David Darling

I’ve always loved the cello, and when I had the opportunity to learn a string instrument, I should’ve signed up for cello, but I didn’t. Talked out of the violin by my mother who felt (correctly) there were too many violins already in the world, I settled on the viola – the ugly stepsister of the flashy violin and the regal cello. A useful instrument, but not a beautiful one. The viola gets all the support jobs, but none of the glory. When I’d practice one of my orchestra parts, my mom would often ask if I was playing it correctly, because it didn’t sound right to her. “Yes, I’m playing it right!” I’d snap, bitter that I was relegated to keeping time or providing a bed of harmony over which the violin could skitter and gambol. Stupid viola. Ah, but the cello, now there’s an instrument. Deep, rich, dark, luscious – like dark chocolate – the most romantic of all the instruments in the orchestra, the cello is capable of producing some of the most beautiful tones ever heard.

And no one understands the inherent melodramatic power of the cello better than David Darling. I can just hear my stepbrother, a passionate cellist, bristling. David Darling! That new age fraud! That charlatan! What about Cassals, for god’s sake, now there was a cellist! Actually, he’d probably find Cassals a bit too pedestrian too, but you get the idea.

I wouldn’t be surprised if David Darling is not that well received in classical music circles. He has largely rejected the established repertoire and followed his own heart, creating a series of moody tone poems, often using unconventional techniques or instruments (he overdubs a lot and has been known to play the electric eight-string cello). His large body of work peaked in 1992 with the release of what I consider his magnum opus, an album simply titled Cello. Throughout the album, he wrings the entire spectrum of human emotion out of his instrument, although he focuses more on the deep blue melancholic tones the instrument is so well suited for.

Once, when I was in high school, I came home from the dorm in the middle of the afternoon, sick as a dog, and fell into bed. I slept for a couple of hours and woke up in that strange disorienting nap twilight in which you look at the clock and it says 4:30, but you have no idea what that means. It was winter and getting dark, and the whole world looked blue and empty from my room. Everything was still and quiet, and for a moment, I imagined I was the only person left on the earth. The darkness deepened and still nothing broke the spell. Still it was quiet. Still it was still. Still I was alone on the earth. After half-an-hour, a car slowly drove by in the distance, crunching on the snow, and I was snapped back in the world. David Darling’s music sounds like that half-hour to me. Still, quiet, blue, and profoundly alone. And no track raises the hair on my arm and cracks open my heart faster than In November. Especially the way that, near both the beginning and the end, over the stately progression of somber chords, there arises from the mists a shriek, a scream, a distant cry of unbearable loneliness. The piece ebbs and flows, the chords shifting and pulling, waxing and waning, swelling and subsiding. The harmonies drift, creating tension without dissonance, then slowly settle inexorably towards resolution. Closer and closer, darker and darker, until the final resolution is struck and the shriek of grief, the threnody, is released again, only to be swallowed by the ominous, omnipotent night.

I turn back from the black water, lapping at the shore, and head silently back to the hotel. I am in Kodiak. And my father is dead. In November.