“Here in the orchestra world, in order to keep things “fair,” you must perform a feat that you’ll never actually have to do on the job, and you must do it better than everyone else. You must be a fierce, cold-hearted, highly-trained soldier—impervious to the wildly fluctuating vibes of everyone around you—in order to win a job where you are surrounded and supported by other musicians as you perform brave technical feats; and where you MUST be completely aware and responsive to the tiniest changes going on in your colleagues all over the stage, because otherwise, the piece will completely fall apart. As funny as it is when it happens, there aint nothin’ sexy about a conductor having to stop mid-concert to shout out a bar number.”
“For decades, we have been telling ourselves that we need to be perfect if we want to satisfy our audiences. But AUDIENCES DON’T WANT PERFECTION. They want to see themselves reflected on stage. They want humanity.”
“We’re all classically trained musicians who have wandered into various other creative paths- and at one point, Jenn asks Amy if her bluegrass sheet music is Urtext. HAHAHAHA!! “What would that even look like??” someone says- “some scrawlings on the sole of a shoe?!? BAHAHAHAHA!! We all cackle even louder, as I imagine what a whole book of urtext bluegrass music would look like- a dirty Kleenex, a chunk of wood with nails sticking out, a stinky cast, all scrawled with a tune and spiral-bound.”
“The clarinetist blows some air through their instrument and Scott and I look at each other, smirking, wondering if it’s part of the music or just a clearing of spit- you never really know with contemporary music. But then later in the concert, we hear air blown very purposefully through the french horn, repeatedly in waves of three- starting loud and getting soft, like a mother SHH Shhh shhhhhshing a baby; or as a friend said after the show, a whale exhaling water out of its blowhole, giving us the feeling that we’re in the ocean.”
“The problem is that the train has already started to slow down as it comes in, so you have a very short period of time over which you can yell and be pretty sure that guy standing by the trash can is just going to think he’s hearing a ghost.”
“The 16-legged muscular cat contraption waits on the deck poised, listening for the doorknob to turn before thudding towards me at lightening speed- throwing themselves at me with all their weight, rocking me like a bus in an angry mob. I use my right leg to ‘redirect their energy’ across the deck. I walk down the steps bare-legged to escape for a moment under the guise of scoping out the garden; and the bigger grey one, who looks like Rocky Balboa in the last round of a fight, follows me around munching on my ankles like some sortof shitty appetizer to the food he clearly thinks I’m about to give him.”
“At one point I’m sitting on my bed fresh out of a hot shower, window wide open and heat on full blast, trying to simultaneously warm up and cool down from fever flashes. I’m so exhausted from pain I’m just staring at the wall. [My Airbnb host] comes in, ignores the fact I look like I’m about to drop dead, and asks me to squeegee her glass shower stall and then dry it with a towel. So here I am, appendix about to burst and kill me, on my hands and knees drying out her f—ing shower so it doesn’t get water spots. Why? Because heaven forbid I disappoint this weird German lady. After I finish, I calmly call an Uber to escort me to Emergency.”
“Harry and I started going to pet stores just so we could visit the rats. I was looking at them through Harry’s eyes now, and couldn’t believe how anybody could look at them and not squeal with delight. Those curious little faces with their glossy eyes and forests of whiskers and tiny little ears… Sometimes they would come up to the glass to say hi, but more often than not you could find them in a glorious pile under a miniature log cabin, the shape of which their bodies would maintain once removed. Rats LOVE to cuddle; a trait I share with them. At home wherever Harry was, I wanted to be near him if not fully integrated with him, our bodies molded together like play-dough. So I started affectionately calling him ‘Rat.’ And it stuck. I loved that we had something nobody else had. He wasn’t my ‘babe’ or my ‘honey;’ he was my rat, soft ‘r.’ The word took on this whole new meaning that only we understood.”
“As I’m sitting here, taking it all in, my chest burning and my eyes welling up… it strikes me, what an honour this is. To be able to give these people such a beautiful release. Music has this incredible power to allow people to take their walls down and really process their emotions. If we were playing happy upbeat music, they might have stayed in that ‘celebratory’ mode from earlier; but because we are playing slow, beautiful sad music, they feel safe to cry. They know it’s okay to be sad. That we will be up here playing until it’s all over, so they feel no pressure to do anything but reflect on their loss. They don’t need to talk to anybody; they don’t need to smile and pretend everything is okay. We are their protection when they are at their most vulnerable.”