The Essentials of the Lyre in Český Krumlov
/By Sheila Johns – Ecuador
Sarah Boyd, Hanae Nakamura, anna Cooper, Sheila Johns
After a long four-year hiatus, the experience of being in the exquisite, fairyland village of Český Krumlov provided an unforgettable portal back into the human and musical embrace of our world lyre community. Because we were fewer in number than in previous international gatherings, there seemed to be a heightened appreciation for the presence of each participant. Old friends and new acquaintances mingled in a warm, intimate circle as we began our initial pedagogy workshop that preceded the larger general conference. As Saeko Cohn has already beautifully described, this workshop, artfully led by Martin Tobiassen, was designed to be highly participatory, and by the end of the weekend, pearls of wisdom and important insights about the pedagogy of the lyre had been masterfully extracted from each and every participant.
For me, the highlight of this opening workshop came in the Sunday morning course entitled The Essentials of the Lyre, offered by one of our Czech hosts, lyre innovator and performer extraordinaire, Jan Braunstein. Long-familiar with Jan’s extraordinary technical gifts, I had imagined that we would be the recipients of some helpful technical exercises during this session. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth of what he actually brought to us.
Jan began by asking us to produce a single tone around the circle, meant to played out of an imagination of ‘the ideal lyre sound’. Next, he asked us to repeat this exercise, this time drawing the sound ‘from within’. On a third round, he requested that we beckon our sound ‘from without’. Then Jan reminded us that our physical instrument actually just consists of a frame with strings attached – the quintessential ‘naked piano’. Out of this, we can produce a ‘naked sound’ (pitch on a string), but we also have the possibility to make audible what he referred to as the ‘naked tone’, which is, in fact, a living reality coming from above – but we need something physical to receive this tone coming from other realms. Jan pointed out that that the meeting of our own sounding with what comes toward us is what we have come to understand as the true tone of the lyre.
Jan suggested that modern lyre is distinguished by the individuality of how the tone sounds. The miracle is that what we call the true lyre tone is immediately available to every person who approaches a lyre string. Jan asserted that the gift of this ‘pure tone’ needs to be cultivated and developed so that it can meet the world of music around us in order to keep the listening open, which is needed in our experience of music today as never before. He also reminded us how, just as at birth, toward the end of life, our listening capacity as human beings is naturally open again to the region where the pure tone can be heard. Between birth and death, we must cultivate this quality of intentional listening out of our free will. If we keep in mind that this is actually the purpose of the modern lyre, we will be guided in our efforts to use this essential of playing the lyre as a foundation on which all other aspects of our musical and technical development can subsequently be based.
Listening to Jan speak, I couldn’t help but feel the presence of our dear friend and colleague Channa Seidenberg, who during her lifetime as a lyre teacher, upheld the essential element of cultivating our active listening in order to beckon the true tone of the lyre in exactly the way that Jan expressed in this memorable closing session of a valuable pedagogy workshop before the general conference even began!
