Nightly Scribbles on my Hand
I slept until 11:10 AM today, my plans for an early, productive day completely shot. Turning over, I stretch my weary arms, looking down at the illegible blue markings on my left hand.
I often half wake-up many times per night, grab a pen, and write something on the back of my hand. What does it say this morning? Maybe “Schubert, Yoga, T Pick, M Tchaik, Pigs, and Fred.” I’m sure it will all become clear once I get some coffee coursing through my veins.
Yesterday was the end of my Inside Music Academy Chamber Music Workshop in Corvallis. It’s been exhilarating, exhausting, challenging, and rewarding to see these students, age 10 to 76, crave the work necessary to pull off major repertoire, and to find new ways of working together, supporting each other, and pushing themselves through difficulties.
This year we had 85 students, 20 of them staying with host families and Airbnbs, and 4 staying with Jason and me in our ramshackle, sprawling house, surrounded by trees so tall I can’t see the tops, baby deer in the back yard, guinea pigs squeaking in the living room, turkeys gobbling up the drive, atop a steep hill in Corvallis.
Looking at my watch at the end of this week, it shows I am clocking 6 miles a day on my feet. But that’s not jogging. That’s running from room to room at camp, setting up stands, meeting faculty, doing errands, and mostly just energetically coaching Beethoven, Smetana, Ravel. No wonder I am exhausted. Plus demonstrating, playing along, and leading the orchestras from the concertmaster (first violinist) seat. My shoulders feel like mechanically separated meat product. No wonder I wrote Yoga on my hand.
As I slide into yoga, just a couple of minutes late, as usual, I see a wave from one of my regular concertgoers – he’s made a little space for me next to him. It’s during this next hour that I will untie the knots in my back and arms, untie the knots in my head, and slowly make a plan for the rest of my day. By 8 pm, I have to be at the University of Portland, checking into the dorms, ready to teach for a week at the Delgani String Quartet Academy. And I have to get there with the list on my hand completed.
It was a successful week in Corvallis – happy students, happy parents. Jason and I had an autistic college student staying with us this week – a boy we have known for 6 years. He doesn’t sugar coat anything, he’s brutally direct. Many of his sentences start with “I don’t mean to be disrespectful” and the next part can go something like “but I think that people who are playing the melody need to play louder. It’s just too soft. No one can hear that.” True, true. It was a hilarious card game of B.S. he played with my 14-year-old daughter and friends the first night. The combo of his bluffing style and the fact that he had memorized the deck of cards meant that no one could get away with anything. He won handily.
And so – the back of my hand. Yoga. Yes, happening now: Schubert. Jason and I play the Schubert Trio in E-flat Major with pianist Hunter Noack this week, live on All Classical Radio and then for 2 concerts as a part of his stunning series, IN A LANDSCAPE: Classical Music in the Wild™. I haven’t had a second to practice. 2 hours should do it. The next thing on my hand: T Pick. We won’t be back to pick our older daughter up from visual arts camp in time – I need to find someone to get her from Salem to Corvallis, a one hour trip, on Friday. Our younger daughter needs help practicing her Tchaikovsky Sextet – she’s the youngest member of a group tackling the fiendishly difficult Souvenir de Florence by Tchaikovsky, and rehearsals start tomorrow. I need to give her left hand violin fingerings before we leave, that should take one hour. And we can drop off our guinea pigs on the way out of town. My daughter’s friend lives on a farm, and our two pigs love to spend time there, romping around the yard with the other farm piggies.
And finally, Fred (All Classical’s President & CEO!) I’m supposed to write my next blog post. So here it is. All typed and ready. I wash my hands, the ink naming tasks for today dissolving down the drain. I’m in my dorm room, Jason is snoring in his bunk bed, it’s 10:47 PM, and I can’t wait for another week to start tomorrow. New and old friends, old and new music. The life of a musician.
