In Need of Music

Tags

AMA, MMEA, music, teaching

On the second day of the MMEA All State Conference I spent several hours watching University of Delaware professor Paul Head rehearse the choir. It’s one of my favorite things to do at the conference, largely because it brings back such fond memories of my years singing in the festival as a high school student. It was exhilarating back then, and it remains so today. I know of no more inspiring sound than two hundred young voices – the very finest of their generation – raised in song. It expands to fill every crack and corner, swirling around the room and enveloping the listener like an embrace.

It’s the sort of experience that would make a person want to devote their life to its pursuit.

I could have easily spent the entire day listening to the group rehearse. I had to force myself to get up and attend a few of the sessions that were being offered for my professional development. After all, my reasons for attending the All State conference as a teacher are not the same as when I once attended as a student. But sometimes I think the greatest argument for attending is that it is important for us teachers to witness and be inspired by the creation of great music.

As I listened I was reminded of the Elizabeth Bishop poem “I Am in Need of Music,” and specifically about the David Brunner choral setting that my students and I are currently studying. I know of no better expression of music’s beauty, its redemptive qualities, and its essential place in my life.

I am deeply fortunate to have spent the last ten years of my life sharing my love of music with teenagers. I realize that an awful lot of people do not get paid to pursue their passion, and frankly, I’m not sure how they get out of bed in the morning. But there is a peril to making your art into your livelihood: after a while, it starts to feel an awful lot like a job.

Last summer I chaperoned a student music tour through western Europe. On the day that our buses drove through the Alps into Austria, the students begged and pleaded us to show “The Sound of Music” on the TV screens. We have a firm “no movies” rule on this tour because we want our students to take a break from their glowing screen fixation and witness the beauty of a foreign landscape. But we decided just this once to break the rule, because could there be a more appropriate place to watch this particular film?

I had watched the movie enough times over the years to become somewhat jaded, which is why I was a bit surprised to feel my heart swell as Julie Andrews burst into the first strains of the title song. Somehow the trite old tune had managed to take me back to my childhood, when I would watch the movie on videocassette and took great delight in picking out the tunes by ear on our piano. Back then I understood exactly what Oscar Hammerstein meant when he wrote “My heart wants to sing every song it hears.”

I don’t have these moments quite often enough these days. I certainly have plenty of uplifting aesthetic moments with my student ensembles, but even in the midst of that joy I remain conscious of the hours and hours of hard work that went into its creation. It has become an unusual moment indeed when I am fully transported by a musical experience. I had one such moment in Paris last week, and I had another one today at the conference. So I guess you could say it’s been a pretty good month.

Still, I think I need more of these moments.

Waking Up in Paris

Tags

AMA, France, love, Paris, sadness, travel

One week from today, I will wake up in Paris.

This was the first thought that crossed my mind when my alarm went off this morning.

My second thought was that waking up in Paris has been the starting point for some of the most vivid memories of my past.

July 22, 2010

I awoke to the distant sound of road noise. The room was pitch black, save for a narrow yellow beam that shone past the edge of the light-blocking curtains. Nestled under a thick feather comforter, I blinked in the darkness and tried to remember where I was.

It was hard to distinguish between dream and memory, but I was certain of this much: there had been long midnight walks through a slumbering city for which I was the tour guide. There were familiar monuments, eerily illuminated against the heavy blackness of a summer night. There was a sunrise over the Seine, two café crèmes, and a long talk about destiny, chance, and choice. There was a cinematic farewell on a train platform, a tearful solo walk back across the city, and a heavy fourteen-hour slumber.

Five hours later I would board a plane and return to a life I had left behind for a month. Some would call it a return to reality, but I couldn’t say for certain what was real anymore. For one last tranquil moment I surveyed the darkness of my room and marveled at the strange ways of fate – that thousands of miles from home, a stranger with kind eyes and a nice smile could change everything I thought I knew about myself.

June 28, 2011

I awoke shortly after four a.m. drenched in sweat. In the dim gauze-curtained glow of a streetlight I stumbled into the bathroom and drew my second cold shower of the night. It was the fifth day that my exhausted body had been stricken with fever, muscle aches, and digestive malaise. The hardest year of my life was nearing its end. Sweat and bile were the physical manifestations of ten months of grief, anger, and fear that were finally, violently, being expelled.

A most unhappy situation for a student – head lice – had been the catalyst for a reconfiguration of hotel rooms on the American Music Abroad tour. Her misery was my gift, for I unexpectedly found myself in a single room where I could sleep off my illness in solitude.

Freshly showered again, I wrapped myself in two towels and collapsed back on the bed. In three hours, my alarm would go off. There would be museum visits, walking tours, and a concert under the Eiffel Tower. I was barely sentient enough to appreciate where I was. But I would put on a smile for the students, who would take it all in with the wide-eyed delight of first-timers. I was nowhere near my best self, but I did at least have the sense to recognize that if I had to claw my way out of illness and grief, I couldn’t have picked a prettier place to do it.

April 24, 2008

I awoke as the plane began its descent into the Charles de Gaulle airport shortly after 6:00 am. I walked off the plane, cleared customs, and wandered down to the lower level where the RER trains departed for Paris. I stood there in jet lagged confusion for nearly five minutes before determining how to purchase a ticket. It was all so very foreign.

Paris was just waking up as I stepped off the metro at the Luxembourg Garden stop, which seemed like as good a place as any to start my exploration of the city. A small company of firemen jogged past me as I dragged my suitcase along the cobblestones. I smoothed the wrinkles out of my linen dress as they passed.

Unsure of where I was going, I wandered out of the garden and into the Latin Quarter where shopkeepers hosed down the sidewalks in front of their shops. A bookstore clerk nodded wordlessly as she set up tables covered with musty paperbacks under a yellow canopy.

Across the street, an elderly man made his methodical way down the sidewalk, a newspaper and a baguette tucked under his arm. He stopped when he saw me, removed his hat, and called across the street: “Mademoiselle, vous êtes très, très jolie!”

I responded with a cheerful “merci!” as I rounded the corner. I decided at that moment that I liked Paris very, very much.

Oui, Paris

Tags

adventure, AMA, Europe, France, Paris, perspective, Spain, travel

Have I mentioned lately that I’m going to Paris?

Well, I am. In ten days. I’ll be traveling with a friend and colleague who has never been to Europe before. We will spend the first half of our February vacation exploring the (exceedingly cold) City of Lights before taking a train to Barcelona for a (slightly less freezing) celebration of art, architecture, and octopus. (I hear they eat octopus over there. I’m down with that. I’m not sure if Eileen is.)

Have I mentioned lately that I’m really, really looking forward to this?

My love affair with travel began in the summer of 2007 when I took my first tour with American Music Abroad. For nearly a month I journeyed across western Europe with three busloads of high school musicians and their teachers. We performed at the American Cemetery of Normandy, climbed the Eiffel Tower, ate moules-frites in Belgium, and chased Austrian dairy cows with our cameras. It was my first experience with extended travel. It takes considerable stamina to keep up with an active AMA itinerary, and it requires a certain independent streak to leave one’s life behind for an extended period.

I absolutely loved it.

Ten months later I returned to Paris. I took the trip on two weeks’ notice – I needed to get out of the house, and I remembered liking Paris an awful lot. It also happened to be a period in my life when I felt compelled to prove my autonomy. I had never traveled alone before, and the prospect terrified me. I remembered very little of my high school French, and I didn’t have a clue how to get around the city without an AMA tour guide. I spent four days getting lost, eating crepes, avoiding the lecherous leers of the local lotharios, and discovering the kind of confidence that comes from doing everything wrong and somehow surviving anyway.

Having checked off the goals of traveling alone and traveling for extended periods of time, my vacation hobby quickly developed into an obsession with personal one-upsmanship. I’ve spent the last four years exploring ever further beyond my comfort zone. I have wandered the streets of Paris at 3 am. I have explored the excavations beneath Vatican City. I spent a jovial night with friends in the cargo hold of a bus where we were serenaded by an accordion-playing Tyrolean driver. I have been kissed by an overly attentive Italian waiter. (I caught his eye by ordering the octopus, FYI – and I escaped his advances by beating a hasty and ungraceful retreat out of the restaurant.)

It has been seven months since I last touched down on American soil, and while I love my life in Massachusetts, I am itching for another adventure. Travel has a way of flushing the extraneous noise out of my cluttered brain. It reminds me to keep seeking inspiration, and it offers proof that I can roll with the punches (and often come out with a few hilarious stories to boot.)

What’s more, I’ve learned that my priorities here at home come into sharp focus when viewed from a few thousand miles away.

So, yes. This trip is exactly what I need right now. Paris m’appelle. I must answer.