In which what doesn’t kill one makes one stronger
Princess Ekaterina Vorontsova
The weather did not support al fresco musicianship. The wind howled, and the ship fought its way through enormous waves. Urs, the princess, and the attendant found themselves huddled miserably below decks for safety, since the deck was awash with water.
Urs was not a bad sailor, in general, but in this slow rolling sea she suffered from debilitating nausea, made much worse when the two Russians determined to pass the time playing tin flutes in the Irish style. Both women had clearly spent hours mastering this misleadingly simple-seeming instrument, and they made the most of this exceptional chance to demonstrate their virtuosity almost uninterrupted. They stopped each day for roughly six hours of sleep, but they resumed their efforts again with alacrity after these cleansing respites. The weather gave them almost a week to really focus on playing their astonishingly ornamented versions of traditional folk tunes at a terrifyingly fast tempo.
Astonishing was the only word for it, Urs thought. The inescapable high pitch of the whistles, the deftness with which the two ladies fluttered their fingers over the holes of their instruments, and the seemingly unlimited number of tunes known to her ship mates offered a buffet of opportunities for bad playing that dwarfed those offered by yesterday’s performance on brass instruments. Urs had never before thought she would be so grateful for the trombone’s basic construction and for its relatively limited repertoire.
At first, Urs was stunned into immobility both mentally and physically by the barrage of unpleasant sensory information from without and within. She struggled to escape to the deck, but found the hatch blocked to discourage the ship from being swamped. She shredded a bale of cotton in her eagerness to find something to stuff into her ears, and then she painstakingly reconstructed the cotton into bale form again under the frown of the first mate, who caught her in the act, and who preferred to deliver the full value of the cargo on their arrival in England.
Urs’s travel companions did not provide any natural opportunities for her to courteously request that they might want to rest a bit, if only to keep up their strength, and their fierce expressions discouraged the maddened inarticulate shouting which would have better expressed Urs’s mood. Every so often, one of the Russians might find a reason to stop playing in order to take care of some naturally arising need, but rather than pausing, the remaining lady seemed to revel in the opportunity to take an extended solo, increasing her volume (which Urs had not thought was possible), and swaying with expanded gusto until her duet partner returned.
Urs found herself awed by the sheer endurance of her companions, and then gradually more puzzled by it. What in the world could possibly be motivating them to play so unceasingly, for so long? In Urs’s experience, musicians played for a while, and then stopped, at least to confer. Not these two. They were surely going to injure themselves repeating the same small movements of their fingers.
Would not their lips eventually get sore? Was one of them afraid of thunderstorms, and they were playing convulsively to keep their minds off of it? Urs had initially assumed they were trying to divert themselves, but she gradually came to think that they were getting actual entertainment watching her reactions. She had not taken them for kind-hearted, certainly, but she was surprised to think that might be actively enjoying the act of giving pain to others. She had heard of people like this, but she had never actually experienced it first hand. No, it couldn’t be. She wouldn’t believe it, even under these very trying circumstances.
Urs dismissed the lowering thought, and began to take a mental inventory of the different kinds of mistakes her companions were making, so she could give them suggestions for improvements when they finally exhausted themselves—on the dock in England, if necessary. She would be able to prioritize her advice and support her observations with an inventory of quantified examples. They would not be able to dismiss her observations as vague or impressionistic. Facts are friendly, Urs thought, virtuously.
The wind howled and the ship groaned. The tin whistles shrilled assertively and, to the informed listener, quite painfully.
Once Urs began to attend to the playing more carefully, with the goal of helping the ladies to comprehensively understand their errors, she grew more and more puzzled. These were not, she realized, the mistakes of over-enthusiastic amateurs. Urs had thought she could start gently by suggesting they improve the accuracy of their intonation, perhaps by slowing down and playing some scales. And yet she did not hear more mistakes from the ladies on the more technically difficult notes. Quite the contrary. The Russians were both playing standard tin whistles structured to support high-speed delivery of melodies in the key of either G or D major. Urs had assumed they had been over-ambitious when they chose to attempt to play melodies in E flat and B flat, keys which required them to half cover (“half hole,” to the expert) one or more holes of the flute. Half holing is difficult to do at speed, Urs knew. And yet what she heard was that, weirdly, the two ladies played all of the half-holed notes correctly, and stumbled instead on the simple notes, played more slowly.
She met a similar puzzle when she considered her shipmates’ patterns of musical ornamentation. It was common for beginners to attempt to play extra trills or runs at the expense of the basic melody and rhythm of the standard folk tune, leaving the hearer with a muddied cacophony that could not be resolved into anything in particular. As Urs looked to store a mental record of ornamentation errors to correct, she realized that these ornamentations were technically complete and correct (and quite complex in their construction) except sometimes they were executed exactly one half step above what would have made sense in context, or sometimes they were executed a half beat before or after the expected timing.
Urs began to see patterns in the choice of note, key, ornamentation, and tempo. The ladies’ playing appeared to be failing to please through a calculated design, executed with precision, and not because Urs’s shipmates were the feckless dilettantes she had assumed. What on earth?
Urs made direct eye contact with the princess, blowing away with gusto in her duet with Natalia. Urs joined the duet, and loudly howled a series of notes which brought the whistling to an abrupt stop.
“Ah,” said Princess Ekaterina Vorontsova. “I see we have things to discuss.”
