Want to Improve Your Musicianship? Try this!
By Thomas Wolf
Michael Reynolds has had a long career as a successful cellist. Perhaps best known as a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Muir String Quartet, he is a cello professor at Boston University, and has often been called upon to be part of the cello section during tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra or to fill in when another BSO cellist is sick or on vacation.
Colleagues praise Mike for his natural technique and his superb musicianship. “It all seems so easy for him,” says one. “It’s no muss, no fuss. I love playing with him.”
Mike Reynolds, second from left, with his colleagues from the Muir String Quartet (Steven Ansell. Lucia Lin, and Peter Zazofsky).
I have worked with Mike for years and performed many concerts with him and I can attest to the fact that one has an extra bit of confidence when he is on stage. He is so reliable, extraordinarily musical, and a wonderful collaborator. But unlike many of his colleagues, I know one of his secrets!
Sure, Mike has had all the right training (he is a graduate of the legendary Curtis Institute of Music). He has a fine instrument. He has spent years playing with other master musicians.
But that is not all. And here is the surprise. Mike is a superb fly fisherman and has been one since he was a kid. He claims that much of his success as a cellist comes from his fly fishing.
The story begins in 1955. Mike is still in utero and his parents, both orchestral musicians, decide they have had enough of the orchestra life and they move to Montana where Mike’s father has accepted a job as a violin professor at the fledgling music department at Montana State University. (Mike is born later that year in October.)
Bozeman, Montana in the 1950s when the Reynolds family moved there. Not exactly a booming capital for classical music.
Predictably, Bozeman turns out not to be one of the musical capitals of the world and there is plenty of time for recreation and fun. Immediately after emerging from the cradle, young Mike takes to outdoor life. His parents manage to find him a cello teacher who is also a well-known fly fisherman and the gentleman agrees to teach Mike both skills.
Mike’s abilities both on the cello and with a fly rod advanced quickly to the extent that he became a local child star in both domains. By the time he moved to Philadelphia to go to Curtis, it was clear that he was bound for a professional career in music. But fly fishing remained in his blood and his ties to Montana persist to this day. In fact, as I write this blog (on a warm day in July in Maine), I am aware that Mike has hiked a couple of miles from his forest cabin on the Gallatin River and is fishing. I know the drill. We used to fish and play concerts together there for years.
The fishing is slow, so Mike Reynolds decides to practice his cello streamside. (Photo Bob Durling.)
As Mike has explained in multiple interviews for fly fishing magazines, the two skills of fly fishing and cello playing have a lot in common and each contributes to skill in the other domain.
“‘Take timing and tempo,’ says Mike. ‘I can almost hear the rhythm of fishing in my head, and it makes me fish better. Certainly pinpoint casting is all about timing, and so is the way a fly floats relative to the tempo of the current. Striking a rising fish can vary from prestissimo for trout to the more moderate and loving andante for a salmon. When I play the cello, I have a confident sense of how to attack a note since I have done it so often in my fishing life.’ Indeed, often Mike’s advice to me on a trout stream is cluttered with musical metaphors that sound very much like his suggestions in our musical rehearsals. It is almost like we have a secret language that translates nicely from one world to the other.”[1]
There are many other areas of mutuality that are important. A skilled fly fisherman can model how to practice music well and it has much to do with varying approaches to difficult situations. I can play the same passage the same way a hundred times and make no progress just as I can stand in a trout stream and fish the same fly the same way and never see a fish.
Mike always counsels me to vary the approach whether fishing or playing. On a trout stream, he constantly changes flies when there is no action, trying to find the exact one that fish will feed on. He changes his position in the stream. He varies the presentation of the fly in the water.
“When you are having trouble, try things slow, then fast, with different rhythms, different articulations. The variety will allow you to hone in on perfect presentation.” He could be talking about a fast run in music or on a trout stream.
A good fisherman may have several boxes of fishing flies in an endless variety of patterns. It is best to change flies often until you find the right one just as it is important to practice difficult musical passages any variety of ways until you achieve mastery.
Then there is the matter of equipment. Many string players will insist that great old Italian instruments are best just as some purist fishermen will only use split bamboo rods, arguing that one cannot achieve the delicacy of touch with modern equipment.
But in the end, having an open mind and being flexible is often the best approach. The late Guarneri Quartet violist, Michael Tree, who owned a beautiful 17th century Italian instrument, often played on a modern one made to his specifications by a luthier colleague. According to him, it wasn’t the pedigree of the instrument, it was the quality and its appropriateness for the purpose for which it is to be used.
A “Pinky Gillum”—the “Stradivarius” of fly rods. Finding great equipment, like finding a great instrument, is an important strategy for effective execution.
For many years, I could not decide how to choose between a silver head joint for my flute or a gold one—the silver playing more lightly and more brilliantly, the gold, playing heavier with a bigger, darker sound. Both were superbly made by Verne Q. Powell, so quality was not the issue in making a choice. In the end, I decided to use both… but on different occasions—silver for classical chamber music like Mozart and gold for heavy orchestral playing. Similarly, I may use a short light rod for spring creek fishing and a longer, heavier one for larger streams and rivers so long as both are well made.
If all this sounds terribly technical, esoteric, and boring, it isn’t to those of us who depend on these decisions for success. Our conversations, often endless debates on these topics, are gripping to us, knowing how important they are to the end results we seek. (Just listen to oboists talk endlessly about reed making or fly fishermen debating whether a pre-tapered leader provides as much strength as one in which tippets of various sizes are strung together.)
Indeed, musicians and fly fisherman work hard at what we do, we practice for hours, and we depend on making good decisions, aspiring toward a perfection that we never quite achieve.
So it is with some frustration that we see others—often apparent novices—who manage success with only a very little knowledge and seemingly no particular effort.
Many years ago, I presented Mike’s Muir String Quartet on my series in Maine. It was a matinee concert on a beautiful October day and after a wonderful program, I invited the members to my house for an early dinner before their return to Boston. I have a pond out back that at the time was filled with trout. Naturally Mike Reynolds could not wait to grab a fly rod and see what he could do. I joined him and for the first twenty minutes, things were quiet. We did not see a single fish.
Muir Quartet and Boston Symphony violinist, Lucia Lin, decked out for an early fly fishing lesson.
Lucia Lin[2], one of the group’s remarkable violinists, and a member of the Boston Symphony, ambled down to watch for a bit. Mike had introduced her to fly fishing the summer before when she had come to Bozeman to perform at his Montana Chamber Music Festival. Recently, she had mastered casting a line.
“Can I give it a try?” she asked sheepishly. “I’d love to have some trout for dinner.”
Smirking privately to Mike, I handed Lucia my rod, telling her, “Don’t get your hopes up. There is not much doing, but go ahead. If you catch one, it’s yours.” I wasn’t worried about that eventuality.
On the first cast, there was a huge bubbling in the still water and a large trout emerged, violently taking the proffered fly. Like an expert, Lucia played the fish as it jumped repeatedly, and eventually she brought it in. Picking up the creel I had left for her, she dislodged the hook, secured the fish, flashed us a big smile, and calmly walked back up to the house with the trout.
As we both watched, Mike shook his head. “I wish I could fish and play like that. Maybe I practice too much.”
[1] Quoted in an admiring article about Mike that begins on page 7 of the Fall 2017 issue of The American Fly Fisher.
[2] For more about Lucia Lin, visit her website. During COVID, Lucia embarked on a commissioning project involving composers of color with later performances with musicians of color. Read her blogs at In Tandem – Lucia Lin.