Two weeks ago, there was a series of synchronous events. This is not unusual in my life, but it’s rare that it happens so obviously. This is a long post, so be forewarned.

One day I woke up and wondered, apparently out of the blue, if playing a 7/8 cello would be better for me. There was absolutely no grounding for this notion; it literally popped into my head one morning. I thought about it for a few days, and decided that if things felt right, I’d ask one of my orchestral colleagues if I could try her 7/8 cello during a break.

I thought about it all the way to the next rehearsal. As we were setting up I asked my section leader if she’d take a look at my cello to confirm if it was laminated or not. She did, and to my surprise it isn’t: it’s fully carved. She asked about where it was from and when it was made to further confirm, and I told her that it was Hungarian and about forty years old. Then it was certainly carved, she told me.

And then, once she’d handed it back to me and I was setting up to play, she said, “Have you ever thought of trying a 7/8 cello?”

I put down my tuner and looked at her, partly amused, partly astonished.

“I ask because my luthier told me he has one in stock. I have a student who needs a new cello – she put the soundpost through the back [ed: insert wince here] – but I thought of you.”

“You know, it’s the oddest thing,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about trying a 7/8. I know M. plays one, and I was going to ask her how she likes it, and if she’d mind if I tried it. But won’t your student be wanting it?”

“Not for a while,” she said, “she has to work out exchange value and repairs with her current luthier, because hers is worthless the way it is now. It will be a few months. And he can always order another one.”

“What kind of cello is it – I mean, where was it made? Do you know the price range?” I asked, steeling myself for a cascade of blithely unaffordable numbers.

“Bof, it’s Chinese… maybe twelve hundred?” she said.

I blinked and fought the urge to grin madly. Chinese instruments had a bad rap about twenty years ago, but lately they’ve been dramatically improving in quality. My section leader wouldn’t recommend anything that wasn’t carved and of decent quality, especially as I’ve been playing for fifteen years. (In fact, her new cello is a Chinese instrument, with a remodel done by a local luthier.) Any new cello would need a proper set-up by the luthier, and if it’s a basic model then we’d need to upgrade pretty much everything to get it to the state I’d need it to be in: tailpiece, endpin, bridge, certainly the strings, possibly the entire fingerboard if planing it isn’t good enough… but even then, if it’s a good enough instrument, even with five to eight hundred dollars’ worth of upgrades it wouldn’t even come close my original estimate of what my next instrument would cost. Well, I’d need to find a good bow, too, but I have decent bow-buying luck (my recent at-home bow woes are a different matter entirely!) and so that wouldn’t be more than five hundred, I would think. And still the total would come to below what I was expecting to have to pay for my next instrument alone. There’s always the trade-in value of my current cello too, although now that I’m seriously thinking about a new one I’m becoming fiercely attached to it, for some silly reason. We’ve been through a lot in fifteen years and I feel somewhat responsible for it. (I feel the same way about our thirty-five year old family stove that died recently, as if giving it away is some kind of betrayal.)

So my section leader gave me her luthier’s card, and told me to call him.

At the break, I moved back and asked my colleague how she liked her 7/8. I knew she had been playing a full-sized one for two or three months while the 7/8 was in the shop, and I wondered how the difference had affected her. M. said that there hadn’t been a lot of difference in playing, really; she’d expected to have problems with the spacing and shifting, but had adjusted very quickly, almost intuitively. The one problem she’d had, she said, was with the body of the instrument, about halfway down. There was just more body in the way of her hands and arms. She readily agreed to allow me to sit and play about with it, and handed it to me.

To my astonishment, when I sat down and leaned it against my shoulder, the first thing I felt was that I wanted to hug it. The body was certainly smaller – not so much so that it felt fragile or weak, just more compact. It tucked into my own body better. I ran through a couple of scales, then nudged her sheet music closer and played through some of the troublesome bits of the piece we’d just finished playing.

Every instrument is different, plays differently, feels different under the hands, but this 7/8 felt as if it were co-operating with me, playing with me instead of being played by me. It was neat, and it was compact, and it… well, it fit better. It would be foolish to assume that any 7/8 would function the same way; every instrument has its own personality and quirks. Still, it provided food for thought.

I set it down carefully and went back to my own, picking it up and leaning it against my shoulder. And… I felt claustrophobic. It was huge. I could see immediately what M. had meant by the fuller body getting in the way of the hands. The 4/4 was deeper than the 7/8 had been. There really isn’t a lot of difference between a 7/8 and a 4/4, and there’s enough variation in the basic sizing anyway that you could find a 4/4 that is petite. True 7/8s are moderately rare and hard to find. The regular body length of a 4/4 cello is about 30″ and just under 18″ wide, whereas the 7/8 body is about 28.5 to 29″ long and 17″ wide. Overall it’s about an inch and a half shorter than a full-sized cello. But it’s not just about the length; it’s about the overall proportion. And having played both, one after the other, I could understand that in a way I hadn’t really understood before. Even that half-inch or so and the proportional depth makes a noticeable difference. There’s no difference in the pitch or power of the sound produced, of course.

“What made you think of mentioning the 7/8 to me?” I asked my section leader when she came back from break.

“I thought it would look better. You’re so…” And she gestured with her hands to indicate my petite build. M. is petite too, although I’m slightly taller than she is. I’ve never considered a 7/8 because I have very long fingers, and long arms and legs for my size, so making my way around the full-size cello has never been a problem for me. When she handed my cello back to me after looking at the top she must have seen how awkward it was in a way she doesn’t usually see, sitting next to me.

“If I were to try it,” I said, “would you come with me and give me your opinion? I’d pay you your regular lesson fee.”

“No no, my dear,” she said, “you would bring the cello here, and we would try it out together under real circumstances.”

“They would let me do that?” I blurted out, then laughed with her when she said, “But of course!” I never thought anyone would ever trust me enough to let me take a cello home for a trial. (In some ways I still think of myself as a young university student, the one who was deeply scarred by a bad experience with an arrogant and condescending luthier who, I hear, still treats his clients insultingly.) I expect that I’d have to leave a security deposit and prove that my insurance would cover it. Still, it’s an option I’ve never considered because I never thought it possible.

And then a few days ago Erin posted her thoughts about perhaps trying a 7/8. By this point I was already convinced that the universe was trying to tell me something; Erin’s mention just made me go “hmm” again.

So this morning I e-mailed the luthier, querying him about the 7/8 he had in stock. It can’t hurt to try it when I have a life again in mid-April. If it feels and sounds wrong, then that’s that. But ignoring the universe when it seems to be jumping up and down and trying to attract my attention about something would feel ungrateful. This may lead to something entirely different, or to nothing at all, which would be fine; I’m not in a hurry, or in dire need of a new cello. We can take our time. We’ll see.

Last night was my first post-FMS diagnosis orchestra rehearsal, and I was observing my energy levels and physical activity and things like that in a completely different way, instead of just being tired and depressed about my inability to pull it together and play properly. The concentration problems that have slowly crept into my orchestra experience — focusing on the score on the stand, staying in the rhythm, predicting the next bars of music rhythm- or note-wise– may very well be connected to FMS. I used to be able to know what came next without being there yet, when listening to or playing a piece of music. I used to be able to do this with a piece of music I’d never heard or played before: I could predict it, and if it wasn’t dead on then it worked musically with/against what actually did come next. I’ve slowly lost that ability over the past year. I’ve been having problems feeling the music, getting inside it in order to feel what comes next so that what I’m playing now flows into it the right way. It’s not related to how many times I listen to a recording to be familiar with the way the music goes, or how often I practice it, either. It’s a disconnect that happens somewhere in my mind as I’m playing. (Thanks so much, cognitive dysfunction.)

My fine motor control has grown a bit clumsier, too. I can’t do finicky things like trills or mordents like I used to, or throw out thirty-second notes in rapid scale-like patterns without lots of practice at slow speeds. I was putting all this down to not enough practice and the natural ageing process, but looking back I can admit that these sort of things don’t hit to this extent within the space of seven months. My hands and fingers are clumsier, which makes sense from a medical viewpoint now I know that FMS affects the musculoskeletal-CNS dynamic and creates a weakness in the limbs (and by extension, the limb extensions, hello clumsy fingers!).

The drive home had me thinking about the commitment to orchestra. At its most basic, it’s a way to make sure I play at least once a week. Now I need to look at it as a way to work on my hand and finger fine motor control, my focus and concentration, and the process of wrapping my mind around the image of the music as a whole to help me get from point A to point B. I have to cut myself some slack about my level of performance, which has, I admit, decreased: I can’t handle quick complicated passages like I used to, or be as accurate rhythm- and phrase-wise all the time. And yet at the same time, my position work has improved even more over the past six or seven months, which confuses me. Evidently shifts don’t require the same kind of fine motor control that quick fingering does, although it asks for fast precise movements in a different way. Somehow my understanding of how notes relate to one another in high positions and how my fingers have to move to play them has developed without conscious work on my part. It’s good to know that positive things are still happening in my brain beyond the fibro-fog while other musculoskeletal-related things are experiencing technical difficulty.

Last night I didn’t hurt as much as I used to after or during the rehearsal, either. Hurrah for medication.

I have to allow myself to accept that it’s not all my fault. I’m not playing less well because I’m not practising; I am not failing to be as good as I was because of lack of application, but because my mind and body aren’t co-operating. Practice would help, of course, because as I keep hammering into my skull (with limited success, evidently) if I’m this good without regular or structured practice, just think how good I could be if I did practice more often, and properly. But with the challenges and limits the FMS is trying to set on me, practice could be a very good exercise in pushing back the cognitive fog and keeping hands and arms limber, with the bonus of, you know, helping me play better.

I need to carve out a routine where I play at home more. Fifteen minutes in the morning before the computer gets turned on on work days, at the very least, would be better than nothing. I think repetitive work on the places where I fall apart at orchestra is a good place to start. (Gounod second movement of symphony numero uno, I’m looking at you, you example of rhythm going somewhere other than my brain expects it to go every single time, you. Behave.)