Wuorinen: Cello Variations II (1975)
As a part of our accreditation, college and universities in the South are required to implement and evaluate ten-year “Quality Enhancement Plans,” or QEP’s. At High Point, our current QEP is focused on creating a culture of Growth Mindset and studying its effect on academic outcomes, retention, etc. As a result, I have a small library of growth mindset/productivity books, including Angela Duckworth’s Grit, Anders Ericsson’s Peak, and (of course) books by Carol Dweck, Annie Brock, and Heather Hundley. Before the COVID-19 crisis, I had been running an action study exploring the connection between growth mindset and motivation in my problem-based comprehensive musicianship courses.
Once the students were sent home, all action studies were discontinued. I spent the first month of the stay-at-home order just getting used to running my classes online. I had done online education before, so the methods were familiar, but the situation created some unique challenges. As one of my colleagues put it, we became counselors first, teachers second. As the weeks progressed, however, I noticed that several of my colleagues were posting videos of themselves playing the usual cello favorites. I was most impressed by an old buddy who was taking the time to actually learn all the passages that we usually fake. Gradually the idea formed:
As a response to all the solo Bach, it would be funny to post a cello piece that (almost) no one wants to hear, and
Learning something ridiculously difficult in short, focused sessions would be a valuable experiment in both growth mindset and deliberate practice
So often, we as teachers are so busy with the mechanics of the job and family responsibilities that we don’t take the time for the kind of critical reflection we want to see in our students. I hope that this project will help me to “practice what I preach,” and bring new insight and empathy to my teaching.
So why Wuorinen? As is so often the case, I have no idea. My library is full of fiendishly difficult pieces, many of which I’ve wanted to play for years, but this one… just called to me. That’s how it works in my world. This is the second of three “Cello Variations” that Charles Wuorinen (1938-2020) wrote for the formidable Fred Sherry (b. 1948) in 1970, 1975, and 1997. The latter two were birthday presents for Sherry. I first encountered the pieces in Sherry’s album Charles Wuorinen: Fast Fantasy from 2004. I bought the sheet music for all three, but at the time, the second seemed the most accessible.
My cello playing has been undergoing a profound transformation. I had a sort of breakdown in 2013 and stopped playing entirely for the better part of a year. Since then, I haven’t really done much independent work. I am asked periodically to do short-term projects, but I usually don’t even open the case between rehearsal cycles. When I do perform, I have found the experience of playing the cello entirely different. I gave up teaching private lessons years ago, because I was having difficulty articulating the way I perceive music. Now it’s impossible; the sensation of musical motion has become almost entriely kinesthetic and visceral. Technically, I find that I care most about the things we hardly ever talk about in performance studies : timbre, density, register, articulation, and so forth.
Even my first experiences reading through this piece have been… how to say it? Breathtaking? Euphoric? Each gesture surges and sighs with emotion; it hits me at a deep, sub-intellectual level. This is not the usual response to Wuorinen. I’m quite curious to see where this goes.