Thursday's Thoughts  "Whether the Weather Be..."


I happened to catch the last few minutes of an interview with the great cellist Yo Yo Ma on the radio this morning.  He was talking about how much the weather and air conditions affect his instrument, being made of wood and thus, highly sensitive to such things.  He explained to the interviewer how, in winter, great care must be taken to protect his cello or it could result in the "death of the instrument" as he called it.  During winter, his cello is stored in a special "hold" which protects it from the very dry winter air, because if the cello were exposed to this for great periods of time its wood would become very brittle and eventually split!  The specially crafted hold prevents this, but sometimes an additional and more simple method is employed, just to be on the safe side of musical morbidity rates.  A little rubber tube, with holes in it, is placed into the hold along with the cello.  Inside the tube is a sponge that is damp and that will release at least some level of moisture into the closed hold, to safeguard the life of the wood!  So simple, yet so critical, if  Yo Yo is to be believed...and I think he knows what he's talking about!  


Moisture has been in abundance this spring.  The sun has been very shy here lately, even allowing for the expected level of springtime showers and cloudy days.  For three weeks in a row, we have not seen much of the sun between Monday and Friday, almost as if it has packed up its rays into a briefcase and gone off to work in some other part of the world each work week...lucky Brazil!  By the third week it starts to get to you...even a person like myself who doesn't mind "the soft weather" as the Irish call it.  But after a long stretch, you realize it has begun to affect you...tired of the gloom and damp, you long for the dry, sparkling days that surely must be coming!  Listening to Yo Yo Ma  got me to thinking about how natural, biological even,  this reaction is.  If his beloved cello, created of a fine wood and string skeleton, but which doesn't possess a brain or central nervous system, can be so affected by weather, then we human instruments all the more so!  


Until some savant at M.I.T. devises the purse-sized "sunshine model" of the cello moisture tube, we must grin and bear the weather...whether the weather be too much rain or too much sun...it's a problem either way, as we know.  In the meantime, it's up to us to take proper care of our instrument and learn what strings to pluck and notes to play to make us grin and make our days musical, whatever the weather.  (I find lots of tea and a great book really helps!)


Thanks for reading.  Let it steep!