Flashback Friday: music school

I grew up in a college town. There I went to a pint sized prep school that had almost all the trimmings. It had a quirky artistic feel to it - perhaps brought forward to defend itself where it completely lacked in athletic prowess (meaning equipment, brawn, coaches, property...). Our school was, in fact, slowly going broke, though we didn't know it. We always had the theater, however.

For a while I took my music lessons at school. I don't remember if I stayed after school or if I was getting pulled out of class or if it was in fact part of the curriculum. The lesson room was just off the chapel. It was really just the hallway between the chapel and the chaplain's office. Someone had pushed a piano in the corner and there were two stools. It often smelled like incense from what we as kids called long chapel, but was really the Thursday Eucharist. The other 4 days were short meditations or hymn sings. Long chapel's incense lingered in this little space. To get there, one had to tumble down the back stairs, or march down the front stairs and pass by the headmistresses office - uniform perfect, no shuffling of feet - on the way there one could hear the tail end of some other student's lesson. One could perch on the top step -- the chaplain's office being in some limbo between the basement and the first floor - and wait listening to the whatever wind instrument was being played (strings/suzuki went to the 7th floor, where they practiced in what can best be described as a very large closet full of stringed instruments. SUZUKI was printed boldly on the door. Wind instruments players had no door on our hallway and I believe piano students were taught in the real music room, which was in the real basement of the building, reached only by the main stair case.)

For a short time I took my lessons at home on the family piano- our church was almost overpopulated by Julliard students earning cash while trying to make it in the city. Most were not born educators, which was why the music school was my very favorite place to take my lessons. Its creaking stairs took you on a journey past other players rehearsing, practicing, struggling and breakthroughs. The way the orchestra sounds when it is warming up was just how the music school sounded to me all the time. I did not practice as much as I could have. I was often late, running the 10 blocks south on Broadway, flute clutched to my chest, papers flapping, but I did love the perpetual feeling that we were back stage. It was a behind the scenes pass to a world I didn't expect to enter, more serious and older students concentrating, earnestly perfecting their pieces for the next recital. Walking in and out I felt the shiver down my spine that comes just before curtain as you sit in the theater with the lights dimming low. Something wonderful was just about to happen for someone.

This week I went back to music school. My son has been taking viola at the community division of a local university's well renowned school of music. He has been most often shuffled off their by husband in the early evenings and often enough by one or the other of his grandparents, while I mind the home front of toddlers sleeping late into the afternoon and messing up their bedtimes, or not sleeping at all and being way too cranky to be brought along or left behind by their mama. Today, very near the term's end, I decided that I would go to music school with Thinker. It was an innocent decision. I hadn't met his teacher yet. I hadn't heard him with piano accompaniment. I wanted to get away from cranky non-napping toddlers!
And suddenly, I was back at music school. The sound of other musician's rehearsing, all their varying skills and abilities leaking out onto the institutional flooring and filling the cracks in the painted cinder block walls, well it just about knocked me over. I snuck myself into a tiny rehearsal room, perched on a chair and knit while Thinker played May Song and Allegretto with piano accompaniment from his very nice (and young!!) teacher, feeling for all the world just like some kid's parent - and this is not news, but strange to be feeling it all the same time I am feeling just like a kid myself with my papers discombobulated in my music folder, running those 10 blocks downtown and looking all the while uptown for the M104 bus that might save me and keep me from being 5 minutes late if only it would catch the next green light.

And just as I came to the end of my knitting row, our lesson was over and I found my feet back on the cement floor of somebody else's music school.