Music Through the Ages

I just walked out of a forty minute long seventh grade orchestra class. A first.

I’m doing research, another first. It’s a nascent idea, having something to do with a musician, a shadow of a character who has put music at the center of her life. My ideas start with questions, and this one is fairly huge: how does that happen? How does someone spend their life reading, teaching and making music? Or any art? What does that life look like? How are marriages and kids managed? Laundry? Income? Health insurance, job, errands?

These quandaries landed me in seventh grade again, where I experienced acute age envy. Let me be clear: I hated seventh grade. Yet there I sat, jaw agape, thinking, “These kids don’t know how lucky they are!”

I’ve been teaching intermittently for over ten years, usually writing classes, and usually to eighteen year olds. Last fall, in the freshman seminar (16 student discussion class) I came close, closer than I ever have, to being really old. I looked out at these stony faces who refused to so much as make eye contact with one another,  and I marveled:  Do they realize they will never get the chance to talk like this, about ideas such as these, again? Life doesn’t allow this kind of—I hate the word—discourse. Let’s face it, unless you make it happen, it just doesn’t.

Today I learned that eighteen has nothing on twelve. Two observations: One: the teacher, a musician herself, did not have scowl lines, that gutter down the center of one’s forehead that comes from either constant irritation or intense concentration. Or both. Two: the kids had instruments! Beat up, scratched, nicked cellos, loosely held. Cellos for god’s sake! A whole bank of them in cubbies along the wall! And stand up basses! Violas! And they did it with an eye on the clock, suppressing yawns, fidgeting. I don’t know if all middle schools everywhere have orchestra, and I don’t know if they provide instruments. Mine did not. My parents bought me a clarinet. It was marching band in the Midwest in the eighties. No strings in sight. I have no idea if I’d have even been interested (band didn’t stick). And I realize I sound like my dad (we had to walk to school! Over a mile! In winter!), but for me this was beyond that tall wheeled cart that sits in my second grader’s classroom, filled with a stack of Macbooks—astonishing enough. This was row after row of wooden instruments with strings, the kind of thing that a bow can be drawn over and notes produced. Notes! Notes written several hundred years ago, notes that look like small, flagged dots to most of us mopes, but to some privileged few read like words.

I am being ridiculous, expecting awe and rapture from seventh graders, people whose emotional life resembles the rise of fall of red lights on a stereo equalizer. It occurs to me that some of us never get past this stage; we learn to manage the rise and fall of inner intensity by adjusting the dial to a long flat line. Just equalize it and don’t show a thing. Maybe that was the root of my envy: these kids still had a shot.

First they had a tuning quiz: each of them played four notes and the teacher could tell if one was too high or too low, like a chef can taste a buerre blanc and know the precise adjustment needed. The teacher had them warm up their fingers to the beat of a metronome, which she set faster and faster, pointer to thumb, then tall man, ring finger and pinky and back again. Then she asked them to bow in the air while she counted out the song—which was new to them. She said things like, “Let’s see those nice bow holds we’ve been working on all year;” and “Tiffany, let me see you relax your pinky.” Then they plucked the song while she played it on violin. She said, unbelievably,  “There is a flat in front of that A; it’s a squishy four with the D string.” Huh?

And then they began. It was clunky, they weren’t  all together, it was a beginning, but by-god it was music. To these illiterate, middle-aged, perhaps over-reverent  ears, it was music.