Finding Sympathetic Vibrations when the Lights are Going Out

I was eager to impress my violin instructor with my improvements on the song, Da Slocket Light that week. But it sort of came out like all the notes had been swept off the score, thrown into a blender and then poured back onto the page. It was a total cacophony of sound. Rather grinding on the ears.

Da Slockit Light was composed by Tom Anderson, a Scottish fiddler. He shared in an interview once that the depopulation of the town of his birth inspired him to write the tune. “I was coming out of Eshaness in late January, 1969, the time was after 11 pm and as I looked back at the top of the hill leading out of the district, I saw so few lights compared to what I remembered when I was young. As I watched, the lights started going out one by one. That, coupled with the recent death of my wife, made me think of the old word ‘Slockit’ meaning, a light that has gone out, and I think that is what inspired the tune.”

When played well, this popular tune does really seem like a walk through the hill country, at night, in the quiet, gazing at the hillside where lights have been going out one by one as the inhabitants settle into their sleep or move away to the city or pass from this world to the next. It’s a story filled with layers of meaning, nostalgia and emotion.

On YouTube you can find a hundred different versions of the song each with its own spin and spirit. It’s a fiddle tune, so it’s meant to be played around with a little.

However, my instructor was not quite so impressed with my playing that day.

“Christy, slow it way down and drop all the fancy fingering.” These were not the words this student wanted to hear that day. I wanted my attempt to be applauded. Wanted to make my fingers jump around the fingerboard and play the song as I wished it to sound. The way the legendary fiddlers play it.

But let’s be real. I was still quite new at this thing. Still couldn’t make it speak the way I want it to. Still prone to squeaks, and sharps and flats and entirely misplaced fingers. All illusions of grandeur were immediately put to rest when I started to actually play.

He instructed me to start over and play it very slow. “Unnaturally slow.” Unnaturally slow so as to hear every little thing rolling off my strings. Every sweet and terrible thing.

And so I did. For a week I slowed it down and stepped back to the basics, eliminating all the slides and frills and trills. I set aside the creative liberties, in order to first get acquainted with the foundation of the song, and I aimed to spin those notes off the strings with conviction and hopefully, eventually perfection.

The thing is, it’s hard to play the violin unnaturally slow. It’s… well… unnatural, to state the obvious.

I found it significantly more difficult than running forward quickly through the song. Quickly in a way that the mistakes blur with what I get right, and where its more difficult to distinguish specifically when I’m on and when I’m off, thereby making it easier to ignore the errors (and therefore also more difficult to correct the errors).

Yes, it’s easier to fly through the song haphazardly. However, it’s far less nice to listen to, it turns out. And I’m reminded that making music that is pleasant to listen to is the goal after all.

The awkwardness of slowing down hurt my brain and body both. Slowing down required patience. It was hard because I wanted immediate gratification. I wanted to be amazing. Today.

It’s hard to take up something that is so slow going when we live in a world that is constantly trying to sell us shortcuts and quick fixes and your best life right now in all circumstances.

Nevertheless, I spent the week doing as I was instructed to do. Maybe a bit begrudgingly. Perhaps with a slight gash to my pride. But I did it. I stuck with it and reaped what I had sewn.

I simplified the sound. Cut out the clutter. Found the bones of the song again and made it beautiful.

The thing is, when I tapped the brakes on my bowing, in addition to actually beginning to play the right notes, I heard every note too. Clearly. Warmly. Intentionally. I was able to adjust the flat notes and pay attention to every finger placement. I began to see how each note has a purpose in telling the story Tom Anderson set out to tell.

And then came the really amazing part. As I was playing it back for my instructor at the next lesson my whole violin suddenly began to vibrate as I slid the bow across the string. It reverberated warm waves of sound through its spine. Long humming strokes of the bow coaxed out something indescribable. Something you kind of have to experience to fully understand.

Like a compassionate physical touch, those sound waves travelled from the spine of the violin right straight down into the spine of me.

It was a moment of such an overwhelming and pleasurable sensation that it stopped me in my tracks. Or rather, it stopped my bowing. My chin lifted from the chin rest and my jaw went slack. “Did you feel that?” I asked him, stunned and wondering what had just happened to me.

He smiled and explained the fascinating phenomenon that happens between the strings of the violin when you hit certain notes just exactly perfect. It’s called, “sympathetic vibrations.” It occurs when the fingers placed on one string play the same note as the neighboring open string, an octave higher. When this happens the neighboring unbowed and untouched string jumps, quivers and sings prompted by the string beside it playing its note.

Perfect attunement is felt through the entire body and mind of both the violin and the violinist, and this results in an experience of unparalleled pleasure.

The thing happening between the two strings was like an incredible dance with distance between partners who ache to be close but maintain the space between, opting for a deeper more sacred connectedness that transcends the physical. I know there’s an actual complex scientific explanation behind it. But I prefer the dance.

A perfect understanding, an authentic knowing between the strings was happening (two inanimate objects!) and I was so much in awe by the experience, my brain was struggling to comprehend it.

Call it a dance. A duet. A yearning. Or a celebration of knowing and being known. The two strings stretch, reach and bend, throwing their arms out for each other. They sway together in such a way that the sound is so unbelievably rich you can feel the vibrations roll out as waves into the air. Even the hairs on your skin stand up, alert to the magic happening in the room.

As the violin reverberated during this intimate moment and its warm rhythmic waves swelled right through my skin and crescendoed deep into me, it was as if I and the violin were one. And that is how you know you’ve done it. Because you feel it.

Sympathetic vibrations are experienced in the mind, body and spirit.

I felt them inside my bones. Inside where the marrow lives. Not metaphorically. I literally felt the vibrations in my bones. My chest hummed with heat and sound waves. The music wove itself in waves all the way through me down to my heels and into the floor beneath my feet. And I wondered if the person standing next to me could feel it too.

Letting go of the clutter of the song that I was not yet qualified to carry and focusing on the simple core reaped a pleasurable physical reward. And it was nothing short of incredible.

In slowing down, I reached a new level in this relationship with my violin. I began to feel a deeper connection to it—physical, emotional, spiritual connectedness. Rich, honest, deep and raw. It was a part of me now.

It literally lives inside my bones.

This was a simple sacred grounding, an attunement with the slow liquid pulsing reverberations of the basic melody. In letting go of the clutter I was able to see the actual song. Not the song as I wish it to be or the song from the perspective of various artists, or the song through my striving too hard beyond what my capabilities were, but the song as it actually was on its own terms. And it was beautiful. And it was strong. And it was holy.

I felt myself entering the story and paying attention. I was right there walking beside Tom Anderson through the Scottish countryside at night watching the lights of the dwindling village go out one by one until the only lights remaining were that of memories and the stars that pierced the darkness overhead. My mind’s eye looked over at Tom and we both had tears dripping off our cheeks. We were present in this moment together.

The strings of my violin were becoming rooted in me and I in them. In our slower pace together, we began to experience a deeper understanding of ourselves and of each other and of the context of the world we were in and the words we were working at putting out into the world.

May it be so in every part of my life.

May I let go of the clutter that distracts and pulls me away from the core. May I seek resonance with all that is good amidst the swirling chaos around me, may I find and intentionally attune myself to the sacred center so the warmth and goodness experienced there rolls out of me too.

I invite you to pause with me. To slow down. To breathe. To go deeper. To be present. To find and connect intentionally with that which is true and good in each other and in the world. May we avoid being separated by all the many voices that are shouting their distracting lies into the crowds, and may we know that in struggling times we always have each other to walk with through the hills in the darkness of night. And we will know when we have found each other, because we will feel the sympathetic vibrations all the way inside our bones.

All images taken by my son, Henry Berghoef, on the first anniversary of my violin lessons.