Circular Breathing
Meditations from a Musical Life
Publisher: Sunstone Press, 2011
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Circular breathing is a technique for wind instrument playing in which fresh air is drawn in through the nose at the same time that stored air in the lungs is released by mouth through the instrument. The process allows the player to produce a continuous line of music without breaking the curve of a melody to inhale. In this collection of personal essays, clarinetist Ann McCutchan uses the metaphor of circular breathing to animate her understanding of her own life as a woman, musician, and writer.
The questions McCutchan grapples with have universal implications. For example, how does one come to be called to a life’s work? For McCutchan, who grew up in central Florida in the 1960s, the call grew out of twin desires: to exercise a physical voice and to develop an interior one. Bringing both to fruition meant abandoning roles expected of young women in that time and place, and learning to live ever after with the conflicting claims of art and life. Questions of familial loss lie at the heart of this collection, as well. With a sure, delicate hand, McCutchan examines the impact of her parents’ untimely deaths, her inability to bear children, and the foundering of her marriage. Art may not deliver one from sorrow, she discovers, but it may console -- deeply. Finally, there are the questions that arise when one can no longer fulfill the physical demands of an art. Can a musician trade in her instrument, and a world that defined her for decades, for something else? Here, McCutchan charts her journey from the stage to the page, exploring the ways both worlds feed each other.
“It takes more than candor to find the story amidst the miscellany of one’s life and give it shape and significance. Ann McCutchan, who knows that all meaning begins in the particular, uses her rich experience as a musician to meditate on art, memory, loss and desire with wit and insight. When she writes of ‘sculpting the sentences of music,’ I want to turn that around to say that, in this generous and inviting collection, she ‘sculpts music into sentences.’“
Rosellen Brown, author of Tender Mercies and Before and After
”Ann McCutchan's essays show gifts rarely seen in combination. They reveal a savvy, witty, worldly feel for human motivation, a lyrical appreciation of nature, and, perhaps most notably, a profoundly informed understanding of the places where music and literature meet.”
Emily Fox Gordon, author of Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy and Are You Happy?: A Childhood Remembered
”McCutchan's personal essays about the role of music in her life go behind the typical “liner note” style of music writing to something far more elemental, primitive, bodily—and, hence, spiritual. In her essay, “Opening,” she speaks of the “windy gush of vowels,” those sounds that pry apart in us that which would otherwise be clamped shut. As a clarinetist, McCutchan has learned how music can be a spiritual as well as artistic discipline. She celebrates the beauty of music (as well as the human mind and body), interrogates her own life to discover the path she's been walking, and bears witness to the presence of mystery. That makes her a triple threat.”
Image Journal