The C string of a cello, when perfectly tuned, vibrates 65.4 times per second. If the cellist places their fourth finger correctly on a perfectly tuned G string, that G string will also vibrate sympathetically with the C string, also at 65.4 times per second, without being bowed itself. They will resonate together.
Not being a cellist myself, my brain needed to research this information after attending a wonderful recital last night by a man earning his doctorate. I’ve been thinking about empathy lately, about resonating with someone else’s experience. I’ve been thinking about how crucial empathy is to community and society.
Well, I suppose more accurately, how empathy is a requirement for and a measurement of the health and goodness of community and society.
I think it was during Mattia Imponenti’s second piece (the second movement of David Baker’s Sonata for Piano and Cello) that musical resonance and empathy as a measure of societal health and goodness began to come together. Because, while strings may resonate with each other when they are playing the same note, string resonance alone does not produce enough sound to emotionally move an entire auditorium of people. It is when the spruce top plate of the cello resonates with the strings, amplified and warmed by the hollow cavern of the cello’s core, that the wood’s vibrations travel to our ear drum—which itself matches the resonant vibration, and in turn vibrates the fluid in the cochlea tube behind our ear drum, and is perceived by our brain as music.
If only things that are the same, only things that are alike resonate with each other, there is no rich goodness. It is only when things that are different, only when things that are unlike allow themselves to resonate with each other—wood with string, ear drum with wood—it is only then that we get the full-bodied warmth of music that can move us.
This is so important for our communities and our society to understand. I have no doubt that many humans display a large amount of empathy, an incredible ability to resonate, with people who they perceive to be like them. We will care for our own, defend our own, stand up for our own.
But the true goodness and power of communities and society is when we as individual humans go beyond that kind of “string to string” resonance and empathy. True goodness and health and power in our communities and society can only come when we find resonance and empathy for those who we do not perceive to be “like” us. When we, like the wood body of a cello, allow ourselves to empathize and resonate and amplify the experience of the “other”—of the string, the different one.
May we work together toward this empathy, this resonance, which goes beyond caring just for those who are like ourselves.
(PS: As wonderful as the cello recital was, I wouldn’t have gone if it weren’t for the fact that son-in-law Nolan Koskela-Staples was part of a jazz trio supporting for the last section of the recital. Take a look!)