Originally published by Rita J. King on LinkedIn: Focus on Motion, Not Power
During my cello lesson with Michael Fitzpatrick today, I realized that his performances offer a glimpse into an important aspect of our relationship with technology.
I’m a beginner, so he’s teaching me how to hold the bow, to arch my hand into maximum interior “cosmic space,” as he calls it, and turn my thumb into an omnidirectional machine and turn it into the support that opens and closes the drawbridge of my hand.
“Right now,” he said, “you just have to focus on motion, not power. You are learning how to create a relational sonic universe. You come at it from an elegant angle, like Michelangelo with his chisels, to free the sound the way he freed figures from the block.”
Michael and I met over a decade ago, in a medieval Spanish castle, when he was invited to perform at a conference at which I was a speaker. I was overwhelmed by the raw emotional power of the sound, not just because the music was beautiful, but because I got the impression that somehow, Michael was channeling the energy of the people in the room.
I’m not the only one who feels this way.
“The emotion induced by Michael Fitzpatrick’s music is so powerful it seems almost verbalized,” said His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
“A visionary work of extraordinary creative imagination, designed to uplift humanity into its higher nature on Earth.” Robert Snyder, who won an Academy Award for his film TITAN: Story of Michelangelo.
Two Titans
Michael told me a story about two cellists today, titans who were diametrically opposed to one another philosophically.
“And they were both absolutists,” he said.
For the sake of this context, I will call the two cellists Cello A and Cello B.
Cello A was brilliant and on the ascent when technology came along to change the way classical music was recorded. He got an idea, to put a microphone on the cello while he performed, which enabled him to economize all of his energy and create a sleek sound with less effort. He let the microphone do the job for him, Michael said.
“These were living gods,” he said. “Their fates unfolded along different lines.”
Cello A, Michael said, never understood the magic trick that Michael had just taught me: how to conjure the cosmic real estate within the universe of my arched hand. He was a mechanical genius, but he was also a reductionist, too smooth, reliant more on the laws of physics than his own soul to produce sound. The system he created “poisoned the minds of thousands of students.”
His left hand, Michael said, was very robotic.