For Love of Music

Music was my first love, I suppose you could say.  I was performing on stage—by my choice, not my mother’s—at the tender age of five: Spending hours listening to my parents’ records and eight-tracks, memorizing lyrics, teaching myself to mimic all the greats.  Studying my older cousin’s music books and pounding out chords on the ancient upright that inhabited the downstairs of her Adirondack summer-house.  Finally deciding that while I had some skill at it, the piano was not for me and that I would stick with voice and learn to play the flute instead.

Six long years and innumerable private lessons later, it was a decision that I nearly came to regret.

In the summer of ‘94, the music instructor at the private school which I was attending took a leave of absence to give birth to her third child—and in the weeks and months that followed our headmistress went through a succession of replacements ranging from overwhelmed by the scope of our program to simply incompetent.  That glaring lack however, did not change the obvious: monthly chapel, and three major concerts already scheduled and the venues booked.  At length, an interim accompanist was found; but she could only attend the performances and not a single rehearsal.

The headmistress being who she was—and I’ll make no further comment than that—decided that in a pinch that rather than pay for two professional accompanists, she’d settle for the next best thing: students who knew what they were doing, and had no choice but to perform for free as their ‘duty’ to the school.  Alan, a piano student several years my junior, was delegated to accompany the choir at chapel.  And I…?  I was the one chosen to be removed from my own academic classes several times a week, to teach several hundred young children how to sing in harmony.

It was nothing short of a nightmare: Long hours, sleepless nights as I played catch-up with class work, homework, and a million other things.  After-school activities and weekends with friends became a thing of the past as I struggled just to keep my head above water, hovering on the edge of collapse.  Graduation couldn’t come soon enough.

And when it did, the headmistress simply handed me my diploma and sent me away, without so much as a thank-you—whilst Alan, who only showed up for a single hour once a month and never had to miss a class or a single moment of free time, she publicly acclaimed.

That night, I put away my music, locked away my flute, and swore never again. 

I was considerably less stressed, yes.  I was also completely miserable.  But I’d made a promise, and all else be damned, I was going to keep it.  Except that I hadn’t anticipated Carolyn.

Carolyn was perhaps slightly older than my mother, and had been teaching for nearly as long.  Rumor had it that she’d attended convent school as a girl, and very nearly become a Sister.  At any rate, she certainly had the temperament of one.  Certainly, she brooked no nonsense from anyone around her—on any front.  She’d have been the perfect teacher except that she was also the choir director, and she was recruiting: tenors and bases primarily, but also accompanists—the school had no band program as yet—and anyone else with musical background that she could lay hands upon.  Add to that the way rumors spread in a school population and among teenagers, and within a matter of days she knew she had one of the most highly acclaimed instrumentalists in the district sitting in her homeroom, pretending to know nothing about music at all.

To say that Carolyn was shocked would’ve been a lie.  She realized from the moment I walked into her room that first day I was hiding something: Knew enough, at any rate, to know the right questions—and whom to ask.  Not, she later admitted to me, that I could’ve hidden the calloused tips of my fingers, or my perfectly upright ‘concert carriage’ or the way my hands instinctively moved to recreate flute fingerings whenever music played—no matter where I happened to be.  She cornered me after class, and demanded to know why I was being so foolish—deliberately denying myself something that I so obviously and desperately loved.

And how could I refuse her, when I knew that she was right...?