Time for another post in my “guest blogger” series. When I asked Christopher B Sales, the CSO’s new Principal Bassoon this season, to consider contributing to Eargasms, he asked me what I was looking for. I suggested something about what “makes him tick” as a musician. Knowing that Chris is one smart and articulate dude (on top of blowing a mean bassoon), I expected something special from him … and he didn’t let me down.
Here, amid his free-roaming, refreshingly non-journalistic flood of “schmuckadora” (as he described it) lie some very honest and interesting clues as to what floats his boat, both as a bassoon player and human being. Musicians and musically sensitive folks everywhere will find echoes of their own goals, motivations, demons and delights in his words. I’m happy to share them with you.
When I was a kid, I did kid stuff. Caught crawdads in the local stream, fished with a stick that had some string and a hook tied to it, built forts and had snowball fights with the boys next door. Not sure how I managed to squeeze in an hour of piano each day as well as all the Disney channel cartoons (Darkwing Duck, Rescue Rangers, Tale Spin… etc), but somehow I was able to get everything a growing boy must. At 11 years old, I played my first bassoon. Mellow in timbre, sweet to the ear. Dousing my soul in the soothing rumble of a buzzing, burping bedpost, I new that I had found a green amethyst, a purple diamond, a four leaf clover, a black sheep. Not even. I had found a reason to live.
I get asked all the time not only why I chose the bassoon, but, “what the heck is a bassoon?” Generally, I have to explain that the bassoon is not an oboe, nor is the fingering similar to an oboe. Nor do we play the same mouthpiece as an oboe, but the two instruments are similar. “No, the bassoon is not in the oboe family, but of course the oboe is in the bassoon family … why don’t you know what a bassoon is???” As for choosing the bassoon, I tell people that the bassoon chose me. It seems to do that for most of those who play it. But the bassoon is more than just a choice or a simple tube of maple wood with holes drilled in and metal keys placed on it with pegs drilled into the wood. No, when everything else in the world would go wrong, I had the bassoon there to speak with. When I couldn’t come up with words to describe, the bombastic bassooning became my ultimate form of expression, belonging, and burden. It was my crutch, my anima, my existence, all placed into a cylindrical conical bore piece of wood with two vibrating pieces of cane.
But enough about the bassoon and the incredible sense of love that is inherent in such a beautiful instrument, and on to the question of music and its mystical tick. First, I must explain that I do not play the “beautiful.” Beautiful is a dangerous term to throw around. Some people think beauty to be simple consonance. But what of dissonance and its resolution? Do we not love the dark sometimes? Do we never find ourself embracing the negative? The world is beautiful, but it is not always pleasant, and yet it is the unpleasant things that happen to us in this world that give us the feeling that we have accomplished something when the world is going right. Perhaps we desire the world to be a utopia and euphoric, but if it were beautiful all the time, then wouldn’t beauty in itself be normal, and more beautiful be beautiful, and less beautiful be ugly? No, beauty is too destructive a term for me to ever claim it as my stylistic reference. I play elegance. I play hate. I play jokes. I play joy, and I play destruction. I play the voice of angels, and I play the voice of despair. I play emotions that have no English name yet, and I play experiences that are simply impossible to put into words. But beauty? Never!
Perhaps I am a realist. And my realist approach to music is unadulterated by optimism, pessimism, utopia and apocalypse. The music stands simply as itself: an experience that exists within a given instant and instances of time that explains a unique story that shall never be repeated with the same inflections and emotions. To me, music is a work of art that exhibits meaning in such a way that it may not be a real emotion, but a state of being that could not be conceived any other way than through partaking in the musical experience at that given moment. And the world of music is one in which I feel more alive as a human being. And to my listeners, music is the closest you will ever get to my soul.
– Chris Sales
Lindsay’s back. I wish only to qualify one of Chris’s eloquent assertions, from the perspective of somebody who’s heard him play: namely his claim that he never plays beauty, or uses it as a stylistic reference. Even what we think of as dark or negative emotions — like despair or grief — can, in musical guise, still fall on the listener’s ear (and heart) as moments of searing, transcendent beauty. Like his wonderful recent solo in Shostakovich’s ninth symphony that just about made me cry.
So, Chris, let’s make a deal: you just keep on playing all those honest moods and emotions you talked about, and we’ll keep on thinking that your playing is beautiful — whether beauty is what you mean to achieve or not.
View from the Bassoonist’s Chair
Time for another post in my “guest blogger” series. When I asked Christopher B Sales, the CSO’s new Principal Bassoon this season, to consider contributing to Eargasms, he asked me what I was looking for. I suggested something about what “makes him tick” as a musician. Knowing that Chris is one smart and articulate dude (on top of blowing a mean bassoon), I expected something special from him … and he didn’t let me down.
Here, amid his free-roaming, refreshingly non-journalistic flood of “schmuckadora” (as he described it) lie some very honest and interesting clues as to what floats his boat, both as a bassoon player and human being. Musicians and musically sensitive folks everywhere will find echoes of their own goals, motivations, demons and delights in his words. I’m happy to share them with you.
When I was a kid, I did kid stuff. Caught crawdads in the local stream, fished with a stick that had some string and a hook tied to it, built forts and had snowball fights with the boys next door. Not sure how I managed to squeeze in an hour of piano each day as well as all the Disney channel cartoons (Darkwing Duck, Rescue Rangers, Tale Spin… etc), but somehow I was able to get everything a growing boy must. At 11 years old, I played my first bassoon. Mellow in timbre, sweet to the ear. Dousing my soul in the soothing rumble of a buzzing, burping bedpost, I new that I had found a green amethyst, a purple diamond, a four leaf clover, a black sheep. Not even. I had found a reason to live.
I get asked all the time not only why I chose the bassoon, but, “what the heck is a bassoon?” Generally, I have to explain that the bassoon is not an oboe, nor is the fingering similar to an oboe. Nor do we play the same mouthpiece as an oboe, but the two instruments are similar. “No, the bassoon is not in the oboe family, but of course the oboe is in the bassoon family … why don’t you know what a bassoon is???” As for choosing the bassoon, I tell people that the bassoon chose me. It seems to do that for most of those who play it. But the bassoon is more than just a choice or a simple tube of maple wood with holes drilled in and metal keys placed on it with pegs drilled into the wood. No, when everything else in the world would go wrong, I had the bassoon there to speak with. When I couldn’t come up with words to describe, the bombastic bassooning became my ultimate form of expression, belonging, and burden. It was my crutch, my anima, my existence, all placed into a cylindrical conical bore piece of wood with two vibrating pieces of cane.
But enough about the bassoon and the incredible sense of love that is inherent in such a beautiful instrument, and on to the question of music and its mystical tick. First, I must explain that I do not play the “beautiful.” Beautiful is a dangerous term to throw around. Some people think beauty to be simple consonance. But what of dissonance and its resolution? Do we not love the dark sometimes? Do we never find ourself embracing the negative? The world is beautiful, but it is not always pleasant, and yet it is the unpleasant things that happen to us in this world that give us the feeling that we have accomplished something when the world is going right. Perhaps we desire the world to be a utopia and euphoric, but if it were beautiful all the time, then wouldn’t beauty in itself be normal, and more beautiful be beautiful, and less beautiful be ugly? No, beauty is too destructive a term for me to ever claim it as my stylistic reference. I play elegance. I play hate. I play jokes. I play joy, and I play destruction. I play the voice of angels, and I play the voice of despair. I play emotions that have no English name yet, and I play experiences that are simply impossible to put into words. But beauty? Never!
Perhaps I am a realist. And my realist approach to music is unadulterated by optimism, pessimism, utopia and apocalypse. The music stands simply as itself: an experience that exists within a given instant and instances of time that explains a unique story that shall never be repeated with the same inflections and emotions. To me, music is a work of art that exhibits meaning in such a way that it may not be a real emotion, but a state of being that could not be conceived any other way than through partaking in the musical experience at that given moment. And the world of music is one in which I feel more alive as a human being. And to my listeners, music is the closest you will ever get to my soul.
– Chris Sales
Lindsay’s back. I wish only to qualify one of Chris’s eloquent assertions, from the perspective of somebody who’s heard him play: namely his claim that he never plays beauty, or uses it as a stylistic reference. Even what we think of as dark or negative emotions — like despair or grief — can, in musical guise, still fall on the listener’s ear (and heart) as moments of searing, transcendent beauty. Like his wonderful recent solo in Shostakovich’s ninth symphony that just about made me cry.
So, Chris, let’s make a deal: you just keep on playing all those honest moods and emotions you talked about, and we’ll keep on thinking that your playing is beautiful — whether beauty is what you mean to achieve or not.