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Cookin' With Sherry.
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Perhaps more than any of his colleagues, Fred Sherry looks the part of a musician; his
white mane seems perfectly consistent with one's image
of a cellist. He surprises in other ways, however, with his interest in Kung Fu movies,
body piercing and women pool champions.
An Artist Member of the Society since
1984, he was its Artistic Director from 1989 to 1992. He is a founding member
of TASHI, a frequent performer at Bargemusic and a member of the faculty of The Juilliard
School. Mr. Sherry has had close working relationships with composers Milton Babbitt,
Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss and Toru Takemitsu
as well as jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea. An ardent supporter of contemporary
composers, he has premiered works by Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky
and Steve Mackey, and in 1988 performed the premiere of Charles Wuorinen's concerto,
Five, with choreography by Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, at New York City Ballet.
Widely represented
on compact disc, he recently embarked on a series of recordings for Koch International
Classics. He has devoted much time to contemplating cello technique, and is now
preparing to write a book on the
subject. He is a fan of Vladimir Nabokov and an avid
cook. His wife, Carol Archer, is a pianist.
"My dad was an amateur record collector so we had classical music in our house. My
older brother played piano and I really wanted to play the piano too. My father said, 'Why don't you go to school and see what they have,' and
the guy said, 'We haven't got much left, we got this cello,' and I said, 'Well I know what that is' and he said, 'Oh you do!
Why don't you take it home and try it out?' |
| "I redo my playing every day." |
"You develop the love affair with the instrument.
I'm not sure that I wouldn't have been
a better pianist, or a really good percussionist, 'cause
I like instruments that strike. The
bow can be used that way. Some people only like to stroke
the cello gently and make
clouds with the tone, and I like to put a little ding
on it. You develop a liking for certain
players who play the way you play. It's funny: I always
loved Rostropovich and he
doesn't play with a ding on the beginning of the tone. "I have a modern instrument that I like to use for certain modern pieces because I find that it has a newer, fresher response, and an old Italian instrument that was made in 1700 by Matteo Goffriller that has a gorgeous, rich tone -- but that one's harder to ding on. The newer one sounds brighter, maybe a little more shallow, and the old one has the really great depth and that burnished tone you expect out of a cello. A lot of cellists prefer the Goffriller because it has 'the cello tone' -- dark, burnished, deep, rich; it doesn't always have a lot of brightness or high end -- but if you wanted high end you would have been a violinist. You want to accentuate the fatter quality of the tone. For a dingy kind of player, the Goffriller can absorb the accents more easily. "I'm a heavy handed person so I use a light bow, which inspires me to play less heavy into the string. Those little attacks, or dings, inspire me not to leave the bow lying on the string but to let it ride over the string. I redo my playing every day. What does it mean to sit right... to play right... to practice correctly... hear correctly. "Each instrument has a thing it's good at; you call the other instruments out of your own. I want to be as rhythmic as a percussionist... as legato as a flute player with just a single breath... as expressive as a human voice... as contrapuntal as a piano.
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| "You won't see an instrument for 10 years and then you say, Hey, that used to be so and so's." |
"The oldest bow I have dates from the 1880s; collectors
like them but from the players'
point of view they get a little rubbery and too yielding
after a while. If I had a lot of
money I'd go around and buy cellos -- anything that
appealed to me from $5,000 to five
million. I have a student who I tell, if you ever meet
a guy in a dark alley and he steals
your cello it's me! There's always a cello that responds
in a more perfect way. They say
you marry your instrument, but I think of it as an open
marriage! "The guy who played my instrument before me was Jules Eskin of the BSO. I saw it at a dealer and recognized it as Jules's. The number of really fine instruments is limited. Players know what each others' instruments look like. You won't see an instrument for 10 years and then you say, Hey, that used to be so and so's. "My main teachers were Leonard Rose and Jan Robbins on cello and Felix Gallimir and Robert Mann for chamber music. I consider all the composers I worked with to be my teachers. If I have one regret it's that I was a little too young to work with Stravinsky. What I'd want to pass along from them is, Don't be a selfish player; don't only get involved in the effete, snobby part without remembering that the guts of humanity is in the music. It's not just a veneer of culture that makes the music sound the way it does, it's all formed from ancient things people liked to do, like hitting something rhythmically. In Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee tells a student, 'You don't kick with emotion, you only kick with anger.' The translation is not direct but the idea is that when you play, don't try to portray one single emotion, the one you feel. Don't decide the whole thing for the audience; put all your emotion into the music. "If you have three voices, things can travel in parallel motion, in similar motion, in contrary motion, or one line can stay the same while another line travels around it -- and that's it. The sublime aspect of composing is taking those four idiotically simple ways of moving and making great music out of them.
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"What would you trade for Bach's St. Matthew Passion for? Nothing. I'm not gonna trade it." |
"Carol and I play a game where she'll ask, 'What
would you trade Bach's St. Matthew
Passion for?' Well, nothing, I'm not gonna trade it. 'Beethoven
Quartets?' 'Sorry, can't trade.'
'Mendelssohn Trios?' 'Okay, I'll trade you Schubert Trios
even up, Schumann Trios even
up even though it's three to two. I'll trade you the
entire works of Hummel...!' There are
cornerstones of the literature... Rite of Spring: not
tradeable. That would be on the Top
Ten list. Schoenberg's Fourth String Quartet would be
untradeable. Mozart operas --
Figaro; Don Giovanni less so, Magic Flute more so. I
love Strauss's Rosenkavalier. I
like Puccini. Stravinsky: The Rake's Progress and his
little chamber operas -- Renard,
Mavra -- are fun. And vocal pieces like The Flood... "Straight pool is the most frustrating game on the planet because it's about whittling balls off the pack and trying to get position. To really play pool right, to put any English on the ball, you cannot hit hard. English doesn't take on a hard stroke; you'll crush the response off the rail. "I found a magazine called Piercing Fans International Quarterly. The stuff that's in there -- body piercing... tattoos...! It's a pagan rite, isn't it. We're talking about music as being a refined version of the very essential nature of all things, and that's just a pagan thing -- you hurt yourself to prove you're a man or mark your body to prove you're different from somebody else. "I make up my own recipes. I like to reduce sauces with different kind of onions in them. Vidalia sweet, white onions, shallots, scallions and garlic; put all those together with some white wine, chicken broth or water -- sauté it and then reduce it and you get fabulous flavor."
"There are the obvious choices like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Caesar, Alexander the Great, or whoever invented painting in 20 Billion BC. I'll have dinner with God! In my own field it would probably be Bach; Beethoven maybe. Since I'm so serious about food I probably wouldn't want to have dinner with them because I'd be too interested in the meal!"
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