Endicott and I Conduct an Orchestra

THE CONTRIBUTORS; CLUB

WHEN two people conduct an orchestra there is plot material. If the two are knit by marriage ties, the plot thickens. Endicott and I conduct a family orchestra, he at the piano, I playing second violin. I know more about music than does Endicott; he is more musical than I. I keep the time; he has the temperament. Temperament is more noble than time, but time, I shall always insist, has its place, perhaps nowhere more appropriately than in an orchestra. He, at the piano, can dominate the situation more neatly than I. In my position among the strings, however, I can more readily organize a strike.

The rest of the ‘pieces’ are presided over by our children, young people of inflexible spirit and chromatic moods. Sometimes we doubt whether we have our troupe under the rigid control which, as parents, we might expect to command. The conductivity of an orchestra, says our son Geoffrey, varies with the distance of the blood-relationship between artists and conductor. When the children were little, we held the pleasant theory that a family orchestra would draw us all close together, standing always as a symbol of our perfect harmony. That would be all right if the harmony would only go to suit us all equally at the same time. As it is, our little band, in which observers find so touching a picture of hearthside unity, suggests sometimes all the elements of guerrilla warfare.

The question most likely to strain diplomatic relations is the choice of what to play. This is complicated by the fact that we each judge music by a different norm. Geoffrey, for instance, begs us not to play anything where the cornet has to rest too much. He says that he cannot keep track of a rest of more than forty-seven measures, and be absolutely sure of coming in again at the right place. Every one admits that it is unfortunate when Geoffrey comes in at the wrong place. There is no smoothing over the astonishing effect of his premature trumpeting. ‘ You cannot,’ says Geoffrey, ‘ do the dumb shuffle on the cornet.’ For his sake, then, in looking over new music, we examine the cornet part for rests before we buy.

Endicott, a quorum in himself, agrees to anything except five sharps. Once seated upon the long piano bench, he is the genial patriarch at home. The girls, gracefully in league, object to extremes of any kind. They are our star performers, and must be humored at any cost. Knowing that the first violin and the ’cello are too valuable for us to lose, they exercise a cool and shameless power of veto at every turn. I myself admire extremes. My tastes are catholic, and my choices range all the way from the Unfinished Symphony to The Swing, by Sudds. The one thing in all the world that I really will not play is Schumann’s Warum, a favorite with the first violin. This worthy composition leaves me undone for days. Its insane, insistent question slides through my mind, over and over. I will not play it. I will not think of it. I will not even explain my antipathy. I have hidden the music.

Probably the assembling of an orchestra is, to the audience, a conventional and colorless affair enough. Any players of chamber music, however, who have been confined to a space that housed as many other things as does our sitting-room, know better. After bringing in enough dining-room chairs to seat the players, and adjusting the cross-legged music-stands, we find ourselves a little short of room. We have as yet been unable to find a type of music-stand which will not trip up long-limbed cornetists off their guard. One evening when Geoffrey, threading his way to his seat, really did lose his balance, and plunged head-first into my work-basket, one foot in the fireplace and the other still entangled in Barbara’s music-stand, affairs rose to a climax.

‘Everybody more than a mile high please leave the room,’ said Barbara, leaning over her ’cello and unweaving the legs of the stand from among her brother’s feet. Any quotation from Alice in Wonderland is always calculated to infuriate the men of our family, and Endicott turned at once to his son’s support.

‘I don’t see,’ said Endicott, ‘ why Barbara does n’t arrange some little device for her music, just as Margaret does. Those tin spider-legs are really dangerous.’

Margaret’s ‘device’ is at least not dangerous. She always pins her music to the tomato pin-cushion on the mantel, and stands aloof, compactly.

‘There is no need of taking up all the room that Geoffrey takes,’ said Barbara sweetly. ‘I can hardly keep my bow from getting broken on his knee. No ’cellist ought to have to suit his bowing to the traffic.’

Once comfortably settled, we tune. That is one thing that we all will do. Ever since the children began to learn, when even the baby would bring his harmonica and say, ‘Give me M,’ they have always played to pitch. For this fact, Endicott is not responsible. In the midst of the most critical attuning of our strings, Endicott will cease his obvious business of giving us ‘ A,’ and will break into little improvised arpeggios and fanfares, incorrigibly. Why pianists do this will never fully appear. After the best disciplinary training that accompanist ever had, Endicott still continues to ‘practice his part’ while the rest of us are tuning our fifths.

From my position in the orchestra, I can see the whole group reflected in the mirror over the fireplace. This helps me to conduct, and it also gives me pleasure. Barbara’s ’cello is the most picturesque of our instruments. I find something very lovable about the long, vibrant strings, and the gracious curves of its worn, dark form. A ’cello is big enough so that you can embrace it and treat it as an equal, — big enough to satisfy your love for layer on layer of velvet tone. And Geoffrey is the most picturesque of all our players. There may be men who can play a cornet with a perfectly natural cast of countenance, concealing their attention to a proper ‘lip’ under a nonchalant expression. There is nothing nonchalant about Geoffrey’s lean cheek and beetling brows. His eyes are purposeful and all his hair erect. His incalculable legs are far astray, and the very angle of his elbows has a look of do or die. Margaret, on tiptoe, before her tomato pin-cushion, is perhaps not wholly at one with the group. One evening she turned briskly about, waved her violin like a brakeman’s flag, and announced that somebody was out, and we ’d better begin at ‘K.’

‘It was old Meggie herself,’ said Geoffrey fraternally. ’Everybody’s out of step but Meggie.’

Does every amateur orchestra, I wonder, when trying new music, interrupt itself sometimes for the tentative inquiry, ‘Are we all at “J” ?’ Now and then we have an uneasy feeling that we all are not at ‘J,’ and a general assurance that we are lends confidence. Another amateur pleasure of ours is in taking liberties with repeat signs. If we like the passage extremely, we mind the repeat; if we are not acutely stirred, we take the second ending. With new music, we have no way of knowing beforehand what we shall especially admire. It chances, accordingly, that the cornet and the ’cello perhaps shout in the same breath, ‘Repeat!’ and ‘Don’t repeat!’ respectively. At such moments, it is impossible to keep the orchestra together, even with two conductors. We usually stop and have a family consultation as to who is conducting this band, anyway.

Orders of the sort just mentioned, shouted into the middle of the music, are apt to sound blunt, not to say savage. When you have a violin beneath your chin, and a melody beneath your bow, you simply cannot converse in human tones, no matter how mild your mood. There is a certain tenseness about your voice, a dictatorial crispness about your brief request, that is likely to sound domineering. Margaret and Geoffrey, one evening, almost became permanently estranged because Geoffrey in the midst of a lovely passage took the mouth-piece of his cornet from his lips long enough to roar, ‘Three flats! Three flats!’ for her guidance. Such stage directions have a brusque and startling tone, as if the speaker had stood all he could from you, up to the explosion point, and must now relieve his mind. Then too, there is of course a subtle excitement about the playing that approaches the danger-mark if anything happens to spoil the spell. Julia Ward Howe used to be all keyed up, she says, when she played with an orchestra; and so am I. Little things seem vital in such moods.

But I think that the part that we shall all remember is something more difficult to describe. Sometimes, of a witching night, when we all are keyed for the music, and outside circumstances behave in normal fashion, there comes an experience worth all the years of scratchy scales that went before. We are in the midst of the Larghetto, in the Second Symphony, perhaps. I am not conducting. Neither is Endicott. Perhaps Beethoven prefers to conduct the Larghetto himself. And then, suddenly, as one sometimes on a journey becomes vividly aware of a breeze and blue distance, and firm hills beneath his feet, I really hear the chord that we are playing. It is no longer a measured flow of mingled sound, but distinct, exquisite, richly personal to me. There is the queer little rush of the accent that comes from the first, violin when Margaret is really stirred; the ’cello’s full response, vibrant, but soft with hidden masses of covered tone. I can feel my own little second fiddle quivering beneath my bow. There is some curious connecting of the spirit in the playing of a chord. Again and again we find it. Probably these moments are what we live for, varied though our programmes always are. In our cabinet are certain ragged folios that we try not to play too often. They live in a promiscuous company: Peer Gynt and the Edinburgh Quadrille; Massenet and MacDowell; The Red Mill; Liszt and Bach; The Toy Symphony and Schumann’s Liebesgarten — each of these has its time. Our only question is, What next?

At times, when we have been ambitious all the evening, and Geoffrey’s lip is tired, we hunt up one of the songs arranged for voice and orchestra. The ‘Shoogy Shoo’ is one of these. Endicott then, with generous baritone, sings as he will, while the rest of us, with mutes astride our bridges, follow on. I shall not hear that song without the picture of the group in the mirror: Endicott upon the old red piano-bench, his hair silver under the lamp-light, his mood transformed. He is no longer the downtrodden accompanist, to whom a measure is restraint, but the untrammeled artist creating his own rhythms. What is a measure or two among friends? Then I watch the girls, now wholly at ease, their bows moving softly, their eyes upon their muted strings. Geoffrey listens, with his cornet on his knee.

After all, though music that we long to play is far beyond us, though we can not always find all the parts, no matter how many times we search the piles; though the telephone rings, and the heater blows off steam — these all are only passing discords. Some sort of music is always ready, alluring: Mr. Strauss for times of enterprise, with all our reckless hearts; the ‘Shoogy Shoo’ for moments when strings have snapped; ancient hymns at twilight of a Sunday evening, with Endicott to sing, and now and then a guest with a fiddle of his own. After such evenings as these are over, when the children are putting away the instruments and folding the stands, and I go about locking up the house for the night, I think that I do not greatly care who really conducts that orchestra — Endicott or I.