(This is not about violin--

but most of what we are doing during lessons and classes is not actually about violin.)

Recently one of my 3rd graders caught a glimpse of the top of my head while I was tuning her violin.

"Your hair is turning white!"

"Yes, it is! That's okay. I actually kind of like it."

She nodded. 

"I guess I'm getting older and changing, just like you are." It was really only as I said these words that I realized how true they were. Had I known this, before it came up? 

I cannot tell you how often something like this happens. It seems like it would be enough, just learning a skill like how to play an instrument. But there is always so much more going on. The focus is violin. We work pretty hard on that. But what it is about lies always just below the surface of what we do every day, and sometimes rises above, glimmering. I love these moments more than words can say.

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Light, 12/2/15:

Today's light: honestly, today was dark. I caught the news in between private students and Violin Project, and all I could think on my way to the school was, I am going to go spread light now, because it is the only thing I can do. And I saw Oldest walking through the park on his way home, and I got to class and saw the faces of my students and the volunteers who help me and friends who teach at the school and Middle and Youngest because they wait for me after school and Oh, this work drains me but all those faces connected to all those souls--they were the real light.





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Found, Day 34

Middle brought me the tiniest purple flower today while I was tuning violins for the Violin Project. She found it while walking over from the middle school and presented it to me with reverence. I set it down on a shelf nearby where it found good company next to two handmade ceramic figures—a cat with a green collar and a father penguin with a baby on his feet—that needed a safe place to rest before finishing their trek home from school.

Because of the children in my life I have become a Sharer of Treasures. This is a position of honor, and nobody asked if it is deserved. I just one day found myself here. But in this place of honor I hear about the best (funniest, grossest) parts of books, I see the proudest-of pages of homework and artwork and projects. I peruse and contemplate untold riches: new shoes, plastic cupcake rings, agates, stories about baby brothers and sisters, knock-knock jokes. I know these things differently than I did when I was a child. Yes, I see them with adult eyes. Somehow, though, this second glimpse into childhood balances things out, and I see their value increase, not decrease. I see them as they are.

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What You End Up With

I have next to no expertise with a camera. I am in awe of what people who have skill can do with their cameras, and I’m frequently frustrated by what I can’t do. But I’m also fascinated by what I can capture, even in my ignorance and lack of skill. In the car with Husband a few nights ago, appreciating again the colors of winter in my adopted state, and setting sun, and gentle rolls of fields, I took as many pictures as I could. I liked so much of what I ended up with, even while I didn’t capture exactly what I saw out the passenger seat window. Expectations aside, I ended up with something beautiful. I was still participating in some form of seeing.

That play of expectations and my response and what I end up with in the end—it can make me crazy, but it also makes life something of a holy kaleidoscope. And I like that. A lot.

It struck me a few months ago, while walking an unruly bunch of young violinists back from the bathroom and wondering at the crazy swinging we do every day between off-the-wall-tired and brilliant-short jags of learning: what if one of our primary responsibilities while we wade through this life—this chaos—is to dip our hands into it as it flows past and make something of it? Sometimes it requires great skill to form something (smooth, perfect, compact maybe, or maybe towering and grand.) Sometimes all that is needed is to reach into the torrent and hold up, shining and raw, what I get hold of. Either way I am on a treasure hunt. Either way the best thing next to the find is showing it to you.

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Questions, Answers

Last week I wrote some, practiced some, organized some. I did lots of normal everyday stuff and also cleaned my office (definitely not normal-everyday.) The whole week, frost flowers climbed across my office window, advancing and receding without my really noticing the movement. Just every once in a while—hey, look at that! and later—gone.

Also last week, from A.Word.A.Day, this: There are years that ask questions and years that answer. –Zora Neale Hurston

I’m so glad that’s true.

I had been suspecting it, wondering on some level. Because what a relief. If entire years can ask and answer questions then that allows for time—long stretches of it—and all the other things that move slowly and profoundly but only while you aren’t looking. Like the frost on my window.

*     *     *

Friday afternoon, as we worked our way through a bitter windy parking lot after violin, Oldest and Middle expounded on the future of technology. The things they talked about teetered on the brink of science fiction: information uploaded directly into our brains, easy learning, instant knowledge. I had to ask: So is being able to carry or transfer information the same as knowing something? I think they thought I was trying to be argumentative, but I wasn’t. I spend hours a day trying to move people from understanding, to ability, to something that is a deep abiding part of their being. Besides effort and process, the thing that seems to matter the most in this progression is time.

*     *     *

Whole years of questions = whole years of discomfort, true. But the softness of not-knowing is there, too. Have you ever run into the hard brick wall of someone else’s Knowing? I think I prefer softness. That slow slow motion and growth. Because it must be here in the question years that compassion grows, and humility, and humanity.

The years that answer—they are like breathing pure oxygen. Peaceful, whole. Welcome. And yet they probably hold as much potential for danger as the question years. A person could get stuck there. The questions and answers need each other desperately, and as much as I hate to admit it I need them both.

These are things I maybe have not wanted to accept: the necessity of the question years, the long periods of time that answers and understanding require, the waiting. But the idea of slow things, of softness and knowing and Time, of a cycle of questions and answers that does not ever have to tire out—there are promises there. They make me want to promise to keep watch.

Frost flowers creep

across the window—

seen, not seen.

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Light: 12/15/14

Every day I see this. During arrival/tuning/snack time, especially—they are experimenting, exploring, asking each other questions, teaching each other stuff. Every day I see this fire for learning igniting around the music room. Yes, they are tired and distracted after a long day at school. But still. I get to work with that fire.

Maybe one of these days when someone asks me what I do, instead of saying “I’m a violin teacher” I will tell the whole truth: “I am a violin teacher, a witness-er of miracles, a problem-solver, a counselor, a herder of squirrels, a maker of music, a fanner of flames.”

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Thankful, 2014: A Chance to Watch

1. At my students’ fall recital, sitting finally—momentarily—watching and listening. These milestones—you hit them whether you feel ready or not, whether you are sick or healthy, regardless of what else is happening in your life. We work for mastery. We work to capture the spirit of the piece. But what is on display in front of us is always deeper than those things, broader than the performance.

 So many dramas at play, and most of it hidden.

My pride in my students, and the fact that I am on the edge of my seat for each person who walks to the front of the church and bows and plays and bows again has everything to do with knowing them. Their stories, their struggles, their triumphs. Working with them I have gotten glimpses of these things, and I promise you even Twinkle is never the same piece twice.

2. Sitting with the pit band on the opening night of Fiddler on the Roof. Technically my first high school musical, if you don’t count the All-City Opera production of “The Magic Flute” I played in ninth grade. It is an odd and beautiful experience at 42, and I can’t get enough of watching. 

I am here to play, but my heart is with Oldest, on stage. Stage fright for the people you love is almost worse than stage fright for yourself, and it has nothing to do with your confidence in your loved ones or their abilities. As we start playing “To Life” the only thing tempering the adrenaline is the fact that I am used to playing despite it. Besides, I have to focus on what I am doing. 

And then it is his solo, and he is standing on a bench, hand raised in blessing—hand with new angles, and handsome—nailing it:

Za vasle zdorovie

Heaven bless you both, Na zdrovie

To your health, and may we live together in peace!

I get to watch, and I get to be part of the music—his music. My pride in him, the fact that I am on the edge of my seat—you know what that is. I have been watching him since what must be the beginning of time, and the story is rich and complex and I know I will never grasp all of it.

But I get to watch.

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Violins!

Wednesday I brought the new violins to class, and the rest of the week was an even more pronounced mix of our usual brilliant moments and chaos. The anticipation building up to this week has been thick, and now that it has been released—oh. 

Wednesday pretty much everybody forgot about snack. They forgot to be squirrelly when we went to the bathroom. They were focused only on the violins, and for a certain amount of class I gave in to the noise and the spirit of discovery and watched them explore. My seasoned second year students helped the first year students, showing them how to put their shoulder rests on and how to tighten the bow, and then everyone just tried stuff. It was beautiful and loud, and I wish all of you could have witnessed it. The pictures, I think, tell the story well:

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Today is the Day

They have been waiting. And waiting. Practicing with box violins (mac and cheese boxes, stuffed with plastic bags and wrapped in turquoise duct tape, paint stirrers hot-glued in for necks) and dowel rod bows. They have been practicing, and singing and clapping and marching and dancing and listening. And waiting—mostly patiently but not always—for today.

It will feel different—the real violins are heavier, and not as easy to get in the right spot on your shoulder. Today will feel like a step backward because the playing positions and bow holds will not be as familiar as they were yesterday. I promised them the ease will come back, and will arrive much sooner than it did the first time around.

Everything will be more breakable now, and we've had a few accidents in class, already. We'll deal with that when we need to.

But—sound. We are so close to making sound, and learning notes, and putting real pieces together, bit by bit. We are going to make music together.

Today is huge.

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Medley, 10/13/14

1. Tuesday evening: moonrise. A not-quite-full moon, pale and round and flat. The sky, too, is clear and pale. Peaceful. This week is busy, like so many of the rest of them, but the sky remains open and peaceful, changing and unchanging.

2. Later Tuesday evening: orchestra rehearsal, all Beethoven. The 7^th Symphony, and Leonore Overture No. 3, and the Piano Concerto No. 4. I’m not sure how many times I’ve played any of these pieces, but the past performances are present, always. The piano concerto, for instance: I once got to play this with Daniel Barenboim as both soloist and conductor. The intensity and concentration of that performance, it turns out, is burned into my psyche. As we run through the piece with tonight’s soloist I can hear both the present version and the one from all those years ago. And this music is so good. 

3. Wednesday morning: I’m sitting alone in the waiting room at the dentist’s. All three kids are having checkups at once. I hear Youngest’s voice—she is singing “Let it Go” with all her heart. I imagine her face, and the way she must be moving in the dentist’s chair as she swoops for the high notes and dips for the low. “The cold never bothered me anyway—” I think she especially loves that line, and the meaning she intuits in it. The hygienist tells me later that they waited at the doorway of Youngest's  room until she finished the song. They did not want to interrupt.

4. Saturday: the last birthday cake of the season, chocolate with cream cheese frosting, sprinkled with dark chocolate curls and golden sugar. It struck me, looking at the finished cake, that the frosting works as a sealer, holding in moisture, at least as much as it sweetens and decorates. I’ve always thought of the frosting as the best part; I’ve never before thought of it as a kind of armor.

5. All week, each weekday afternoon: The Violin Project. These kids are young, and they're tired at the end of the day. It is a difficult time for intense focus. The room is often noisy. I have been trying to get them to be quieter—especially while I am tuning their violins. But this week I suggested that they use tuning time (which for them is waiting time) to help each other—second year students could help beginners with bow holds, playing positions, rhythms; older kids in general could help younger; second year kids could join forces to puzzle out new skills and pieces. The noise turned into something special. This is what I am looking for, at least as much as I am seeking order. What could happen, if we all keep learning and growing like this? 

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Recently (In Pictures)

So very much violin. Two birthdays in to our month of celebrations. Beauty, and reminders—just waiting.

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The Violin Project, Year 2: Notes from the First Day of Class

Seventeen is a big number. Seven returning students, ten new students. When I group them that way it all looks very manageable. All together they look like more than the sum of their parts. 

They were excited, yesterday, coming in. Eyes big. The new ones wanted to know when they would have violins. They are ready to play concertos. One child informed me, very seriously, “I’m doing violin because my mom said I had to.” One gave me five examples of How Fast A Learner I Am. We will move slowly, and that is hard but at the same time easier—so much less overwhelming than “Here’s your violin, this is how you hold it. Here’s your bow, this is how you hold it. Now play.” And I think we will have fun, regardless of how we ended up together in the first place.

I don’t know who was more nervous, the kids or I. For them I want to project calm and confidence, but every year is new, the territory fresh and a little wild, and every year I wonder if I am really up to this new year of teaching. I have trouble feeling calm.

And then we start, and everything’s okay.

We began yesterday with background music (Twinkle Theme and Variations) and coloring (treble clefs) and snacks, and worked our way into learning each others’ names, standing still, listening to and following instructions. The newcomers will be painting the fence, Karate Kid-style, for a while, and that tends to fly in the face of young peoples’ expectations. But it is like the scarf I have been knitting for months and months: day-to-day the progress is slow, and certainly not our culture’s usual way of acquiring things. But I got used to the slowness, and I enjoy the process. Recently—suddenly, it seemed—I noticed that the thing has length. Someday I will wear it and forget how long it took to make. Someday, suddenly, we will look at each other over our violins and say, “Look how much we’ve learned!”

Here’s what else I forget, and have to keep re-discovering: it’s not just every year that is new. Every day is new. Getting to know each other, fence-painting, problem-solving—we are in it together. What luck. I can’t wait.

For more about The Violin Project, click here, or visit our Facebook page.

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Sideways

Some stars disappear when you look at them straight on. Pale glints in your peripheral vision when you look up, they slide into blackness when you turn your eyes toward them. The issue is in our eyes: the cones concentrated in the central part of the cornea—the part we use when we look at something head-on—do not pick up the dim light that the rods around the edges of the cornea do. Regardless of the constancy of what we're looking at, we are stuck with what our eyes can see: stars-like-phantoms. They must be approached sideways, and gently.

It’s not just stars, though.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for months—the sideways-ness of things.

It is ever-present in teaching, especially so for me this past year, working with a small group of children every day. Threaded all through the process of learning violin are other things: how we treat one another, how we handle problems, how we respond to frustration. How we show love and respect and kindness. How we create and respond to beauty. How we learn to discipline our fingers, our ears, our mouths, our minds. How we simply learn one another and build relationships—complicated, real, and gritty.

This is why I find it hard to write about teaching. It is personal, ongoing, complex. It is also universal. The fact that I can focus on one thing—learning to play violin—is very helpful, because I can rule out Everything Else. Except I draw on Everything Else to do it—faith, psychology, physics, storytelling, eating Dorito’s—everything. And then of course it turns out that learning violin touches everything else. Try to nail the whole thing down, narrow it, look at it too directly, and you start to lose sight of certain things. Sometimes you have no choice but to approach sideways, gently.

It’s fair, I think, to start wondering which is the true art—the direct work or the sideways, the music or the people working on the music? It’s both things at once of course, but it’s worth considering what you might see when you shift your focus, and what is most important to you to see in the end. 

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In Concert

At our last class before the concert, I made them a promise:

No matter how calm I look when we’re up there on stage, I will be nervous too. I’ve been doing this almost my whole life, and I still get nervous. But we’ll all be there helping each other, and it’s going to be great.

I did not tell them that I’ve been nervous for months.

My violin students—Violin Project and private students—were invited to play with the local community string orchestra back in January. I looked at the music and said yes, I think we can make that work, knowing it would be a stretch. Knowing this was new territory for all of us. We had time, and we got to work right away. I believed that together we could rise to the occasion.

But I was nervous. Afraid of letting people (my students, their families, the conductor, the orchestra) down. 

One month before the concert, I was quite nervous. We had been working hard, yes. But we had a lot of leaps to make.  The second violin part didn’t always make sense to a group of kids who had always played melody, and the form was more complex than they had ever encountered. This is not such a big deal if you can just follow what’s on the page in front of you, but to a pre-reader it matters. Memorizing something you would probably never hum to yourself is not a simple task.

The third violinists had their part down quickly, but they had to be able to hold their own rhythmically, and again—not easy. Not playing on down beats when everybody else is playing, not being swayed by the four other parts around you but listening to and sticking with your own part: that is sophisticated stuff for a beginner.

The first violinists—they had a lot of notes to learn. And life is busy, and so many important things want to get in the way. I knew they could do it, but I was concerned about their confidence.

The week of the concert, however, things came together. I started to relax. I got excited. I was thankful for how good everything sounded. 

Then the day of the concert: I taught my regular lessons, picked up my kids at their grandparents’ house. We ate half our dinner in the car on the way home. At home with a few minutes’ turn-around time everybody had a job: Oldest, help set the table, Middle, change clothes, Youngest, go back out to the car and bring your backpack and jacket inside.

A few minutes later, crying. Youngest back inside with her hand to her head. Blood. And then she moved her hand away and I yelled, I couldn’t help it, because Oh-God-she’s-really-hurt.

Somehow what felt like one hundred decisions were made in an instant. Call Husband. Call Friend who will be at the concert. Do not let on to Youngest that she needs stitches until you absolutely have to if you want her to stay calm. You do not have to be at the concert. Your students can do this without you. Somehow I got Middle and Oldest to the concert location along with the stack of violins I had brought home with me “to make sure they all make it safely to the concert tonight.” Somehow I drove to Urgent Care answering Youngest’s questions as calmly as I could, even though every few seconds I had to clench the steering wheel hard. The image of her wound, my bleeding hurt child, flashed fresh in my mind over and over. Over and over I glanced at her face—pale, eyes half-shut—in the rearview mirror. Clench. Release. Clench. Release.

Clench.

Somehow everything worked out.

At Urgent Care: help. The nurse’s eyes looking at me over Youngest’s head after peeking under the gauze, the whole wordless conversation that passed between us. Oh, Honey. Yes. She needs stitches. I knew right away. Oh this girl, she fell really hard. She did, didn’t she? Husband arriving sooner than seemed possible. Youngest, scared and brave, fighting the stitches, still managing to be all at once sassy and funny with the nurses. Her confession to me with deep serious eyes: “I thought maybe I just wouldn’t tell you I fell. But then I thought maybe I should.” Her forehead mended, bandaged. Her arm sore, but not broken.

All the fear and worry that went into this concert—

They moved everything around on the program, and announced from the stage that the orchestra would just keep playing until I arrived to lead my students in their part of the program. Husband took Youngest for ice cream. I arrived at the church where we were playing and my students, a good number of them up past their bedtime at this point, were sitting in their designated seats, listening to the concert. Everybody behaving like angels, as far as I could see. Questioning looks. "She's okay," I told them. "She's going to be okay." We got up and played and I had moved far beyond nervous to shaken and dazed, but even so I could tell how well everything went. 

I am so thankful for all these people—family, students, friends. We were there for each other. I made it there for them. And they were there for me. For Youngest. For each other.

There is this thankfulness, too: I do not understand how Calm can be there in the middle of Fear and Worry, but it was—the whole time. I felt it there the same way I have felt it each time the world threatens to unravel, like the skin that holds my body together when everything beneath it feels shattered. Like that place deep within—at the center, maybe, of my heart—that remains solid and still when everything else is whirling.

And finally there is this, the deepest thankfulness: The day of this concert, there wasn’t room for much more. The day was tightly-scheduled, and there wasn’t room for more than just getting to the concert and playing it, everybody doing their best. I knew it would be great, and enough. And I almost always have a plan like that. The thing is, even when I think it’s a big, grand, wide-open plan that stretches me it ends up being a tight little thing. So when a Hand reaches down and breaks the whole thing wide open, I am shaken, and thankful. Because for a moment I see it all—larger, wider, and more beautiful than I thought it could be. Or than I would have allowed.

Release.

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What I've Been Up To

(Besides taking pictures)

Teaching:

I find teaching a difficult thing to write about, but I daily feel my brain churning away at the mystery of it all. I start to feel a little lost when I take too long a break from it, and I feel consumed by it by the middle of each semester. I dream of having a secretary to handle the details—scheduling, snacks, fundraising. But the actual teaching part—being part of and witness to so many lives, so many struggles, so much growth—I am all at once thankful and stretched and puzzled and energized and drained. The Violin Project, especially, is intense—7 kids and several wonderful volunteers and I—we have spent many hours together. The time and work are turning into something special. (Much of our year together is in pictures on our Facebook page.)

Last week my students performed with our community string orchestra. Everybody worked hard, prepared well, played beautifully. 

Non-blog writing:

A couple of projects that have needed more than I’ve been able to give. It was good to give them more of my time, even though they are not yet finished. The bit of momentum behind them is encouraging.

On the blog:

There are a number of new titles on my Music Resources: Picture Books, Etc. page. There are so many good books out there. Let me know what I've missed!

Oh—and making stuff:

These are slow-moving projects but I refuse to give them up completely. At the very least they are good for the soul.

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Wordless 2014, Day 24

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Thankful, 11/15/13: Just Right

Each day, for The Violin Project, I carry eight small violins to and from the primary school where we meet. Eight small violins, plus my own, plus—twice a week—either Youngest’s or Middle’s violin. Along with my purse, my teaching bag and my laptop, this is exactly the limit to what I can carry from the car into the school in one trip. It’s maybe a little crazy-looking, but it works.

I admit that I worried I would not have enough students to do this, or enough donations, and I never did recruit volunteers the way I intended to. Turns out, the numbers, size, pacing, and the people all turned out to be what they needed to be in order to get this project off the ground. That is such a comfort, and such an encouragement. And it’s just one example of what I’ve started to see around me over the years.

There is strength in this, I think, to trust the effort, the work, the journey. Strength to trust that what is supposed to happen will happen. Strength to keep showing up and pour into it all I’m able. Strength to maybe even relax a little and enjoy it. 

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Long-Awaited

Husband and Middle took a bunch of pictures on The Violin Project's first day with violins. I love the moments they captured. My favorites? My first answer is "all of them," but I especially love these, by Middle. (If you want to see more pictures, you can find them here.)

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8

Eight violins ready to meet their students. Don't they look magical?

Today is Day 38 of The Violin Project at Kirksville Primary School, and the first day the students will hold real violins. To say everybody is excited would be a huge understatement. They've been working hard learning to hold "box" violins and dowel-rod bows, learning rhythms, singing, marching, and yes, we have even drilled "standing still" and "not talking." They seem to especially love playing "Fix the Teacher's Bow Hold."

I've been teaching for a number of years, but the fact that children learn things always, always feels like a miracle to me. Not because I don't believe they are capable of amazing things, but because being witness to amazing things unfolding in front of you is no small thing.

Best kind of magic there is, I think. It is not an easy job. But I love that I get to do this.

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Medley: 9/29/13

 

(1)

From What Charlie Heard: the Story of the American Composer Charles Ives, by Mordicai Gerstein, Frances Foster Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002:

 

Charlie grew older and became ill. He had to stop writing music. He and Harmony lived in the country. He had hundreds of pieces of music that had never been performed, all on paper, all silent. Charlie continued to send his music out into the world. But few people had anything encouraging to say.

 

“If only they would open their ears,” he said to Harmony, “they might open their hearts.”

 

 

(2)

Watching the face of one of The Violin Project students while I read this book to them Friday afternoon: I wish I could share with you the concern and intensity with which he listened.

 

 

(3)

An artist, El Anatsui, his shimmering work made from tossed-out bottle caps, and how those who assemble and install his work play a part in his art: (www.npr.org)

 

“’Every one of us has an artist in us,’ he says. ‘Really, some may be asleep and some are fully awake, you know. So I think I have a kind of commitment to waking up some people in whom it is asleep. Teaching—my work is still teaching.’”

 

 

 

(4)

“Season of Rain,” Josh Garrels

 

 

(5)

It rained this weekend. We were glad.

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