The Metro-North train was packed as it pulled into Grand Central Station, the iconic landmark that opens New York City to commuters and travelers. Leaving the train for the platform plunges you into a strange world of seeming chaos of people on the move to somewhere.
The United Nations was meeting there this week, with diplomats from all nations crowding the high-end hotels at a thousand dollars a night minimum. Every major institutional player in banking, finance, and global corporate power was there too, because no one who is anyone wants to miss the chance to be near the action.
I was there for a humble dinner with a friend and the rest was a distraction, something to endure. The sights and sounds were already cacophonous as I climbed the stairs to the main level at the station.
One sound was different however. It was a cello, and I thought I could make out the sounds of the suites by J.S. Bach.
As I finally rounded the corner, it gradually emerged that this was not a recording but a single cellist in white tie playing the full cello suites without music. His talent was stunning, and it is such a rare treat to sit close by and watch it on display—close enough to see the rosin from the bow float around the vibrating strings.
The contrast between the ethereal virtuosity of the cellist and the bustling madness of the train station was psychologically and emotionally overwhelming. Though I was anxious to get to the appointed restaurant 10 blocks away I simply could not pass up the chance to listen. There I stood in people’s way for the better part of 20 minutes, transported by that middle voice between time and eternity.
Bach did not write these pieces for public performance. They were a private study. They contain a variety of moods and deploy extremely difficult techniques. The most plausible theory is that the composer wrote them as studies and exercises for his son for practice. So far as we know, they were never heard outside his home in his lifetime.
They were discovered 100 years later during the Victorian period where tastes were not compatible with a single instrument playing so elaborately: too lonely, too introspective, too ominous. So when they were first heard, it was with an invented piano accompaniment.
It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century when Spanish cellist Pablo Casals rediscovered them in a bookstore at the age of 13, and worked them up into a public performance.
Part of the mystery of these pieces is how they play with the audible imagination of the listener. They are constructed nearly as quartets with the other three parts left to the imagination while the notes heard serve as cues, signs, and symbols to the formation of an inaudible voice out there somewhere. It seems like magic that anyone could write such things or perform them at all.
If you are only listening to the recording, it helps to remind yourself that there is only one person playing because otherwise it seems not quite believable. But watching a live performance makes one a believer. This is why these pieces just stop you in your tracks, transport you to a different place, somewhere connected to but set apart from the world around us. The music performed right in front of our eyes takes us to this place and feeds the soul.
Without such music, we might forget there is a soul, that we are purely biological creatures with physical senses. Bach Cello Suites deploy the senses in order to compel the rediscovery of our deepest and highest spiritual longings, elevating the mind and heart to experience a place without the passage of time. In today’s world of violence, despair, and nonstop disorientation, hearing them is startling in the best possible way.
These twenty minutes for me conjured up an image of an oasis in the desert, a source of growth and life in the midst of nothingness. There I rested however briefly on my way back into the cacophony but carrying the music in my mind and heart.
Years ago, as a long-time trained musician with a focus on brass instruments, I took up singing. I flattered myself in mastering a huge range, and performed both as a conductor and singer in a range of repertoire from Palestrina, Pergolesi, and Monteverdi to Vivaldi, Handel, and Mozart.
One day I picked up the musical score to one of Bach’s hundreds of cantatas. I tried to sing a single aria I had heard. I simply could not. It was impossible for me. I realized at that moment that I was not a real singer, at least not one for which this composer wrote. Bach is truly next-level.
Bach did not live an easy life. He had 20 children over two marriages, and supported them all with playing, conducting, and compositions. He played for a Lutheran parish in a humble role with a meager salary, and faced down unrelenting pressure from the rector to write new works for every Sunday service while preserving traditional hymnody. He often applied for new jobs but kept being turned down. He often complained about the poor quality of his musicians, a point I cannot even fathom since truly only specialists today can perform his harder works.
Bach signed all of his works, whether religious or secular, to the glory of God. It was clearly his conviction that all of his skills were from God and owed back to God, and the object of his works was to point to ideals outside the rough and tumble of the stream of life. Indeed, some consider his B-minor Mass to be his greatest achievement (how can one decide?) but it was never performed in his life. It sat in his drawer as a private meditation.
It’s remarkable to imagine Bach being told in his time that 300 years later, a single cellist would perform his suites in Grand Central Station with crowds rushing by, an audience of thousands of people doing other things and only one person stopping to listen carefully. Somehow these pieces transcend all things contemporary and must sound today exactly as they did hundreds of years ago and will sound hundreds of years hence.
I think too of the player who sat there casting blessing on the crowds with his stunning talents. What made him take up cello? He surely faced down warnings from family and friends that he would never make much of a living from doing this. He studied decades with thousands of hours alone in practice, cultivating a level of skill not one in a million corporate functionaries have. And yet there he is.
Artists on this level often report that they could do no other: they simply had to follow their passions and dreams despite inevitable suffering and possible poverty.
Such beauty and talent often runs headlong into the buzzsaw of real life. A New York City cellist once told me that there are two kinds of cellists who cannot find work in the city: the worst and the best. The part about the worst is easy to explain. The part about the best gets us into gritty reflections on envy and how ubiquitously it crushes excellence.
There is never a good rational reason to go into art as a profession but there is every idealistic reason. This is the reason that I cannot fathom why any artist would want to participate in any project that makes the world uglier, as we see in so many government-funded arts venues in large cities today (and have for a century). Art that fails to transcend is not worthy of the name, in my view.
In all times and all places, there are surely settings and moments we can find that provide sanctuary, oasis, refuge, and safe haven for the soul. What form this takes is different for everyone. Regardless, this space in the soul must be fed, for our own sake but also to beautify the world and keep it together and livable for another day. Those who do the hard work deserve our gratitude even if the worldly gains will never be there.
I would trade the tens of thousands of United Nations hangers-on gathered in the city that day for this one cellist, who, sitting on that platform at the train station, playing alone to no one in particular, revealed more truth than all the combined speeches that week given to the multitudes.
