Music and Memory, Back to School Edition: Artificial Pearls

The music department at the community college where I teach moved to a new building over the summer. This is a good thing, even an excellent thing, since, up until now, the music department has been housed in a building that was apparently designed as a bomb shelter. All the classrooms in the old building were in the basement, and all their carpets were mildewed; I stopped reminding my students not to bring drinks to class, because the odor of stale spilled coffee was a marked improvement over what it could have been. The large number of linoleum tiles missing from the ceiling gave it the appearance of a menacingly-grinning, upside-down clown-smile, and the choir couldn't rehearse in the building, because so many of its members were stricken with mold-induced asthma attacks during practice.

Last week, before the semester began, we music-department adjuncts (who make up, incidentally, around eighty percent of the music faculty) converged upon the new building to clean it up and make it ready. It was a beautiful late-summer day, and my heart did strange things when I stepped outside the cinder-block building to make a phone call. The Soviet-bunker-style campus is nestled in a depression in the achingly-green northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains, hills that look so gentle, so kindly somehow. I thought about Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," about how the jar on the hill in Tennessee "made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill," and how, here, the anecdote was turned upside down: how here the hills surround the makeshift slovenliness of the college, but the artifice of man does not add order to or impose mastery upon those surrounding hills. I thought, too, of Emerson noting that

The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.

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I've been asked to give a paper at a conference being held in honor of my dissertation advisor, an important musicologist now retired after many years of teaching, an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn with whom I became, during the time we worked together, somewhat uncomfortably enmeshed in a sort of artificial mother-daughter relationship. She remarked to a friend at my wedding that she hoped I wasn't going to take my husband's name, because I had worked so hard to build a scholarly reputation under my own (Italian) name. When my dissertation voice recital was approaching, she, apparently worried over what I would wear, confronted me awkwardly in the hallway of the university, where she was a full professor and I an adjunct, and anxiously enquired how I was planning to do my hair. When my first son was born, she said something I wasn't sure how to interpret at the time about how some people thought you should change your life for your children, and others thought you should fit your children into the life you already had; to this day, I don't know which camp she, a mother as well as a scholar, fell into. I still worry that I'm disappointing her with my hair, my life, and my scholarship, and I still don't know what my paper in her honor is going to be about. But I felt like hanging my head when I saw the website for the conference, and saw my name (the version of it that's trotted out for performance and publication purposes, Italian maiden name first, followed by married name) and my affiliation (northern-Appalachian-county community college) next to the names of well-known musicologists who teach at Case Western, The City University of New York Graduate Center, Harvard, and Yale. I recalled how I wanted to be something great, to do something important, and yet, here I am.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Someone once said that teaching is casting artificial pearls before real swine, which, to the extent that it's true, does not make the thrower of pearls any less swinish than his intended audience. How am I supposed to do this job -- to teach music to my students at northern-Appalachian-county community college? I want to do it, I burn to do it, because, as William Carlos Williams wrote (about poetry, though the same can be said about music):

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die every day
for lack
of what is found there.

I turned on the radio the other day while driving through my ramshackle post-industrial town, and I heard the adagio movement of a piece I know well, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major. I know it well because, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother had an LP of it that I would play over and over again. We had bought it while out grocery shopping; I had seen a display near the exit of LPs on sale for something like forty-nine cents, and this one had an image on the cover of one of Marc Chagall's designs for The Magic Flute -- Papageno, the birdcatcher -- though I didn't know this at the time. I begged my mother to get it. While driving the other day, I found that, though I hadn't heard the piece for years, I could sing every note of the piano solo and the melodic orchestral line. I noticed that the performance on the radio was actually played on the fortepiano, a forerunner of the modern piano, and that, delightfully, the soloist interpolated a fragment of Mozart's song "Komm, lieber Mai" into the cadenza in the coda of the last movement.

While singing along to the radio, I saw a shabby-looking, morbidly obese man with dirty legs riding in a self-propelled wheelchair in the oncoming lane. I thought about my mother's LP. Where would I be, who would I be, if my mother had not had it? Classical music is not salvific by any means (I remind myself), but, for me, it's always been anodyne, palliative, hallucinogen, and opiate all in one. It dulls pain, it comforts, it heals, it confers vision. Without it, I would be a miserable worm of a person, even more than I am now. And I wonder if this is true for everyone: if everyone, had he had access to my mother's record collection, would be a better person.

I thought about my wonderful voice teacher and mentor, A.B., who grew up, as it happens, in rural Tennessee. His parents were mountain people; his father was a self-taught singer who worked for a biscuit-flour company. The flour company would send out a string band to drive around the rural counties in a flatbed truck, from which they would play music, and then give a baking demonstration with a portable oven. A.B. told me about how, as a child, he was given a recording of the Nutcracker on 78s, and he listened to it until the records, as he put it, literally dissolved. He later found a recording of La Bohème at the public library, and played it, too, into the ground, memorizing every word and note of Rodolfo's Act I aria, but -- as he found when he got to conservatory -- memorizing it wrong, because the record had a skip in it that obliterated part of one measure.

Classical music, discovered as a child, taught me how to live, how to breathe. It did the same for A.B. I wonder if it might do the same one day for one of my students. I think of a recurring dream I've had for years, in which I am walking certain streets in New York that I know as well as I know the Mozart Piano Concert no. 27, but finding them slightly and ineffably altered, and looking for something as I walk -- something that, while I can't quite remember what it is, I know to be the key to everything. There's a beautiful children's book by Barbara Helen Berger called Grandfather Twilight, in which the twilight is personified as an old man who each night takes a pearl from an endless strand and walks with it to the sea, while the pearl grows larger and larger, eventually becoming the moon. I hope that the artificial pearls I offer to my students this semester -- not out of perversity, but because they're all I've got -- might be able to change into something real and beautiful for them, too.

Interests and Talents That Do Not Involve You

I was surprised to see this blog mentioned favorably in a recent post on motherhood by Dartmouth undergraduate Clare Coffey in the "On the Square"  section of First Things. Coffey, who discloses in the second paragraph that she has no personal or quantifiable experience in her subject, nonetheless attempts in the piece to unpack certain cultural constructs of what we might call "the new motherhood," and to offer her ideas for remaking it along more humane lines. In case the reader should question her credentials, however, she lightly suggests that "if anything I say seems presumptuous, unrealistic, or stupid," the reader should "just chuckle."

It appears that more readers scratched their heads than chuckled, wondering why First Things would publish such a facile sort of piece that gets so much wrong by an admitted non-expert. Sally Thomas addressed these concerns in detail at Castle in the Sea, focusing in particular on Coffey's assertion to the actual mothers out there that "[it] is perfectly acceptable to say 'No, you’re not doing trombone camp this year, because I have interests and talents that do not involve you, and spending my life in the car prevents me from pursuing them.'” "Only a sociopathic narcissist," Sally counters,

would declare aloud, to her child's face, that he isn't going to get to do something because frankly she has better things to do with her life than drive him around. I don't think there's anything remotely, let alone perfectly, acceptable about saying that sort of thing to a child, who in any case is naturally going to think, "Who said we were talking about you? The subject of this conversation is me and trombone camp."

I have to conclude that the reason Coffey recommended my blog along with the excellent blogs of some of my esteemed friends is that this one (which does NOT, by implication, extend to theirs) has historically been heavy on the "interests and talents that do not involve you." The idea that this blog might be paradigmatic of some sort of platonic ideal of rightly-engaged motherhood has led me to consider, with some chagrin, the course of my own attempts to maintain my activities as a scholar and performing artist while trying to be a good-enough mother.

There was a time a few years ago when this blog had some very active detractors who, in the interest, I think, of correcting me on my evidently bad course, left hurtful and even vicious messages in the comboxes (must I mention that these trolls generally self-identified as orthodox Catholics?). One, after I had written something in a comment about one's art, if one is a mother, being able to flourish more readily when one has cash in hand for child care, helpfully sought to remind me that the arts were for "people with TALENT," which is to say not for poor schlubs like me, international performing credits, scholarly publications, and at-that-time A.B.D. in music notwithstanding. Another real-life former friend, a self-styled apologist with a strong internet presence, incensed by something I had written here on a different topic, similarly blasted me for my "unsuccess" at everything I'd endeavored, from music to marriage to motherhood (this same erstwhile friend, before he started hating me quite so much, had asked me to sing at his father's wake and funeral, which I did, taking a cab from the Bronx twice to another far-off outer borough of the City of New York, vomiting from morning sickness much of the way), and, further, suggested that I wickedly blamed this unsuccess on my children, both living and dead. You have a happy life too, buddy!

But there is enough fodder for a mommy war waged by me against myself right here in the present. I was asked recently to translate some academic-musicological essays from the Italian for a prestigious forthcoming publication from a major publisher. I felt I couldn't say no to a well-paid gig of this nature, which could potentially generate similar money-earning opportunities, and was being overseen by a scholar I respect. As it turns out, though, I've already had to renegotiate the deadline, because I'm fairly fried from my current nighttime parenting duties, and I'm recalling a woman I used to know who also did freelance translating but concluded, after the birth of her second child, that she just couldn't do it anymore.

Then there's The Magic Flute.  While it's an opera I've never done, the only roles for my voice type are ensemble roles, so it seemed like a low risk to agree to cover those two roles (Second and Third Lady), especially when the chance that I would go onstage in one of them was miniscule and the conductor welcomed my children at rehearsal. But as it happened, I took him at his word. I brought my children to rehearsal.  While the conductor continued to be supportive, saying it was "a delight" to see them there (the fact is that, out of the entire cast and production staff, he was the only other parent; such is opera), the stage director and his staff begged to differ. It seems that Maestro had asked the stage director not to curse in front of the wee ones, and the stage director made it clear that that was "how he worked," and that children were not an appropriate ancillary to his method (in all honesty, Maestro needn't have been sensitive on my behalf; I curse like a truck-driver, though I try to remove myself to another room when I feel like I have to, or else do so in Italian, though I know neither of those tactics are exactly praiseworthy). This has meant that, because of the sudden and unexpected need for child care, I've been to attend only a few rehearsals, and that, as a result, I wouldn't be able to execute the staging in any kind of admirable fashion if I happened to get a last-minute call that one of the mainstage singers was sick. I've done covers before, but this is the first time in my life that I haven't been prepared for the eventuality of going onstage, and it's a very uncomfortable feeling, not just because of that eventuality, but also because it's in violation of my own strict work ethic. I am grateful to the conductor for making accommodations on my behalf, but the truth is that few other people would have done so.

When my older son was an infant, I was asked to chair a panel at an international conference on British music being held that summer in Vermont. I explained that I would need to bring him along, as he would be seven months old and couldn't be away from me. The conference organizers -- all men, fathers and grandfathers -- were happy to oblige, and so were most of my male colleagues. But I was not prepared for the reaction of the other women at the conference, who looked at me and my baby, whom I wore in a wrap, as if we were the shit on their shoes.  I asked a colleague if it would be all right if I brought my son to his panel, and I sat on the floor in the back of the room with him to minimize any disruption he might cause, and to have easy access to the exit. Luckily my baby was fine, only making a few baby sounds here and there, and no one seemed to mind. The keynote address was scheduled for later that day, and I was eager to hear it, as it was given by a scholar whose work interested me keenly. When I entered the hall, however, with my son in his wrap, another scholar, an up-and-coming young Englishwoman, fairly snarled, "If you're sitting there, I'm moving. I heard your baby in that panel discussion," and she swept up her things and flounced to another seat far from us. I got up and left the hall with my son and burst into tears, and ended up spending the keynote sitting under a tree with him and crying. Ironically, one of the conference organizers, a gay man who had recently adopted an infant with his partner, brought his own baby in on the last day, and father and son were swarmed and cooed over by the same women who had shunned me. My contribution to this love-fest was to give the dad a copy of Mothering that I had brought with me and finished. I won't take the time now to unpack this whole experience. but any conclusions you might draw are probably fairly accurate. Just trust me when I say that the world of academia is no more child-friendly -- if you're a mother, that is -- than the world of opera.

I was also a little embarrassed recently when I had to contact an editor who's involved in my own book project about a deadline missed because of my new son's baptism. If I were a man, this would never need have been mentioned.

Although I have no evidence, I'm fairly certain that the long-ago combox troll who reminded me that the arts are for people with TALENT was neither a mother nor an artist, and I would pretty much bet my life that she wasn't both those things at the same time. And while his scathing email ended my friendship with the "friend" who had suddenly become a self-appointed music critic and, though unmarried and childless himself, a marriage-and-parenting authority (this friend also helpfully brought up the "unspeakable crime" I'd committed against my unborn child years before he knew me, and years after being absolved), and while I no longer follow him nor his fairly prolific work for various online outlets, I would be willing to bet that he has remained unmarried and childless, because, seriously, with a personality like that what are the chances?

But I digress. My point, I suppose, is that, pace Clare Coffey (and thanks for the shout-out, Clare; it's a nice difference from the haters of yore), I'm hardly a paragon of, well, anything. But nonetheless (and this is probably what riled up said haters), I firmly believe that if you give up your whole prior life when you have children -- if, that is, your whole prior life contained anything that you found beautiful, nurturing, or salutary for your soul -- it's going to come back and bite you in the ass. I don't believe in what you might call "professional" motherhood, unless that's a life you've been trained for and have always wanted, which is undoubtedly the case for many mothers. And on a related note, I'm convinced, whatever lurking trolls and former friends might think, that the only way to maintain some sort of culturally-defined "success" -- the flip side, that is, of my troll-former-friend's concept of "unsuccess," the kind of "success" that the other arts-critic commenter seems to have imagined is the natural outcome of being a talented person in the arts -- is to have access to some kind of reliable child care, in which someone other than you, the artist-mother, cares for your children for certain periods of time during which you practice your art. And the cultural imagination notwithstanding (I have it from someone who knows that Angelina Jolie has six nannies, one for each child!), not a lot of artist-mothers have this access, so a lot of artist-mothers stop practicing their art. If you, dear reader, have any thoughts that suggest otherwise -- and generally the thoughts I give credence to are those that can be backed up, if not by quantifiable evidence, then by anecdotal experience; they are generally not, that is to say, wild guesses about what motherhood must be like, made by non-mothers -- then kindly let me know, in an un-troll-like fashion if you can manage it.

Epiphany and Manifesto

Yesterday was my son's sixth birthday. We started the day with a birthday tradition of wild dancing in the kitchen to Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 5 in F-sharp minor (above; the sound quality is poor, but it was one of the few performances on Youtube that I actually liked. The one we use for wild dancing -- and the one I love am bestsen -- is the solo piano version by the great but sadly-short-lived American Brahms proponent Julius Katchen), and then it was time for school.

One of the things I love am besten is taking brisk walks in the cold, and school is good for that. It's about three-quarters of a mile in each direction, and on the way back I have time to look around and think. The combination of Brahms and the cold early-January weather, though, is a poignant one for me, bringing up memories of countless cold walks in the desolate post-industrial neighborhoods of the wintry Bronx, walks that were nevertheless wonderful and full of all kinds of interior riches influenced by the bleak exterior landscape.  Here there's none of that. But there's still Brahms.

Brahms's music dominates the inner landscape of my life.  His music is so inextricably woven into the warp of my earlier life, from my childhood listening to my mother's LP of Glenn Gould playing the Op. 117 and 118 Intermezzi, to my earliest days of performing his art songs as an undergraduate voice major,  to later and more mature performances, including a turn in the four-soloist version of Liebesliederwalzer when I was still a soprano, and, most recently, the solo version of Ziguenerlieder in my last recital for my Doctor of Musical Arts degree in voice performance. (We had a three-recital requirement, and I made sure to program Brahms into each one. In the first of these recitals I performed George Crumb's song cycle Apparition for voice and amplified piano, based upon excerpts from Walt Whitman's elegy on the death of Lincoln, When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, which was truly one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. I also sang a short group of Brahms songs early in the program, and one of my best friends -- a non-musician but no stranger to twentieth-century music -- said afterward, "The Crumb was just astonishing . . . but I loved the Brahms.")

I think now that if I hadn't had access to the kind of order and beauty that the practice of classical music has allowed me to take hold of, I would have fallen apart even more in this place where there is no discernible order, and not so much beauty, to my everyday life.  We left New York when I was just finishing my doctorate, and I was teaching music, studying music, writing about music, and performing music with my esteemed instructors and colleagues. But here, my practice of music is largely solitary. I still have a few gigs a year, nearly all of which involve travel, which means that what I work on at the little piano in my living room does not ripple out into the community at all, and essentially has no effect upon the place where I live, and is brought instead into other marketplaces and other communities, and I wonder why it is that the people and places that most need beauty that have the least access to it.

I have been thinking of A., too, whose life is lived minute to minute as she attempts to meet her own and her children's basic needs with the scanty survival skills she's learned in a hard place. The beauty of Brahms's music, and the music of so many others, has scarcely been short of salvific for me: it shines light upon the soul's darkness; it converts the tattered rags of a wasted day into a rich tapestry. I've always thought of this music as having not only real form, but also real, tangible substance, as if it were something that you could actually erect standing structures out of, something you could build with. And perhaps you can: as misshapen as my inner self might be, it was trained like a vine around the trellis of music (in other ways, it could be said, though certainly hyperbolically, to have been stretched like a tortured body upon the rack of music). In any event, the discipline of music gave order to my life where there was none, and gave me all kinds of mad coping skills in the face of crumbling chaos. But A. has never heard it, and perhaps never will.

My son's wonderful violin teacher came with his quartet from Budapest to New York City in the 1960s. He has told me about playing school concerts in the inner city ghettos, and about how well-prepared and attentive the children were. Their teachers knew, then, that their young charges needed this music -- as who doesn't? But many teachers and educational theorists today reject that notion, believing instead that students, especially disadvantaged students, need forms of cultural expression that speak specifically to their circumstances. I don't deny that there is a place for particular, time-and-place-specific, vernacular art. But to say that each subculture should be sequestered with its own small and particular and self-referential art forms is to deny -- again to speak hyperbolically, even Beethoven-esquely -- the universal brotherhood of man; it's parochial at best, and bigoted at worst.  All people, and especially all children, deserve to learn and to study and to know the great soul-strengthening and spiritually-deepening works of the great wielders of the highest forms of artistic expression of our culture, which, for all of us living here, is western culture. And they deserve to learn and to study and to know these things not because they make you smarter or better at math or better at sports or whatever the hell, but because they are beautiful, and they speak to the essence of what makes us human.

Where that leaves me, I don't know. It's still cold out, and I'm still listening to Brahms. Happy Epiphany, everyone.

Music and Memory, Part 25: Every Gig Counts

On the last day of classes at the end of the fall semester a few years ago, at the large urban university where I taught a writing class for music majors, I picked up several dozen doughnuts and a couple of gallons of coffee at Dunkin Donuts before getting on the subway to go teach.  I had a lot of jazz players in my class that term, and, when they fell upon the treats like a horde of locusts as soon as I'd set them out, I reminded them half-jokingly that it was probably more than they usually made on a gig. The truth is that it's harder to make a living as a jazz musician in New York than it is even as a classical musician.  As in the classical world, there's a glut of players and a dearth of jobs, but the prevalence of brunch spots and tony cocktail parties depresses wages for jazz players to a degree that few opera singers ever experience, owing to the virtual non-existence of comparable gigs in the opera field. So opera singers have desk jobs, and legendary jazz players take home two hundred bucks on a club date, while their lesser-known colleagues compete with Manhattan School of Music students for the $25-or-so-per-man that a brunch gig pays.

Still, in the classical world, you could always tell which of your colleagues was going to be an unusually good, and possibly even a successful, artist by the way she comported herself when even on the crappiest of gigs. The soprano singing a concert of opera arias in the church basement with a pickup orchestra of her friends from conservatory conducted by her boyfriend, who nonetheless wore her most beautiful diva gown, got her hair done, held her head high, and smiled dazzlingly at the audience at her entrances and exits, was the one who was going places. She treated herself, her motley audience, and the very essence of the singing profession, insofar as it was visible in that church-basement gig, with the respect commanded by the Western classical music tradition as one of the most beautiful possible reflections of God's divine nature and His desire that His creatures should live life more abundantly.

Even if it weren't for their gig at the Carlyle Hotel and Joe Nocera's rave in the New York Times, this couple is going places. Nocera's essay is certainly unusual for an op-ed piece, the sort of thing that is generally attributable to a slow news day, a personal connection to the subjects, or some combination thereof. Still, good on them. I don't know them or their playing, but they must be excellent. And their work history is very much like that of thousands of other musicians in New York, with the exception of their eventual, hard-won success.

Not-happiness

Occasionally I've written here before about the idea of happiness, and how it might or might not coincide with the endeavor to live with some modicum of virtue, or with a sense of surrender to the will of God. Lately I've been thinking about how those of us who, for want of a better terminology, live in the First World, have come to expect it as an integral part of our destiny. Expectations of happiness -- whether those expectations take the form of growing into it, or achieving it, or earning it -- seem to cut across social and economic boundaries in our culture.  In his book City on a Hill, James Traub describes remedial-reading and -math students from the poorest reaches of my former city, who believe that they will one day live in the suburbs and drive luxury cars, though this belief is based on nothing in their experience or in the experience of anyone they know, nor upon being in the position to achieve such a goal. And I have often wondered if the tattooed mothers I encounter in the crumbling Rust Belt town where I now live have had their skin pierced and written upon in order to mark themselves with a kind of talismanic map to a better place; after all, the Hollywood and pop-music stars who appear to be the heralds of our culture are inked within an inch of their lives, and they seem to have everything. And it goes without saying that my cousin's Princeton classmates expect to have the world handed to them by virtue of their being, essentially, who they are.

I wonder too if the anxiety that's currently gripping our culture is based, in part, on the bottom dropping out of our expectations of happiness. The recent college graduates currently occupying Wall Street and other less-likely places (there's an OWS contingent camping out in a vacant lot here, for instance, which seems like a particularly ineffective form of protest, since the jobs fled from here at least fifteen years ago) are the first generation in memory for whom a once-reliable pathway to security (and, hence, to happiness) has been washed away.  I don't like to hear people on the right casting aspersions at the OWS-ers, who are probably very scared; it's just unkind.  I have a close family member who is long-term -- as in years -- unemployed; he has a graduate degree, and worked in highly-remunerative capacities for years. I have another close family member who is married to a fully-employed licensed professional who likewise has a graduate degree; this family, nonetheless, gets WIC, but makes just a little too much to qualify for food stamps (i.e. SNAP). When you're scared about how you're going to provide for your family, happiness tends to go missing.

But of course, fear and happiness are different in the First World from what they are reputed to be in the Third.  As for me, I think of happiness as something that I sometimes devoutly long to have administered to me -- like a draught, or a shot, or a little homeopathic pill -- to keep me going, to settle me, so that I can do my work -- the daily work of trying to know what the will of God is, and, then, of trying to do it.  Sometimes I have it, in spite of being a million miles from home and dealing with a number of painful or wearying situations.  As for the work, I'm generally quite shaky at it, but then sometimes I'm entirely in the groove, making contact with what appears most clearly to be God's will with the kind of precise and delicate balance that you feel when you ice-skate, when you become aware of the sure and beautiful contact of your skate-blade with the ice, and you glide with a sharp and true freedom, picking up speed, until you go stumbling and crashing down. 
  
The other day I read this poem, by Barbara Crooker, on The Writer's Almanac:

Sometimes I am startled out of myself

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Perhaps we need to let go of our quest for the happiness we have come to believe is ours by birthright. Perhaps we need to abandon all hope. Perhaps we need just to give up, and, abject as we really are, go crawling into the shelter that we have simply got to trust is there. So much of life happens with no contribution from us, with no word, no consultation, no solicitation of opinion, from us. But there is shelter, and perhaps shelter might become haven -- might even, somehow, become home.

Music and Memory, Part 24: Theft

My work-study job at the music library notwithstanding, as an undergraduate I was constantly broke.  I used to shoplift at the supermarket sometimes, and one one of these occasions I somehow managed to push a whole shopping-cartful of unpaid-for groceries through the automatic doors and to my apartment a few blocks away.  Unlike a certain friend of mine, however,  an artist who -- questioned by store security about the brick of cheese he'd stuck in his coat pocket while buying some expensive pots of jam -- asserted that he wouldn't pay for something the government gave away for free, I felt bad about these heists.  I even told Professor R., the piano teacher I id0lized, about them. "Oh, Pentimento!" said she, ever a worshipper at the church of aesthetics, throwing up her hands. "You need to feed your soul!  You need to go to concerts, galleries, museums!" She proceeded to tell me with her usual great enthusiasm about an original-instrument performance of some Mozart string quartets which she'd recently attended.  "They were just sawing at their instruments!" she said, at which I must have looked horrified, because she clarified: "It was wonderful!" My kindly German professor, on the other hand, understood how things were.  She used to leave brown paper bags of homemade bread and cookies outside my door.

I remembered all this today as I drifted into a not-unaccustomed reverie of my former life in a particularly obscure corner of one of New York's many hardscrabble bohemias.  I thought of two old friends from that time and place, dancers who'd moved to New York from Austin, where they had performed with Deborah Hay, a legendary postmodern choreographer who'd relocated from New York to Texas in the 1970s.  I found some videos of Hay's work on Youtube, along with this brief recent interview:

I was intrigued by what Hay said about not grasping at experience or phenomena; about, instead, being aware of each moment before it passes away and another arises to take its place. I wondered if my clutching at memories, at emotions, at images and sensations evoked by the music I hear and sing, was a symptom of the millennial materialism that she speaks of. Is it harder, I wonder, to mourn the beauty that has gone, or to accept the present moment in all its apparent emptiness?  And must emptiness be desolation?

I thought of the Gospel reading for today, in which Christ insists that anyone who wishes to follow Him must take up his own cross.  Might one man's cross, I wondered, be that everything beautiful he knows is relegated to the place of memory? Indeed, such a cross must be a rather common one.  And might another's cross be having to confront each moment as it is, free from what he thinks it ought to be, and to stand in the place where he finds himself, and even to bloom where he's been planted, be it ever so far from the time and place he has invested with the meaning of "home"?  Indeed, at Mass today, when the priest read Christ's words, it occurred to me that every gift bears the cross with it, and that perhaps the cross itself is the gift.

All this made me think of William Blake: 

He who binds to himself a joy 
Doth the winged life destroy; 
But he who kisses the joy as it flies 
Lives in eternity's sunrise.


(Above: frontispiece to the 1794 edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience)

Music and Memory, Part 21: Weaving False Dreams

As any classical musician in America can tell you, the Glee-like social ostracism of band, orchestra, and choir geeks doesn't end in high school, unless you go to conservatory right after graduating.  This was not the case for me; while I received my M.M. at a conservatory, and my doctorate in the music department of a large university, I attended a liberal-arts college, where I was a socially-ostracized-music-geek undergraduate voice major.  To complicate things further, I had a work-study job in the music library, with a shift on Friday nights, which limited my extra-musical weekend socializing, and to make matters even worse, the music building, which was open all night, drew me like a scrap of iron ore straight to the motherlode.  Turn down the chance to practice at two in the morning?  Not this girl.  And, having a key to the music library, I could also sneak in and study scores and listen to obscure recordings all night long, which is what I did, and which, moreover, is how I first discovered such gems as Harry Partch's Barstow:  Eight Hitchhiker Transcriptions:

and a large chunk of John Cage's recorded oeuvre, among many other treasures. 

One year, my piano professor wanted me to audition for the music department's annual concerto competition -- on the piano.  I knew I would never be able to practice enough to get to the technical level required, and that it would be folly to compete against real pianists when I was not one.  Professor R. was a real pianist with a solid performing and teaching career who commuted to my college from New York, where she also served on the faculty of a major conservatory, so I was surprised by and a little mistrustful of her enthusiasm for my playing.  She explained to me that I had innate musicality, a gift, she said, which can't be taught, and she wanted to bring my piano technique up to the level of my natural musical proficiency.  I was flattered, but I turned her down.  I was a singer, and it was hard enough bringing my technique up to snuff as a singer, let alone spreading it thin between two equally-demanding instruments.

I was nevertheless delighted and honored when Professor R. asked me to be her page-turner for a performance of the rarely-heard Brahms Piano Quartet Op. 60, no. 1 in C Minor.  Chamber music is my great love, and I knew I would learn invaluable lessons about ensemble music-making by observing her and her colleagues at close range in their rehearsals, and I did.  I also came to know and love the gorgeous third-movement Andante, with its heart-stopping cello solo, truly one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written:

There was a beautiful young man at my college, with long, flowing hair, about whom I began to concoct elaborate romantic fantasies to the soundtrack of the Brahms Op. 60 no. 1 Third Movement Andante.  I never expected him to cast a glance my way.  Why would he?  The other girls at my school were beautiful and rich, and I was ethnic-looking, and from a family that my best friend described as "middle-class poor."  And to top it off, I was a music geek down to my very bones.  Besides, he had a long-time girlfriend.

One night I saw him eating dinner in one of the campus's smaller dining rooms.  On the table across from him lay a white rose.  "Would you like to have dinner with me?" he asked, as I walked past with my tray.  "I'm having dinner with a rose."  I couldn't believe it.  In a swoon, I sat down.  I have no idea what we said, but I remember that he was sensitive, poetic -- and he had that hair.

In the middle of our dinner, his girlfriend walked in, saw us, wordlessly plucked the white rose off our table, threw it with dramatic flourish into the nearest garbage can, and marched out.  So much for Brahms.

As the last post on the evocatively-titled, now-defunct music blog "Nihilism, Optimism, and Everything In Between" says about Brahms's Piano Concerto in D Minor:

Brahms, you old Master! You weaver of dreams, you liar! You encourage my “hopeless romanticism” and you know it! Life is not as colourful as you would have us believe! Of course you know that I know, and I can hear you laughing.

You dear Master, you! You—and the worthless dreams you sell me! No, keep them coming. Weave on and on. Go from here to the depths, then further into the depths, then rise up again—portray that impossibly rich, romantic world as you always do. If only life were really as romantic.

. . . . If only life were so rich.

If only life were so rich.

Last weekend I participated in a house concert here in my new town, to which, it seems, the toniest local classical musicians were invited to perform.  While most of the singers sang transcriptions of opera arias, I sang Brahms's incomparable art song "Unbewegte laue Luft" (my translation here), which has been called a "Tristan und Isolde of the Lied."  When I had finished, a sort of sigh rose up from the audience.  A very old woman told me, afterward, that she had cried, and  the head of the voice faculty at the local public university (who knows me and my work, but can't offer me even an adjunct position because of a statewide hiring freeze) said afterward, "I'm so glad you sang that.  People need to hear it."

Oh, yes, I agree.  People need to hear Brahms; they need that stirring, rushing, choking, devastating beauty, that beauty that makes their veins throb with teeming life.  Or maybe they don't.  It made an old lady cry, after all.  Perhaps the writer of the short-lived "Nihilism, Optimism" blog had it right after all, and Brahms -- or better, all music, all beauty, of which Brahms is only the exemplar -- is a deceiver, making us believe that life is so much richer, more poignant, more unifying, more exquisite, more imbued with meaning and deep feeling than it really is.

It seems to me sometimes that, as we grow up and grow older, we become more and more diminished by life.  It as if life strolled up to us with a surgeon's scissors every now and then to cut off a different little piece of us.  But we must go on, and so we go on wounded; and, if we're lucky, our wounds will remain open and tender, so that we can learn how to truly love other people.  Nonetheless, it is very hard for me sometimes to wake up and realize that my life is not at all the same as the music I spent most of my life studying, that it bears little resemblance to the mystical world of beauty hinted at, even whisperingly promised, by Brahms.

Water o' Tyne

Today I found a mix CD that I used to play at the first meeting of the voice class I taught for non-majors while working on my doctorate.  I meant to use it to open my students' ears to classical singing in all its possibilities.  This was the first piece on it, a Northumbrian folksong, sung a cappella by Sir Thomas Allen (the cute badgers, alas, have nothing to do with the song).

Music and Memory, Part 20: The Matrix

Last weekend I had a visit from A.B. -- my former mentor, the most important voice teacher I've ever had, and the generous donor of my autoharp -- because he happened to have business in a Northern Appalachian town not too far from here.  We went to a hippie café that is often frequented by my family because of its surprisingly good draft beer selection and the cheerful tolerance of the staff toward little children.  Although our pupil-teacher relationship ended badly in the mid-nineties (he ordered me out of his studio one day when I told him his instructions were confusing me, which was really only the culmination of many months of growing tension), after a few years passed we were friends again.  In my doctoral program, I studied voice with his best friend, who was on the faculty, and A.B. was a frequent audience member at my New York-area performances, as well as a thoughtful and provocative critic.

At the hippie café, I showed him the repertoire for a concert I have coming up, and we talked about it. The concert's theme is childhood, and the music includes, among other things, pieces by Charles Ives and the three "Heimweh" settings of Johannes Brahms, one of which, A.B. opined, was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful songs ever written.  A.B. is one of the most brilliant musicians I know, one of the rare souls who deeply understand the elusive language of music and are able to interpret it in subtle, powerful, and nuanced ways, and, when I have the opportunity to talk music with someone like that, I'm in my supreme happy place: the place where -- to quote Brahms himself, out of context and with inappropriate self-aggrandizement -- I start to feel as if "straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God."  And this makes me wonder.

It makes me wonder, because my supreme happy place -- the nirvana achieved through strenuous periods of talking about music, performing music, researching music, studying music, reading about music, teaching music -- was all I ever wanted, from childhood onward.  Once I discovered classical music, it was as if a series of doors opened one upon another, and kept opening in my mind, and as if something shifted into place in my being with a loud sort of thunk.  I was about eleven at the time, and from that point, the everyday, experiential world became like a dream to me.  Music was what I wanted, music was my real world, and everything else was the Matrix. I think the reason I was so happy in graduate school was that the time I got to spend in Musicland exceeded the time I spent in the Matrix, and everything that I did in the Matrix served what I was striving for in Musicland.

But we are all cast out of Paradise at some point; for some of us it happens sooner, for others later.  I think a clear-eyed observer of my life would see an overly-sensitive and romantic girl, who, perhaps not atypically, found a form of escape from an unstable home situation and the anxieties of daily life, in a neurotic striving toward a Bacchic transcendence that can be gained only through an Apollonian rigor.  Indeed, my self-imposed work ethic superseded that of practically any singer I've ever known, but the oblivion I found in practice and study was topped by the bliss I found in being able, after many years of hard work, to make music say what I wanted, and use it to express the deepest emotions of my soul.

And of course, my allegiance to this striving, this oblivion, and this bliss turned everything else around me to shit.  I can only credit the mercy of God with the fact that I'm still standing, still able to have relationships, still able to function with some degree of effectiveness as an adult.  But I'm rarely, these days, in my supreme happy place, the lost paradise that Brahms's "Heimweh" songs are all about. The most beautiful and most famous of these songs, the one that A.B. praised, is the first song in the video below.  The great scholar of German Lieder Eric Sams has written that in this song, called "Heimwh I" or "O wüsst ich doch den Weg züruck," Brahms "is overcome by a personal feeling that goes far deeper than the regretful words, into real tragedy."


(The text is a poem by Klaus Groth, translated here by Leonard Lehrman:

Oh, if I only knew the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
Oh, why did I search for happiness
And leave my mother's hand?

Oh, how I long to be at rest,
Not to be awakened by anything,
To shut my weary eyes,
With love gently surrounding!

And nothing to search for, nothing to beware of,
Only dreams, sweet and mild;
Not to notice the changes of time,
To be once more a child!

Oh, do show me the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
In vain I search for happiness,
Around me naught but deserted beach and sand!)

I spend most of my time in Matrixland now, where I feel like a stranger who hasn't mastered the language, and I wonder if I ever will.  And what Telly notes mournfully after this classic performance with Itzhak Perlman on Sesame Street -- that it will never happen again -- is true not just of all musical performance, but also, of course, of all human endeavor, and is the final response to Brahms in his fruitless quest to return to Kinderland.

Back Where I Come From

Little-known fact about me:  I was born in Kansas.  Really.  My father was working on his doctorate there.  We moved back to New York when I was two years old, but my earliest memory takes place in the state of my birth:  I am outside, chasing our dog around a garbage can.  Neither I nor anyone else in my family has ever gone back.

As part of our adoption paperwork, however, I had to contact the Kansas State Department to get a certified copy of my birth certificate, and I was astounded, though I guess I shouldn't have been, by the difference between the vital statistics people in Kansas and their counterparts in New York, where all the rest of my vital records reside.  The Kansas people were genuinely nice, kind, generous, and helpful.  They called and left a message when they had a question for me.  The state registrar herself helped me to complete my request because a very nice vital statistician named Betty, which seemed the most perfect name for a kindly low-level bureaucrat from Kansas, transferred me over to her during a phone call.

The New York people, on the other hand, have sent back my vital records applications several times for various oversights and infractions.  And they are, I'm chagrined to admit, not really all that nice.  I wonder if they'll ever cough up all my other vital records unless I go there in person and wait all day with cash in hand, which is exactly what I'd do if we still lived there.

Another little-known fact:  I've been told my entire life that I have an accent.  I always took this to mean that I actually had no accent, i.e., that my speech had had all regionalisms trained out of it through my long years of voice study.  But once, when I was in my teens and working at an ice cream parlor for my summer job, a graduate student in linguistics came into the shop.  While I was scooping his order, he told me that everyone's speech patterns were laid in place by the age of two, and that he could usually guess where people were from by the way they spoke.  I smirked; here was my chance to stump him.  "So where was I born?"  I demanded.  "Kansas," he said.

Practice Babies

No, it's not what you're thinking.  Read on:

Once upon a time, infants were quietly removed from orphanages and delivered to the home economics programs at elite U.S. colleges, where young women were eager to learn the science of mothering. These infants became “practice babies,” living in “practice apartments,” where a gaggle of young “practice mothers” took turns caring for them. After a year or two of such rearing, the babies would be returned to orphanages, where they apparently were in great demand; adoptive parents were eager to take home an infant that had been cared for with the latest “scientific” childcare methods.

Read the rest of this fascinating story here.

At the End of the Rainbow

One of the functions of this blog is, as I now realize, to chronicle the downwardly-mobile memoirs of a sort of anti-diva, which strikes me somewhat funny since Soprannie and I, back in the days of our high ambition, used to assuage each other's latest heartbreak or botched audition by telling one another it would all go into the diva memoirs.  Now that I've moved far away from the capital of that ambition (which is also the capital of everything else), I feel like my own ambition needs to sink low rather than soar high, as if I, ant-like, should dig tunnels underground and put whatever it is that I have to offer as an artist in there, in the dark, and hope something good will come out of it.  As Dar Williams says in the excellent song "What Do You Love More Than Love" (which, sadly, I couldn't Youtube for you):

I love the way the world is your garden
You plant your seeds and you let 'em grow
And you dig things out of the ground just like
You take what comes but you never know

You never do know, do you?  You recall having planted a rose way back thousands of days and nights ago, before the snows came; but when winter thaws, you see that what you have is a cabbage, which, while not nearly as lovely as a rose, is infinitely more useful.

So, in spite of the fact that at a certain point in my life the idea of the glittering career that I had longed and striven for began to repel me, I kept singing.  What else was there to do?  I threw myself hard into scholarship and research, digging out, from the rich ground of library archives, dozens upon dozens of wonderful pieces that hadn't been heard in a hundred years or more, and making them the basis of my post-operatic performing career.

This career, such as it is, has brought unexptected, even bizarre, good into my life.  There was, for instance, the strange reconciliation with the old flame I'd regretted treating shabbily as an undergrad.  And now, there is The Autoharp.

I was all excited to go to my son's pre-school classroom last month with a program I'd worked up of Christmas music.  I had all the accouterments in a big plastic see-through box:  rhythm sticks, jingle bells, a length of white chiffon fabric that I'd fashioned into dozens of little individual scarves to stand in for snow.  I had songs both sacred and secular for my young audience's delectation and participation.  And I had my axe, i.e., my nylon-string acoustic guitar, on which I'd laboriously taught myself to play a chord progression in A major.  I used the guitar on one song only, "I Saw Three Ships."  And I played that chord progression badly.  Luckily it wasn't a tough crowd.

I noted the experience on Facebook.  My old voice teacher from my master's degree program, A.B., who has been perhaps the single most important teacher I've ever had, suggested that I needed an autoharp.  The truth was, I confessed, I'd been coveting one for a long time.  The autoharp is like a guitar, but for dreamy girls with long hair who don't have time to teach themselves a variety of chord progressions on the axe they really want to play, which is, of course, the nylon-string acoustic (and they really want to finger-pick it like Joan Baez or Mimi Fariña, but that will have to wait for another lifetime).  In fact, I almost bought a used autoharp at a garage sale last summer, but at $175, I didn't think I could justify it. 

So A.B. and his wife decided to make me a present of an autoharp.

It came in the mail yesterday.  It is the Oscar Schmidt Ozark model.  It is the most excellent thing ever in the history of the world.

This is what I aspire to (with all due respect to the comic geniuses Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, from the great movie A Mighty Wind):

Please Pray for Christine

Dear friends, a situation that I posted about here a year and a half ago has taken a turn for the worse.  Christine's cancer went into remission after her surgery, but has now returned in metastatic form and, according to her neurologist, there are no known survivors of this type of cancer.  Her husband, G., a close friend of mine, has told me that he's had the "what if" conversation with their daughters.

In the meantime, G., a lyric tenor who has sung all over the world, including at the Metropolitan and San Francisco Operas, can't get a gig.  The reality of the business now is such that thirteen or so American opera companies have shut up shop in the past two years.  What usually happens in this kind of climate is that the A-level singers get gigs in the B-level opera houses, and the B singers go to the C houses, but there are no more C houses, which leaves many very fine singers, who have devoted their lives to perfecting their craft, unemployed -- and, since the time spent perfecting it has precluded other pursuits, essentially unemployable.  I've been asking my contacts about teaching work for G., and keep hearing the same question:  "Does he have a D.M.A. [Doctorate of Musical Arts, the degree I earned in 2009]?"  Um, well, no, he doesn't, since, instead of retreating to academe, as I and many of my colleagues did, he kept laboring in the trenches of opera performance, spending ten months out of the year on the road away from his family, and he achieved a high degree of success.  What's more, it's not as if there are enough teaching jobs for people with D.M.A.s.

There are all kinds of efforts, including a well-funded foundation, to help ballet dancers transition into other careers.  Why not opera singers?

I've been praying to my usual friends in heaven for Christine and G., especially to St. Joseph and St. Jude, but I'm going to make a special daily devotion to Blessed Pope John XXIII on the behalf of this couple and their children, because of G.'s great love for Italian culture, and because John XXIII is so the man.  Please, if you can spare the time, say a prayer for them, too.

Music and Memory, Part 18: Dreams Dashed

I got a letter in the mail today -- a real one -- from my beloved friend Soprannie.  She writes of attending a production of Le nozze di Figaro, an opera in which she and I once performed together: 

I missed [some] parts because I was busy weeping silently as my husband held my hand.  Mostly in Act II, that perfect, beautiful thing.  I try to feel lucky that I got to be a part of that gorgeous music -- twice! and once with a dear friend.  Ah, we were so full of hope.  I remember [my voice teacher] saying to me, when I called her, tearful, from [an audition tour in] Germany, "You're not the first girl to get her dreams dashed". . . . It was . . . the first time I have gone to the opera without thinking, "that could be me some day . . . " Instead, I thought, "that will never be me."  

But it is OK, isn't it?  I think so.  We could have kept striving and striving and still never hit the big stage.  My friend R. [a gifted baritone] is a great reminder of that.  He's doing well -- a few small directing gigs, constant choral work (New York Philharmonic, American Symphony Orchestra, etc.), occasional step-out [solos] with ASO, a few opera gigs at regional houses around the country . . . but at 45 he is still couch-surfing, single, and hoping for a B-house gig.  I don't envy him.  Usually.  Mostly.

Soprannie is one of the best musicians I know.  In some way, I think I immunized myself against the depth of her present grief, having preempted it by leaving opera, focusing on the rare recital repertoire that became my specialty, and getting my doctorate in voice performance.  Sometimes I think those were all dodges, ways to avoid a fate that is shared by the vast majority of singers who graduate from conservatories and voice programs at American universities each spring.  There are thousands of them, young singers who are talented, well-trained, and hungry, and I estimate that there are currently only around a hundred or so American singers making a living as soloists in opera.  About ten or fifteen of them are famous; the rest you'll never hear of, but they're working.

A couple of years ago my comboxes played host to a rather vicious woman who saw to it to remind me that the arts were for "those who have talent," myself, presumably, not included among them (this same commenter urged Dawn Eden to drop me from her blogroll after interpreting an emoticon I had used in my own combox as proof of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  If I were made of tougher stuff, I would tell you truthfully that this didn't make me cry for months, or send me to the confessional about seven times just to make sure I hadn't somehow unintentionally committed such blasphemy, but this was not the case).  I can only assume that this reader, who is perhaps by now plying her own talents elsewhere, didn't know many classical musicians personally.  In the layman's world, is there really the idea anymore that if you're good, you make it, and if you don't, that's proof of your lack of goodness?  The professional and academic classical music world is the world in which I've been brewed, steeped, and simmered for almost my entire life.  My friends -- singers, conductors, instrumental soloists, orchestral players -- are not getting work, and in case there was any doubt, many of them are musicians of the highest level.  I subbed on a couple of church gigs on Long Island, for instance, with one of the best conductors I've ever worked with.  Another friend, a cellist who was acclaimed for his performances of new music and played a few gigs with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, was shunned by other classical musicians when he started subbing in the pits on Broadway shows after his children were born; a few years later, the scorners were approaching him, hat in hand, to ask how they, too, could get sub work on Broadway.  A kick-ass oboist I know is working for a bank; a truly great pianist moved to Vermont in order to place his autistic son in a better school, and did financial consulting work from home when he could get it, mostly borrowing, as he told me, from "the bank of Mom and Dad."  I know of at least one marriage that has ended as the result of there being simply no work in classical music.  This is bitter indeed for "those who have talent," and who have spent their entire lives learning to speak the language of beauty in order to share it with others, to help others to wash, as Picasso put it, the dust of the everyday from their souls.

Little girls who sing with preternatural vocal (but not musical) maturity on national television will work, in the sense of getting Vegas acts with lots of costume changes and making lots of money.  But they will miss the chance they might have had to enter into the enchanted realms of art, of beauty, of poetry, of music.  It's a pity that the world values classical music so little, and values classical musicians even less; every true musician I've ever known has wanted only to share their joy in that "holde Kunst," as Schubert and the poet von Schober put it -- that wondrous art that transports the hearts of the suffering in their darkest hours to joy, to companionship, to the knowledge that God exists and that they are not alone.

Music and Memory, Part 11: Song of Love

A family event brought me back to New York City this weekend, and my schedule permitted me, while on my way to the event, to pop in at my old university for a bit of practice in the music department.  I have a gig in Boston in a few months' time, singing the kind of virtuosic music that my career at one time was based upon, and I am conscious of having to work in specific ways to be able to sing it creditably once again.  While practicing, I recalled how, when my knack for singing florid music was discovered by my teachers and coaches, and I began to exploit it, I thought it would save me somehow.  I might not be the best singer in the world, I thought at the time, but I can do this special thing that many of my peers cannot; and it became not so much a badge of honor in my craft as a musician, as a weapon of assault in my battle to carve out a life for myself as an artist.  When my first marriage ended, and when, not long after, the World Trade Center was attacked, that artistic quest stuttered and stumbled.  I applied to my doctoral program, and after being admitted, took the opportunity to turn away from the virtuosic music that had gained me a small reputation, and towards the music that spoke the most deeply to me, but which I doubted I would ever be hired to perform, music that can best be described as non-virtuosic, even deliberately anti-virtuosic.

My oral exams dictated that I present before a panel of professors on a piece that I had sung in the second of the three recitals required by my program, and I chose Schumann's famous song cycle Frauenliebe und -Leben -- A Woman's Love and Life (I have the recording of that recital, and consider it to be one of my most convincing performances).  Frauenliebe is based on poetry by Adalbert von Chamisso, whose publication of the poems in book form in 1830 caused a small sensation; young women in particular inundated the poet with correspondence, amazed that a man had apparently been able to unlock the language of a woman's heart and express it so faithfully.  The poems Schumann chose for the cycle tell the story of a young woman who falls in love, marries, has a child, and suffers the death of her husband, and his song cycle is truly cyclical, a sort of closed circle like a wedding ring, ending with the same music -- the theme "Seit ich ihn gesehen" -- with which it begins.  One of the many remarkable things about Frauenliebe is that alone among the great German Romantic song cycles of the nineteenth century, it is sung from the point of view of a woman.  While the famous "male" cycles -- for instance, Schubert's Winterreise, Schumann's Liederkreis, and Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen -- all address the issue of striking out into the world, and trying -- and failing -- to negotiate one's way in it, Frauenliebe takes place in inner space, in the interior of both the home and the heart.

When I was a young singer on various singer listservs, there was a good deal of discussion about Frauenliebe.  Some principled sopranos and mezzos (the piece has a low tessitura and, though it can be sung by sopranos, it's more commonly done by mezzos) declared that they would never, ever sing it.  They deemed it rather appallingly sexist:  the woman's first statement is "Since I first laid eyes on him, I seem to be blind"; when the unnamed beloved proposes to her (offstage, as it were), she cannot believe that princely he has chosen lowly her; she sings an ode to her engagement ring, explaining that it has given her a purpose and saved her from a life that would otherwise have been an endless expanse of barren waste.  (Some of these same thoughtful singers also declared Aaron Copland's arrangement of the old American song "I Bought Me a Cat" off-limits, for its last verse, "I bought me a wife, my wife pleased me/I fed my wife under yonder tree," etc. )

When I was preparing my arguments for my final doctoral exams, I did a great deal of research on Frauenliebe, on Schumann, and on his wife Clara (above), the great pianist who was also a composer in her own right.  I found out some interesting things:  for instance, pace the principled women on the singer listservs who eschewed the piece, it was also sung by men in the nineteenth century, notably by the prominent German baritone Julius Stockhausen.  And I came upon a concert program that Clara Schumann had performed with some colleagues after Robert's death, in which she split up the cycle, interspersing its eight songs with other works by her husband.  In my orals, I also addresed what I believed was an undercurrent of Christian mysticism in the piece, and indeed, some commentators have noted both Marian and quietistic themes in the cycle.  I was nine months pregnant at the time, and was busting out of a clingy gray maternity dress that I had never worn before, the kind that looks cute on the internet, but turns out to be somewhat bizarrely fetishistic when you put it on, but by then you're out the door and it's too late, because you have a date with destiny. 

All of this went through my mind in the solitude of the practice room yesterday.  I was delighted to be there, in the bowels of the place where I had spent some of my happiest years, and where I gained one of the deepest feelings of connection -- to my craft and to my life -- that I had ever received.  Nonetheless, it was a bit jarring to be practicing virtuosic music in the place where I had begun to embrace music that was its aesthetic and even its ethical opposite.

Coincidentally, I recently watched the 1947 film "Song of Love," which stars Katharine Hepburn as Clara Schumann and Paul Henreid as Robert; Robert Walker also appears as the sensitive young Johannes Brahms, secretly in love with the efficient, angelic Clara.  The film fudges the details about the complicated relationships between Robert and Clara, between the Schumanns and Brahms, and between the Schumanns and Liszt, among other things.  However, one of its main themes is the contrast of virtuosity -- in the movie, construed as soulless, empty, morally suspect -- with the deliberate practice of anti-virtuosity espoused by the Schumanns.  There is a wonderful scene in which Clara sets forth her manifesto of pure music before the virtuoso pianist (and relentless womanizer) Franz Liszt while playing her husband's song "Widmung" (Dedication) -- right after Liszt has performed his own bravura variations upon it.  The young man who says, "Such technique, Mr. Liszt; I don't know what to say," is Brahms, also a great pianist -- who in real life fell asleep the first time he heard Liszt play.  It is interesting that Liszt calls Clara "the reigning saint of music," because the mid-century cult of anti-virtuosity, of simplicity in music, was, like much in the Romantic movement, indeed an attempt to find truth, purity, and the essence of the spiritual in art.

Hepburn's piano playing was dubbed by Artur Rubinstein, uncredited.  Here is Rubinstein/Hepburn playing Schumann's beautiful "Träumerei," a piece which both begins and ends the film, as Schumann's "Seit ich ihn gesehen" both begins and ends Frauenliebe und -Leben.  It could serve as the theme song of Romantic anti-virtuosity; "Träumerei" is the most famous piece from Schumanns Kinderszenen -- Scenes from Childhood -- and is a fitting anthem for the ethos of simplicity and purity and the Romantic striving after what is essential and true, but which will always elude us on this earth.
 
Here is the late, lamented Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing "Seit ich ihn gesehen," no. 1 from Frauenliebe.  It is a marvelous performance, and really captures the ethos of Romantic simplicity.  The text and translation can be found here.

Twenty Years After

Twenty years ago, right around this time, I became pregnant with my first, lost child.

My whole world was M. then; all I wanted was for him to love me; I suppose that I believed somehow that the pregnancy would force his hand, would compel his love.  What I did not know was that the sacrifice of our child -- and his regret, and the way that we were now inexricably linked to each other because of that grim martyrdom -- was the thing that would finally inspire his love.

By then, however, it was too late.  I still loved him, but I had become bitter and cynical.  I married him because I felt -- we both felt, I'm sure -- that this was the one way to set right what we had made so wrong (though I can't really know for sure what he felt, because, after the abortion, we never spoke of it).  So I married M.  And I threw myself into my singing.  I have never met anyone who worked as hard as I did to become a good artist, who studied his craft from as many aspects, who strove to become an authority on the history and practice of his discipline the way I did.  (And I now know that, later on, when I taught college, I was much too demanding of my students; since this kind of striving, I believed, was the only thing that could save me, it was surely the only thing that could save them, all of whom were from humble backgrounds, all of whom were searching for the divine spark of beauty in their own hardscrabble lives, too).

I loved what I was doing as a singer -- all I ever wanted was to create something beautiful that would move people -- but, more importantly, it gave order to my life, it kept me from flying off into oblivion;  in short, it kept me from hitting bottom.  I trusted nothing and no one; I believed that all I had to hold onto in my life was my singing; I truly believed that singing would create a new, alternate reality for me, a realm in which the emptiness was filled, and in which I not only had power and agency, but also in which I became essentially good by virtue of the qualities I had developed as a musician.

I suppose it is no coincidence that I walked away from my opera career at the same time that I jettisoned my first marriage.  Too much had been predicated upon my first poor, lost child.

In the ensuing years, I have sometimes sought, sometimes resisted, the contraction of my life into a shape and a form more constrained than the expansive life I once imagined for myself, and which I have pursued at great cost.  I am both an accustomed and a reluctant penitent; as much as penitence has become a habitual stance -- to the bemusement of those who know me -- I would so much rather have all the nice, easy, kind, fun, pretty things in life instead.

My only prayer, as always, is that God will use the rest of my life for something good; that He will bring beauty and healing for others out of the abyss of my crimes and my despair.  Once, when I was very ill, I had a feverish hallucination of the Blessed Virgin standing at the foot of my bed; she showed me scenes from my life, little lozenge-shaped dioramas in her hands in which I relived all my misdeeds.  Then, as I lay there and watched, she turned each of the lozenges around, and they became roses, which she scattered from her hands.  Readers and friends, please pray for me too.

"To be a true artist, the performer must give up being on stage"

One of the fringe benefits of rehearsing at my old university is the out-of-date magazines that someone has been leaving for years on a marble counter just outside of the elevators (on a floor that Music shares with the French, Classics, and Theater departments).  I've gleaned many a few-weeks-old New Yorker and Chronicle of Higher Education there, and on this recent trip, picked up some New York Reviews of Books, in one of which I found this excellent short essay on J.D. Salinger.

Down in the Valley

I was practicing my métier today, allowing myself to sink into the morass of nostalgia, and found myself thinking about the final exam I gave to my first voice class of non-music majors, three years ago right around this time.  I had started teaching part-time as an adjunct at my university just after my son turned one -- shortly, in fact, before I began writing this blog -- and it was the end of my first semester.   I had twenty-three students, from wildly divergent backgrounds:  one, an art major from Queens, was the great-great-granddaughter of Mikhail Fokine; another, S., was the Canarsie-bred child of civil servants, who spoke French and Japanese and was teaching herself Urdu (I later designed a one-on-one tutorial for this student, funded by a grant designed, perhaps wrongheadedly, to attract minority students into the field of academic musicology).

It turned out to be an eventful semester.  In March, I had to be hospitalized briefly for an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, costing me not only the baby but also one ovary (I was pregnant again the next month, but lost that baby over the summer).  Then one of my students, a waifish Chinese-American girl whom I'll call K., disappeared from sight.  I was planning to give her an unofficial withdrawal from the class, which is tantamount to an F, when suddenly she showed up in tears one day after class had ended and confided in me that she had had an abortion and was not functioning well in its aftermath.  Another student, a young Orthodox Jewish girl, was in the last trimester of her own first pregnancy, and K., post-abortion, could not bear to be in class with her.  This was sort of my territory, and I tried to comfort K., and cast around for ways to help her.  K. had told me she was a Christian, and so I totally overstepped the boundaries of the student-teacher relationship in a secular public institution by talking to her about God's mercy; a friend of mine even offered to pay for K. to attend a Rachel's Vineyard retreat, but K. never followed through.

Then another student, a beautiful, upper-class West Indian girl, had a psychotic episode that kept her out for many classes.  I didn't know the cause of her absences, and I was about to fail her too, when the Office of Disability intervened. Then we had torrential rain in April, which resulted in school closings throughout the New York metropolitan area -- except at my university, which never closes, the theory being that the subways keep running through rain and sun and sleet and hail, so everyone had better suck it up and get there on time.  My babysitter, however, assumed that the university was in fact closed, since every other school within twenty-five miles was, and so she didn't show up, which led to the realization of one of my worst fears when I had to plough my stroller through the five-inch-deep puddles to the train and take my toddler to class with me. The girls went crazy for him, but I had to end the class after just twenty minutes, because, after a few minutes of running around in bewilderment while I sat at the piano and tried to teach, he began crying inconsolably.  I didn't want to nurse him in class, and it didn't seem fair to designate one of my students babysitter.  And then one of my favorite students, a mature, compassionate graduating psychology major whom everyone loved and respected, plagiarized his final paper.

I had assigned each of my students two pieces that semester.  Everyone got his own individual piece, and then they all got "An die Musik," Schubert's famous paean to music itself:

(Oh lovely Art, in how many grey hours,
When life's fierce orbit ensnared me,
Have you kindled my heart to warm love,
Carried me away into a better world!

How often has a sigh escaping from your harp,
A sweet, sacred chord of yours
Opened up for me the heaven of better times,
Oh lovely Art, for that I thank you!)

I also assigned each student a singer to study and listen to throughout the semester.  I picked the singers based on my students' voice types, but also tried to suit them to the inclinations the students seemed to demonstrate.  S., for instance, was curious about twentieth-century music, so I assigned her Jan DeGaetani.  Some of the students ended up feeling profoundly connected to their study singers:  Jimmy, a lanky, ponytailed Puerto Rican bass-baritone, took to signing his papers "Hans," after Hans Hotter, his assigned singer.

For the final exam, my students had the choice of singing either their assigned individual piece or "An die Musik."  For extra credit, they could sing Brahms's setting of the folksong "Da unten im Tale" -- Down in the valley -- in English (though it may sound like it, I didn't assign only German Lieder; their individual songs spanned styles and languages, from Handel to Irving Berlin.  I just thought that they  needed to know some Schubert and Brahms in order to know what was truly beautiful in this world).

Although food and drink were forbidden in the classroom, I spent the night before exam day making dozens of sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies, since the exam period was two hours long and spanned lunchtime, and I picked up bottled water and coffee on my way to the university.  I had arranged for the music department to hire my friend and colleague J, a Korean-born monster pianist and vocal collaborator, to accompany, so I could focus on my students' performances.  I let students who were unhappy with their performance start over, and everyone encouraged each other.  At the end, I got up and sang "An die Musik" for them myself.  I will never forget how touching it was to hear Jimmy (a.k.a. Hans) and S. sing "Da unten im Tale" as a duet, like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau did on their legendary 1966 recording of Brahms's folksong settings.  The text:

Down in the valley there
the water flows so sadly,
and I can't tell you
that I love you so.

You always speak of love,
you always speak of faithfulness,
but a little bit of falsehood
is always there too.

And if I tell you ten times
that I love you,
and you do not want to understand,
then I will have to move on.

For the time that you have loved me,
I thank you kindly,
and I wish that somewhere else
things might go better for you.

Jimmy and S, like Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau, sang the song as a conversation, trading off the verses in a he-said-she-said dialogue, which gives the song a rather different feeling from the solo piece that Brahms had originally conceived -- less gallant, more resigned, and more moving.  Here is the excellent German tenor Werner Güra singing it.

And here is a less-polished but heartfelt and lovely performance by a group that calls itself Tre Sorelle -- I assume they are indeed three sisters.

 
At the end of the semester, I picked up my packet of anonymous student evaluations.  Some students were unhappy with the fact that I didn't dedicate the entire class to teaching vocal technique, but tried to present the art of singing in the context of music and social history, and also made them write two papers. Some felt they didn't belong in the class at all (this was not my feeling; it was a beginning voice class, and was open to everybody).  But some students were genuinely excited by what they had learned -- S. switched her major from English to music, is graduating this month, and hopes to continue on to her Ph.D. in musicology (the grant bore its intended fruit in her case) -- and I'll never forget the one evaluation that contained the highest praise I've ever received as a teacher, or perhaps as anything else:  "She's cool."

Teacher Blues

Packing to go to New York for my upcoming semi-important gig, I realized that I have an embarrassing surplus of clothes, mainly work clothes that I used to wear for university teaching: stylish blouses, tailored skirts, grown-up Mary Janes with chunky heels, and the like.  I haven't worn any of these clothes since my last semester teaching, which was two years ago now, yet I'm extremely reluctant to get rid of them.  What if I ever teach again?  A good friend of mine who lives on the razor's edge of poverty in the South Bronx has given away all of her baby things in between each baby (there are three so far), saying, "God will provide."  But these clothes were expensive, I thought.  However, chastened by memories of my friend, I got out a bag and started putting things in it to give away, but the only things I could manage to part with were some recital gowns that no longer flatter me, not exactly useful or practical wear for most people browsing at the Catholic Charities thrift shop on my new town's Main Street.

When I started teaching at my university, I felt as though, my years of performing notwithstanding, I had finally found my calling.  When I was in the classroom, I was in the zone.  Taxi drivers and strangers on the subway and the street would assume I was a teacher (though that may very well have been because most middle-class-looking white women seen in poor neighborhoods in New York, like the one in which I taught, are either social workers or teachers).  I don't know if I'll ever teach again, though I suspect I will in some form.  When we moved here, I sent my academic vita to a dozen schools within a hundred miles of here (an optimistic gesture, considering I still can't drive a car).  The state schools, however, were (and stil are) all under hiring freeze, and in any case my rather eccentric background -- abandoning opera for research-based recitals; then abandoning most performing in favor of speculative music-cultural research -- makes me a less-than-obvious candidate for a teaching position in a state school, although state university teaching jobs are highly desirable gigs.  My experience teaching in a large urban university back in New York had been such a positive one that I then decided that my calling was to teach in community college. I might never teach a promising graduate student, but promising graduate students are highly overrated, I thought.  So I phoned the head of the music department at the local community college, introduced myself, and explained my work.  Somehow from this conversation he gained the mistaken impression that I was an ethnomusicologist (how anyone would draw that conclusion from my c.v. baffles me); but anyway, all his positions, including teaching voice as an adjunct, were filled.

So then I decided I would get certified to teach in public school.  I dreamt of nourishing the budding talent of disadvantaged high school students in my economically-depressed community, and teaching them that the beauty and goodness of music could enrich, improve, and change their lives, as it had mine.  I spent countless hours and about a hundred dollars researching the ways my state would allow me to become certified, only to come up empty-handed.  I had numerous conversations with an educational recruiter in my area, who explained to me that my doctorate had no meaning in this context, nor did my years of teaching at the college level.  I would simply have to go back to school and get a master's degree in education, and then I'd have to do many hours of supervised student teaching.  While I agreed with her that my experience had not taught me the latest early-education pedagogical methodologies, I was confident I could learn those from books.  However, I balked at the idea of going back to school after the long, hard road to my doctorate, so it was not to be.

I'm thinking of homeschooling my son and whatever other children we are blessed to welcome, if for no other reason than that I love teaching so much, and miss it to the point that every day I find myself fantasizing about my time in the classroom.  But the truth is that I really don't know how to teach young children.  High school would be fine; for me, the really exciting stuff in terms of both ideas and pedagogy begins around age eleven.  But I now wonder, looking back, if I was too demanding even of my college students; I was so intent on their getting it, on their loving what I loved, that I think I expected them to reason and write on almost a graduate level, which not all of them could manage.  I fear that my greatest failing as a teacher is the same one that used to plague me as a young singer:  I was having a powerful experience onstage, but my going through it did not necessarily bring the audience there with me, or allow them to come to the catharsis that the music led them to expect.  If I homeschooled, at any rate, I would need an overhaul in my very meager store of patience.