Witchcraft for Cellists

By Kendra Leonard

I To Protect Your Hands and Instrument (especially during travel)

Burn a copy of Popper’s exudes.
Strike a match using your left hand
and light the bottom right corner of the book.
As it burns, sing your favorite etude.
When it is fully burned, rake your hands
through the ashes.
With ashes still on your fingertips,
touch each string of your instrument,
smudging your bridge.

II To Support Right Hand Technique at Auditions

Pluck a hair from your bow and immerse it
in a mixture of lemon juice, an heirloom tomato,
sea salt, and a macerated peony.
Chop very finely and sprinkle onto pasta and eat.

III To Ensure Strong Fingers and Calluses for Six Months

With an athame or clean paring knife,
cut the fingertips of your left hand during a rainstorm.
Make short, straight cuts.
Coat an old string with your blood.
Wind the string into a circle and tie with twine.
When the rain has been gone three days,
place the string in your case.

IV To Aid in Playing the Dvorak Concerto

Sit under a tree.
Plunge your hands into bowls full of
fresh-cut grass and glass beads.
Relax.

V To Aid in Playing the Barber Concerto

Locate Capricorn in the night sky.
Beneath it, make a sacrifice
of Italian wine
to a yew tree.

VI To Play Artificial Harmonics with Greater Clarity

Submerge your whole body in salty seawater.
Dry in natural light and follow
with a glass of champagne.

VII For Building Equity

Build an altar of
Bach’s cello suites,
Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and cello and cello and piano,
Brahms’s sonatas for cello and piano,
and a candle.
Light the candle at sundown
and play only works by composers of marginalized genders
until the candle is half burnt.
Those with whom you come into contact
in the next 24 hours
will experience new desires
for radical diversity and inclusion
in their future concerts.

VIII To Learn New Music More Quickly

Sing a lullaby to your cello after practicing new pieces.
Keep your voice gentle and soft.
Wait until your cello has gone to sleep
to stop singing.

IX To Prevent Believing in Musical Curses

Collect all of the ninth symphonies,
the ninth sonatas,
collect, quickly,
all of the ninths,
ninth by name or time,
quickly, make haste, collect them.
Make stacks, make heaps,
let them make waterfalls of scores,
each falling from the other,
each falling to the last.
Quickly, quickly,
now stack them with photographs
and drawings
of their composers.
Put on a recording
of Lili Boulanger’s
“Pour les Funérailles,”
sprinkle them with pepper,
sing a line of nine pitches,
and dance a dance nine minutes long.

Kendra Preston Leonard is a librettist, lyricist, poet, and playwright. She is the author of two chapbooks, Making Mythology (Louisiana Literature Press, 2020) and Grab (Red Ogre Review, 2023), and the novella in verse Protectress (Unsolicited Press, 2022). Her poetry has appeared in About Place, Ofi Press Magazine, Sage Cigarettes, The Waggle, and Women Scream, among others. As a librettist and lyricist, she has collaborated with composers including Jessica Rudman, Lisa Neher, Tim Hinck, and Angela Slater; their works have been performed by Opera Elect, Rhymes with Opera, New Opera West, Ensemble For These Times, Choral Arts Initiative, and others. Follow Leonard’s work at www.kendraprestonleonard.hcommons.org.