learning music, crows

Lesson with Curt today. We have been working on the bouree of one of the Bach cello suites. This has been slow, measure by measure work offering me opportunities to learn many things simultaneously. I have prepared for the lesson by finding the sheet music online and struggling through learning the notes for the next two measures. While the notes have been nominally learned, the phrasing and musicality is absent. (Well, to be fair, I got a tiny, tiny taste of the flavor of the first measure, but absolutely none of the second.) Despite my efforts to understand the sheet music (even studying a recording) it is only a series of notes. At the lesson, Curt infuses them with music. Still, it takes many, many repetitions before any of this musicality moves into my hands. I listen to him and in my mind's eye, I see the sheet music I have been studying - trying to leap the chasm between the black marks on a page and the sounds I am hearing. Before leaving the lesson, I have managed a dozen or so executions of the new measures. Later, arriving at the office, I pull the guitar from its case and remind myself of what has just been learned. At lunch, I do the same, but I find that the second measure is lost! I can only play it as I was able on arriving to the lesson - a dry series of notes of equal weight and emphasis. I am a human sieve for musical knowledge. It takes ~fifteen minutes of exploring to find the door back to the music.

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Departing from the office in the thick atmosphere of storm clouds at the verge of sunset, the landscape is covered in cawing crows. They fill the trees and line the tops of buildings like snipers. Their caw, caw, cawing is so strange. not quite menacing; a raucous gravitas. I am tempted to linger. As I write this, I wonder why I didn't.