On generosity
This week on a cooking podcast, I listened to Yo-Yo Ma speaking about the role of the performing musician. “Whenever I perform, I think I am throwing a party,” he said. “Everybody that comes into a room is my guest, and I am the host. So instead of food, I'm offering them sounds. Those sounds are designed for them to have to get to a certain state of mind. That's part of the communing.”
I’ve found myself (how I love that phrase, the ontological lilt of it) thinking a lot about this explanation since. It’s not a particularly original thought. It could seem dangerously close to the literary notion of “writer as god” — the artist in total control of what she’s saying; the state of mind intended to be evoked in the audience successfully evoked in the audience — a popular and problematic idea, at least before Barthes. Still, there was something about it, the soft words filling all the car’s silence as I drove down State Highway 16 to work.
The experience Yo-Yo Ma describes rings true of his own recordings. Listening to his famous Bach, it is as if he’s putting a hand on your shoulder and saying what about if you and I, together, felt this way? But the experience is far from unique to him. You have the same sense of inclusion, of being given insight into another world, listening to Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu trade sunlit tendrils of Mozart; or the way Nina Simone freights every single word with heaviness and light in I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free; or the lemon-and-honey guitars at the start of Sufjan Stevens’ Should Have Known Better. Once, a long time ago, someone I loved played the whole third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30 for me because she knew I loved it, and I have never forgotten how loved I felt. The fact that art is fundamentally generous — that it consists of one person holding out their arms and saying imagine if it were like this and another person saying I am listening — seems almost embarrassingly beautiful.
On the podcast, Yo-Yo Ma turned the subject back towards food: “If I'm playing for somebody, it's very personal. I think it's like if you're cooking for somebody, I imagine it's the same thing. It's like you're giving them love. You're offering them something that you know might be useful.”
I suppose really this is the bit that stuck with me: I was reminded that it’s not only classical cellists who create a mood. You evoke a certain state of mind in someone with something as low-brow as cooking them dinner. Or when you stop the car to buy the unignorable sunflowers for the person who is like a sunflower, or put your phone away for the whole time you’re out with someone, or write a friend an unexpected postcard to say — what else? — hello and I love you. Everyone I know could use more such moods. Everyone I know has the capacity to evoke them.
It is already February and a bit late for new year’s resolutions, particularly those of the sentimental sort. Never mind, here it is: I would like to live this and every coming year generously. Offering something I know might be useful.