Category Archives: classical music

The Man In The Room.

classical music, contemplative essays, nostalgia, , , , , , , ,

I am a woman. Always have been; had no choice in the matter. My fetus did not grow external gonads.

At birth, how was I to know that I would never really be alone? No; wherever I would be, go, or do, there would always be a man in the room.

******

The first man in the room was late.

He was sitting at a bar, drinking, on a Friday night – shirking the very responsibility for which any woman in his position, at least in those days, would have immediately jumped to respond. He was an obstetrician. He was my mother’s doctor. And, he was definitely On Call.

When the phone reached him, he likely chuckled with the bartender about cervical dilation and other, baser aspects of the female anatomy over which he claimed domain. And, he probably ordered another beer. After all, who was this infant to proclaim any birth rite at prime time on a Friday night in April? It was pouring rain. Time out.

Back in labor and delivery, my mother was practicing female obedience. No woman, in the history of the world, did this better. I was crowning, and the nurses, frantic to enact their version of submission, pecked about, insisting that the doctor would be there “any minute”. To my mother, the directive was unanimous:  “Just  hold ON!”

So, my mother obeyed the nurses, who were obeying the doctor, who was calling for shots by now in the bar. And, she held a birthing baby in her vagina until it felt certain her entire body would explode. The man was not yet present in the room but, at that interminable moment, he was everywhere. He was squeezing my mother’s abdomen, suffocating me, and holding lit matches to every nurse in the wing. What a masterful grasp wielded that drunken sailor on such a wet and inconvenient night.

When he finally appeared, as doctor, the gurney carrying my mother and me was propelled so fast down the hallway toward delivery that it nearly toppled and, at about 8:45 pm (well after the downbeat), the next baby girl was finally permitted entry into the world. Through the caul that draped my soaking face, I screamed bloody, spitting murder at the man in the room.

The second man in the room was just returning from work.

He was my father.

To hear him tell it, I would be the embodiment of his every gift…a “born” artist and musician, a singer like him, his – for all practical purposes – first-born child. He would hold me with tender arms and soft hands, feed me, sing to me. I would love him with my whole heart. He would go to work, come home, bring the money with him, count it on the kitchen table, and share with me a teaspoon of his hot tea with milk and sugar.

On his day off, he would come and go as he pleased. And, he would take me with him. I would sit in the car, singing to myself, while he did what he had to do inside the store or the other man’s house. He would eat his supper after dark, make his lunch, go to bed, and get up before everybody else in the house was even awake to walk to work. He owned his own barber shop, made his own hours and, when his day was over, he was done.

Mom’s day was never done. She’d stay up til after midnight, finishing the sewing that needed to be ready by the next day’s pick up, and get up before we would in the morning to prepare our breakfast, shrieking us awake so that we’d be ready for school before she was nearly late for work.

On the weekends, not otherwise pulling a shift at the machine shop, she’d run the sweeper and dust around us as we tried to practice our piano lesson or read. On Sunday, she’d get us ready for morning worship at the Gospel Hall and we’d all go, to spend most of the day there listening to: men. Mom finally took her nap, on Sunday afternoon, while Dad would spend the afternoon chewing on a toothpick seated on a park bench watching us pet the small animals at the zoo.

The third man in the room reached puberty when I was almost a toddler. He was my elder brother.

A very ripe 11 at my birth, he had been the only child for those first ten precocious years, surrounded by adoring adults substituting for the father who was not yet there. I was an intrusion, a stray dog, a reluctant pet, an object of derision. I was in the spot reserved for him, and this was not to be.

My brother would manifest as the man in the room for the rest of my life in that house. He would ride his bike wherever he pleased, growing to be an active teen with the capacity to socially organize and initiate all manner of events in the basement, where he held court. I grew, too, but the playpen that corralled me was the only point of view from which I could define the world. He was, when not placed in my exclusive care, always outside of the box – and, ever-present, in the room.

If there were rules, they never applied to him; if there was law, he learned to rule it. When I came of age, he dictated to my parents just what the outside world was all about and, in spite of my creative gifts clearly matching or surpassing his, my choices were decreed: for the daughter, there would be no further education. Doctorate degrees were there for the men to take; girls should get a job, learn to cook, and prepare for the husband God had in mind.

God, on the other hand, frightfully busy making more men and the women intended to serve them, tried to present the man for me on more than one occasion. In the first offering, there were other men with power in their laps who determined that the man God had clearly chosen for me should stay away. Because they were in a position to claim their dictates as from God directly, the fact that they weren’t listening to what I was hearing seemed to have no bearing on the outcome God intended. I just chalked it up to the men themselves, and peered at them, from across the room.

From that point forward, the man in the room took many forms. He was a boss, or a hired hand, or a curious customer, or a band mate. And, I was ready to pass his test. When I graduated to the ranks of professional, Union card carrying musician, he became the Maestro – an object of my adoration. If I couldn’t please God anymore, then perhaps I could revere the baton in his hand.

******

The man is still there. He still waits to tell me when to speak, when to act, and when to acquiesce. He decides my value. He directs my course. He expects me to be there when he needs me, and to disappear when the time is right. He may not have any idea how much power he holds because, to him, he is just in his world – the world he inherited from his mother’s womb.

He’d best preserve that power for as long as he remains strong; a world without a woman in it would change his forever.
.
.
.
.

.

.

© Ruth Ann Scanzillo

2013  all rights reserved. Thank you, sir.

littlebarefeetblog.com

The Voice.

classical music, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The rehearsal was packed into the small college dance studio, like overflow Amish in a bus station. Most of us knew each other, from our regular gig with the Erie Chamber Orchestra. But, this was a benefit event, many of our roster were on vacation, and a notable smattering of stranger faces mixed up our passenger list for this honkytonk. No big deal, though – familiar, or first timers, it was the voice provided by their instruments that mattered most; this was an opera gala concert, and we were about to put the whole show together in just two and a half hours.

Our soloists were creme. Brent, the tenor in charge, was at the helm for this one, ebullient and full of all the positivity that befitted somebody who just plain loved to sing. His wife Lisa, the versatile soprano, capable of both rich lyricism and full on drama; their mutual friend, James, the striking and powerful baritone from New York; and, as guest, a bright, lyric tenor named Joe Dan from nearby SUNY Fredonia to round out their power quartet.

We’d covered the two staple overtures, Barber of Seville and La Forza del Destino, and lay down several Verdi duets. The program almost complete, only the Faust finale, and one more Verdi aria, remained: “Pace, pace,mio dio” , Melodia Eleonora, from La Forza.

Our soprano was intently focused. She’d applied her essential Frankincense oil to the nape of her skull. She’d moved north after several years in Fort Lauderdale. She’d hailed from Yale. Both her body, and her voice, were peaking. She was Leonora, primed.

The strings headed into the opening motif, soundly setting the stage for her grande, penultimate entrance.

Now, orchestral musicians of this caliber are a surprisingly diverse lot. Most gig regularly, teaching as professors on their instruments in regional colleges and universities; still others hold down professional roles in completely unrelated disciplines, some of them attorneys or doctors. A few push through the day as public educators; among the females are mothers, home schooling multiple children. And, one or two are there because they love jazz more, and need the bread.

Harry, the bassist, was a jazzer. As such, he approached the rehearsal scenario with the laid back ease of one who knew the music skeletally, saw its structure, heard all its harmonies inside his cranium, and could take any tune from the head and walk something out.

But, opera singers. These people were serious. They carried their instruments at the base of their throats, 24/7, through suffocating summer humidity, pollens, grasses, post nasal drip…..and, wrapped themselves in exotic fiber to survive the sub-zero tundra. Every sound they made, from chuckle to guffaw, was a servant to proper phonation and the horizontal musculature of the abdomen. They breathed their music, lived their art, and arrived ready.

The first sixteen introductory measures of the La Forza aria had reached their destination. Lisa set her breath, shaped her pharynx for the vowel, heard her opening pitch, and let it soar:

“P-a-a-a-a-ce…..”

Leonora’s plea for peace. Verdi, ever mindful of the text, had set this utterance apart, framing it with silent fermata for full, contemplative effect.

Leonora, haplessly in love with a man she cannot have, begging God for death.

Now, some say the whole universe is alive, breathing in some heaving magnificence. Still others are sure that spirits visit our every move. I can’t know. I only say this: weird things happen that are so far removed from the realm of coincidence the most logical mind must admit astonishment. What happened next was just one of those quintessential moments.

Because, just as our soprano had released that opening “Pace”, something happened to Harry. None of us knew quite how he’d been chosen to represent the mysteries of the cosmos in what was about to unfold. He reached for his pencil, to mark the music as a reminder to wait on the fermata, and unwittingly activated his cell phone.

In less than a full four seconds of the silence of that lone fermata, from the deepest part of the most remote black hole in that galaxy a far cry, indeed, from the voice of Jehovah in the wilderness – or the wrath of God admonishing the Children of Disobedience – came a response.  This was the voice of Harry’s phone, and it was female:

“I’m sorry?”

“I didn’t get that…?”

.

Now, there’s a certain protocol in orchestras. One doesn’t speak while the music is playing. Waiting for a pause in the rehearsal is considered polite and appropriate.

Our faces exploded.

.

.

.

.

© Ruth Ann Scanzillo

8/19/15  All rights those of the author. Sharing permissible upon request of the author.

Thank you.

littlebarefeetblog.com

Brilliant.

classical music, contemplative essays, Deep Questions, Deep Thoughts, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Brilliant – n. Very bright. Glittering. Striking, distinctive. Distinguished by unusual mental keenness.

British :  very good :  excellent
.
.

My big brother was the genius.

So said all the definitive tests, administered on or about 1959.

He scored in the range that set him apart, statistically speaking, from the bottom 99.8 %, in mathematical conceptualizing, computation, and application; language identification and application; spacial relations; and, whatever else deemed worthy of exaltation by our society at the time. I can’t remember. I wasn’t there. I was teething.

Somebody told him his exact test score, in fact, a teacher at the high school. In front of everybody else in the class, it was all kinds of drama. “Scanzillo!  With an IQ of blahblah, you should be ……”

And, eventually, he did.

Do.

What was expected, of an IQ.

Of blahblah.

It was quite the affair.

He raised hamsters in the basement, and sold them, and set up a hand made sign out front to advertize them, rigging an alarm with string and a buzzer to prevent the sign from being stolen. Playing piano and trombone, he led a big band which he’d organized that rehearsed in the basement, next to the hamsters. Then, he went to college, for pre-med, and raised guinea pigs by the dozens, dissecting them in a make shift lab ( in the basement ) using mum’s baking pans and canning jars. He drove all the way to Seattle and took to the hills, selling dictionaries door to door to pay for college. After college, he taught high school chemistry, and then worked in a paper mill developing paper coatings out of dyes and other chemicals. He taught himself how to build whole houses, constructing every home he and his wife ever shared. Then, he went to Cleveland, and finished his PhD in chemistry, and became the local diagnostic lab director. With his second wife and children, he moved all across the country, directing labs, serving in court as expert witness, building and selling homes, and becoming a nationally recognized consultant. He led a highly regarded life.

Last week, he retired.

I inherited the basement. By default, it became my bedroom/in house apartment, after mum’s Uncle Ewart, for whom the space had been filled and decorated, chose to reject it on the basis of rising damp. Cluttered with acquired objects, my clothing, drawings and, mostly, my own personal chaos, after graduating from college myself I would sleep down there, all day, for weeks, immobilized by anonymity and a sense of pre-destined defeat.

In America, we are really good at celebrating ambition. We reward acquisition and accomplishment. We revere, and fear, those who have established power to limit our options.

And, we are also hasty to ascribe qualitative labels to those who excel, according to their predicted likelihood. We call them “brilliant”. And, the results of their efforts we call “phenomenal”, as if we are continually surprised that a human can do anything at all.

Except that there are seven billion of us, strong. Swarming. Churning. Heaving, and careening around the planet. And, these brilliant phenomenals hover over our heads, like pressure systems teasing the barometer, testing the mettle of all humanity, setting the bar and then swiping it away just as we extend our reach.

Is it any wonder, then, that popular culture is born. And, then marketed. And promoted. And, celebrated.

A weird sort of backlash, to appease the masses? A grande comfort zone for the mediocre?

Whole tribes, doing what is popular. Until a majority of humans in America no longer care about producing anything without duplication, let alone effort. An entire people, out of touch with their own capacity for birthing beauty or truth.

This past week, I had a life changing experience. I learned to meditate. Actually, the sectarian brethren had  exposed me to such practice from shortly after birth, but never as focused or directed activity. From childhood, I’d only known that meditation was reserved for thoughts of Christ carrying his cross and then hanging from it.

But, this meditation put me in touch with all that I saw within me – thoughts, feelings, attitudes, perceptions….propensities.

And, this led to the inevitable confrontation. With self.

Who was I, really, and of what was I made? What was the full range of my capacities, and how did I regard my potential role in the scheme of life?

And, I was not alone. Seated around me were several, mostly women, from all parts of north America and beyond. And, among us, we shared one thing: a love for music.

Some of us were already regarded by others as “accomplished musicians.” Others of us were awaiting such recognition, or not seeking any. But, we all shared this: we were all about to become wholly ignited by our own, natural illumination.

By the time we closed our week together, most of us were born anew. There was no altar call, no postlude, no public declaration of intent. Our birth took place in the most profound silence, because the shells holding us in were so thin and unimportant that they merely fell away as we emerged.

The light, however, was all encompassing. No angels; no demons. No hamsters, or dictionaries. No highest scores, or notions of superiority. Just humans, with hearts, baring and then carrying souls, and presenting spirits ready to burst forth with singular and magnificent brilliance.

.

.

.

*This piece dedicated to Madeline Bruser, “The Art of Practicing”, and inspired by our Mary Duncan.

© Ruth Ann Scanzillo   8/2/15   All rights reserved.  Sharing permitted, upon request, and with kind and appropriate reference to the author. Thank you.

littlebarefeetblog.com