still played the recorder, which is often considered a somewhat primitive, limited instrument. “During all your times of playing the recorder,” Brüggen answered, “did you ever just get tears in your eyes?”

Here is what I think I will aim for: not to play a whole piece, or even a measure, perfectly or even a measure, but simply to produce the occasional note that will sound as pure and liquid as the song of the wood thrush in the spring, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

You can hear the young Brüggen play a Fantasia by Telemann here.