Returning to the violin brings ‘a kind of exaltation’
I was 20 when I stopped playing the violin. For years afterward, I felt as if I’d lost a part of myself. During those years I moved several times in the Northeast and twice to the Midwest, and wherever I went, my violin came with me. Once I even took it on a car-camping trip. But I hardly ever tried to play it. I’d lost my touch. It seemed far too late to start over.
In 2003, I moved back to Connecticut. I had a husband and two little boys by then, and we signed our sons up with the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven. Whenever I brought them in for lessons, we’d pass a door on which a teacher had posted a yellow flier inviting adult beginners to join a string ensemble. The headline: “Never Too Late.”
I joined. And slowly, the music came back. I’ve been a student at NMS for some 17 years now. (Full disclosure: also a board member for three.) I’m now working on Brahms’ first sonata for violin and piano. It’s outrageously difficult for a player at my level, but I have an expert teacher. And when the music, my fingers and the tempo all align, it’s much more than satisfying; it’s a kind of exaltation. If you’ve ever played or sung great music, you’ll understand.
NMS is a combination of expertise and warmth. Its teachers studied at eminent schools, including Hartt, Yale, and the Boston and New England conservatories. But when you walk into the place (which should be possible again in September), you start to understand that it’s genuinely a neighborhood. You feel welcomed. You see little kids running around with the adorably small cases that hold their miniature instruments, and high-schoolers hurrying to orchestra rehearsals.
Adults from 20 to 80 will be taking lessons in everything from cabaret singing to accordion playing. You might even hear a poetry slam — because, although NMS was strictly a music school when it was founded in 1911, it has since added dance, theater, film, a pre-K, a summer arts program and an artsbased middle school. There are instructors for every level and for dozens of skills. You can learn hip-hop dancing or ballet, oboe or steelpan, film or theater. You can go in as a teenager looking to polish your jazz drumming or as a 70-year-old who wants to give choral singing a try.
Through NMS, I discovered that the entire state is overflowing with classical music. My violin teacher subs in the Hartford Symphony and plays regularly in the orchestras of Ridgefield, Greater Bridgeport, Waterbury and Wallingford. Southwest Connecticut alone boasts over a dozen symphony orchestras, from Middletown to Danbury to Greenwich.
There’s also Orchestra New England, whose home base is New Haven, and the summertime Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, held upstate but operated by Yale. And the myriad of middle school and high school bands and orchestras may be the most important of all, because they serve the young. Music groups teach attention and cooperation. They also tend to be social by nature — ideal places to make friends. (Parents, take note. Your children may moan about practicing, but they’ll bloom.)
The director of a college orchestra told me he thinks the plethora of established symphonies in our state is a mistake, because small symphonies can’t pay their players what they deserve. He has a point. Union members are paid about $110 for a rehearsal or concert that can last 21⁄2 hours. But why silence Connecticut’s music? Why not encourage it, by donating what we can to our favorite orchestras, bands and soloists? No one should take music for granted. For most of his life, Johannes Brahms’ father was an itinerant musician who played in the street and passed the hat around, or he took gigs in beer gardens. But if he hadn’t earned enough to keep his family alive, he might have changed his trade. He might have become a tailor or a longshoreman. And what if Johannes had followed in his footsteps? There would be no Brahms sonatas. No Hungarian Dances. No four symphonies.
So let’s stand with those long-ago Germans who tossed coins into Johannes’s father’s hat. Let’s keep the tunes playing. We need them. As Oliver Sacks wrote: “We humans are a musical species.”
I discovered that the entire state is overflowing with classical music. My violin teacher subs in the Hartford Symphony and plays regularly in the orchestras of Ridgefield, Greater Bridgeport, Waterbury and Wallingford. Southwest Connecticut alone boasts over a dozen symphony orchestras, from Middletown to Danbury to Greenwich.