Darrett Adkinsx
“WE HAVE HAD I THINK
A PRETTY EXCITING MEETING
OF THE MIND AND SPIRIT”
Interview
“When we’re “playing together” as I call it, I am playing with her, I am responding to what she does, I’m changing my timing subtly – there’re different phrasings, and it’s because she’s there finishing, or she’s starting the gesture that I need to be a part of.”
“My bow hair comes from probably the same horses that her brush hair is coming from. I could see that she had this idea that she could create some relationship between the hair of her brush and the hair of my bow, and so I think that this spiritual energy she’s trying to get is also grounded in the materials.”
Bach and Feldman
“Morton Feldman was a great friend of the American abstract expressionists. He wanted to find a way to write music that was indeterminate, meaning some elements were left up to the performer. Because of the painters he knew, he thought: it’s so beautiful, why can’t the music be like that?”
“When I play this Feldman piece in concert, I practice it a lot – I’m always surprised because you make mistakes, you think you can’t make a mistake – like a painter, sometimes you make actual mistakes, sometimes it’s just different but sometimes you know it’s not what you meant — that also happens with this.”
Darrett Adkins
Cello faculty,
The Juilliard School,
Oberlin College & Conservatory
Co-Director string chamber music program,
Aspen Music Festival and School
“IN ART, THERE IS ONLY ONE
THING THAT HAS VALUE:
THE THING THAT CANNOT
BE EXPLAINED”
With Darrett Adkins, I was plunged into
the deep, somber, and rugged universe of the cello. It was as if the lamentations, so charac-teristic of this instrument, its almost primitive notes, were tearing the space in order to give birth to an essential world. The exploration began with a rediscovery of Bach, whose formidable contrapuntal lines allowed me to untether the brush. The research continued with American composers such as Richard Wernick, Morton Feldman, and Eliott Carter, whose piece Figment cast a spell on me. I sought, immediately, to paint to the rhythms of this melody of the real, as it was being intoned by Darrett’s bow. Carter presents us with the bustling of the world, the permanent motion of things and beings, the endless succession of elusive events, and their sudden emergence. On this adventure, Darrett and I attempted to experience communion
“at the same time.” I allowed my movements
to spill outward, searching for vitality in this lack of restraint. The difficulty lay in the tension and concentration of the moment that precedes gesture, that moment right before the assault on space when, confidently, you surrender to your intuition. The leap into the unknown, the letting go, so you can see something come into being. I remember Braque’s words,
“In art, there is only one thing that
has any value : the thing that cannot
be explained.”
Everything that happened surprised us. We, Darrett and I, were almost suspended inside this music of Carter’s, ceaselessly caught up in the permanence of a dazzling future, as though we were a part of nature itself. We could not really have managed to explain what was happening in the course of this collaboration, and yet, there it was. We felt as though we were carrying the work inside us. This interpretation became a form of creation in its own right. At the end of one of our sessions, Darrett confided in me that, for him, this way of painting called to mind “the very essence of music.”
