Educated Mind

Education – that crucial, early intervention that saved my mother’s life – also saved mine. For my mother, education offered her a way out of being identified by poverty and parental abandonment. We both created new identities in college. For me, I needed to veer off course from her agenda for educational betterment. Hers was a trope of admirable ambition on one hand, but an obsessive self-defensive posture on the other. This goal manifested most clearly in her victory to claim the desk at the head of the class.

Stepping Stones for Mother

School provided sanctuary for my mother. Advocates too. One teacher recommended her to department store that hired pretty high school girls to model their best clothes on sale. She got to keep the outfits, and the store manager let her into the company cafeteria for a hot meal during her break. The store seamstresses who fitted the outfits for her to wear in the store intuited that my mother’s home life was chaotic. Surmising that she would need a skill to earn money, they taught her their craft. Another teacher steered her to a Methodist university that awarded her a full scholarship.

College reflected a confluence of many who steered my mother toward education as her ticket out of trauma. Her biggest champion remained steadfast until her death: the Methodist sister my mother called “Mom” and we called Nana.

As she told it, my mother flourished in her new life in the small college town. Her good grades and affable personality likely helped secure a job better than busing tables at a local restaurant in the college town. An ambitious lawyer needed a smart pretty college girl tending to reception and also to typing legal documents.

Left unsaid in my mother’s glowing narrative about her college years was a tragic miscalculation of one character. She married a professor who turned out to be a playboy just like her father. The marriage quickly ended in divorce.

Graduation with honors and glowing references from former employers secured my mother a high school teaching position at a metro school district Michigan, where she made colleagues with other bright young teachers. Her sights were set on graduate school, which was not a typical career path of women during the 1950s. She attended graduate school out in the southwest and began doctoral studies, poised for a career in educational administration. My mother was driven to accomplish great things.

Mother’s alma mater and its charming college town beckoned her return for frequent visits as an adopted home base. She remained close to the attorney who had given her a job in his law office, and his wife had become a dear friend. During a visit to them, she met my father. The opportunity for a second chance at love and a family seemed a wiser path to follow than the PhD. With her signature agenda of banishing her painful past to the margins of her existence, she seems to have excised the first marriage out of her narrative.

A city girl her entire life, she found herself in a small midwest farming town, wife to a young attorney and judge. She carried over her teaching portfolio to secure a job teaching at a rural high school. She quit within a few years to give birth to twins (Lee and Tressie), then went on teaching hiatus for nearly twenty years to raise four children.

The seeming obstacles of raising a family in a rural midwestern county became opportunities, the way my mother framed it. She found ways to nurture her educator’s heart during by teaching Sunday School and presenting lectures at ladies’ luncheons. To her three daughters, she taught them everything she knew of the domestic arts.

Passing it On

There seemed no end to the attention my mother lavished onto her four children’s educations. The persistence with which she encouraged us toward higher education reflected an authentic, lived experience of its rewards. Mother, as master teacher, endeavored to provide her children what she herself lacked as a child: A proud parent.

Toys and books in our house required a pedagogical function; there were no Barbie dolls or idle games such as Candy Land or Cooties. College in our family was a normative, compulsory rite of passage into adulthood. I grew up expecting to attend a liberal arts college and then graduate school, likely law. I harbored no such ambitions. My parents devoted themselves to providing their children a wealth of material and educational resources.

My parents  enrolled all four of their children in piano lessons, with seven years’ compulsory study (I took ten). We sang in choirs for church and school, and we played in the school bands with supplemental lessons on our instruments. Mom routinely spent her grocery money on record albums, and she bought my first three horns with money saved here and there. I always wondered if she cultivated the arts as evidence of our family’s higher social status, but it was unwise to challenge her values so I kept quiet.

Dave’s upbringing fit my parents’ ethos of educational betterment. His final two years of high school, he attended Interlochen Arts Academy. A year ahead of me in college, Dave worked gigs and took a job as a bank teller to wait for me to finish college. His industriousness pleased my father tremendously, although Dave was absolutely miserable at the bank.

My mother glamorized our future as musicians. She envisioned our going on to earn graduate diplomas that would grant us entry into an exclusive class of people and job opportunities. She imagined our performing in top-ranked orchestras and at grand venues. She saw us joining the ranks of celebrated university professors, raking in intellectual accolades with numerous publications. How proud she would be to have children of such fine accomplishments!

Inwardly, I shriveled in dread of my certain failure to meet such high expectations. I dared not disappoint her, ever mindful of her reminders that she had sacrificed so much to provide for her children. Soon after our wedding, Dave and I embarked on masters degree programs in music.

Countless Hours

Our first venture into graduate studies, Dave pursued percussion performance studies, and I pursued music education in combination with horn studies. My mother crowed proudly, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!” She had to have been referring to my focus on pedagogy, for she herself was tone deaf.

David’s graduate experience rewarded the diligent work ethic he’d honed for years, even before his  Interlochen years. He received well-deserved recognition for his contributions to several top ensembles. I felt proud of him, yet I also sensed a deep layer of mourning for his father. With his father no longer alive to celebrate his accomplishments, his mother visited often to the work of both parents to support him. She attended Dave’s recitals and other important performances, cheering him on.

Weekends, we often trekked to Dave’s hometown and stayed with Kathi and Joe, his sister and brother-in-law. They welcomed us into their home to flop, and we were close by to Dave’s mom. Hanging out with his family felt entirely different from a weekend with my family. Our hometowns only an hour away, we usually stopped in to my childhood home to visit my parents.

I couldn’t then articulate how or why noisy sounds burbling up when interacting with my family. My senses felt ever-heightened around them, and I began noticing moments of blankness that differed from my prior alcoholic blackouts. I assumed my feelings of difference stemmed from adapting to married life or life without booze or pot or pills. At my family’s home, I made sure to get a walk in the woods. Familiar sounds there centered me as I let myself hum and breathe freely with the wind and trees.

Sobriety took priority over my graduate studies, or else I would lose everything. Getting sober was physically painful for the extensive medical care I needed for dental and physical health. I also needed daily AA meetings. Whereas Dave and our graduate student peers could devote their time to practicing, studying, and networking, mine was spent on developing functional skills to navigate life without substances.

My graduating horn recital, poorly attended and poorly performed, nevertheless gave my mother cause to present a buffet reception afterward. She consoled herself with the reassurance that I had at least married well. When my degree program ended a semester earlier than Dave’s did, I secured a job for two months as a substitute music teacher at an elementary school. Whatever folly I might have entertained of being fully recovered dissolved in a major mistake my first day: I overslept two hours.

I diligently applied myself to meeting the responsibilities of teaching elementary music classes. I loved the children, and I felt proud of having found gainful employment. Like my mother, I felt called to teach. Yet I knew a career in elementary music pedagogy wasn’t a fit for me. The seeds of my future in education had been planted elsewhere.

Hearing Music History

No one, including me, would have forecast my path as going toward music history, given my terrible grades in those subjects. Even to this day, linear time can elude me in recalling the exact day, date, or year of things. My sense is that my brain, in those moments, is off in some non-linear calculation of something else, perhaps busily creating some idea or music or verbiage that simply doesn’t need to track time.

It really helped that Dave and I often enrolled in the same classes.  We drilled each other for assignments, often hauling our study notes with us during visits to Kathi and Joe’s house. At times I bet they wondered whether the two of us were truly studying the same thing, given our different approaches to the subject.

Dave: “OK, my turn to ask a question: Beethoven’s 7th Symphony was –“

Sadie (interrupting): “– it was a big horn call feature! The first theme comes in like gangbusters after a wimpy introduction, and then has the AM-ster-dam rhythm that goes like this (sings it loudly) with first horn on a high B. And then the second theme (hums it softly) is totally forgettable; and it may have represented a time when Beethoven…”

Dave (interrupting): “Hold up, that’s not what I was gonna ask.”

Sadie: “Oops, sorry, go ahead”

Dave:  When was it written, and from what compositional period in his life?

Sadie: “Hmm. Maybe 1700?  Or 1750? Wait, is that the Romantic era or the Renaissance?”

Dave: Woah you are way off. And I meant which of his three compositional periods

Sadie:  “Uhhh, 1783, August?”

Dave: “You’re just making up something now.”

Sadie: “Well hell if I know, stupid numbers. And who said he had three compositional periods, Beethoven or some guys who got together later on and said so?”

Dave: “Let’s not go onto a tangent. Let’s go on to something else. This one we’ve had on every music history test. What are the accepted dates of the Baroque Era?”

Sadie: ” … I forget again…why can’t I remember numbers…”

Kathi (calling out from the living room to us): “1600-1750!”

Despite my memory deficit for music history dates, I found my musicology professors enchanting. Richard Crawford and Glenn Watkins, two teachers whose storytelling were of of a calibre far different than my mother’s. Transfixed, I followed their lectures and marveled at how they unpacked layers of context within the sounds of countless musical works. Skillfully, they explained coalescing components of music, verifying their sonic properties as unique, timeless, and vital to human experience.

Holy smokes, but I found in their descriptions much to describe the world of music residing inside my head! I admired (and envied) their power to tell stories about music in this way. Scarcely could I have imagined, as a mediocre graduate student then, that I would one day emulate their pedagogies.

What these two professors taught – and how they taught it – revealed a galaxy of links between my inner and outer music worlds that I would one day develop with my own intellect. I knew in my musical soul that there were stories weaving in, through, and behind the sounds. To hear my truth reinforced by respected teachers’ examples was incredibly validating.

If only subconsciously, my route of departure from my mother’s narrative had begun.

20th Century Music History Course

Dr. Watkins delivered captivating class sessions that seemed to unlock the mystery of a tune’s genesis. He used only minimal notes to present lectures on twentieth-century concert music, situating each work within a particular story of how it came to be. I could scarcely keep up with all the new information. Both textbook and lecture introduced repertoire I had never heard before. My first exam, a solid “D,” revealed the chasm between the desire and the pragmatic ability to learn.

Alcohol and drugs had damaged considerably my cognitive skills considerably. My reading comprehension level was at first so low that I could focus only fifteen minutes at a time. This was an unfortunate condition to discover at the start of graduate studies. Up in my study carrel in the music library, I would read a page of text several times to grasp the words but their meaning. Then I would need a break; a cigarette or a walk around the library. Folks at A.A. assured me things would improve, one day at a time, so long as I stayed clean.

The repertoire Dr. Watkins assigned for each chapter was daunting for its utter unfamiliarity.  There were no streaming services then for audio recordings. Students studied the repertoire by going to the listening lab in the music building. There, we were issued headphones and cassette recordings that Dr. Watkins prepared to go along with the textbook. Time crawled when the music sounded, in Arnold Schoenberg’s words, “difficult and disagreeable.”

I recall well one particularly challenging week of these listening memorization sessions. Numbers for dates in the textbook danced around the pages as though taunting me to pin them down. I could read text for about half an hour by then, but I knew I had only a surface-level understanding of what I had read. The sonic palettes of the music for this particular unit of study seemed absolutely horrid for its atonal jumble of dissonant ugliness. I did not want to hear this in my outer world

Then, in the midst of endless examples of discordant tunes, something profoundly beautiful wafted through my headphones: Trois Poemes de Stephane Mallarme by Maurice Ravel.  My book was open to a description of the tune but not the text of the particular movement, “Petite futile,” as the cassette tape rolled on its spindles. Gads, I moaned aloud, the opening instrumental measures sounded like all the other disjunct harmonies I’d been hearing for weeks in this class.

I leaned over and rested my head on the table and started to cry over how stupid I felt. Suddenly the introduction shifted, and an astonishingly sonorous opulence caught my breath. The strings shifted smoothly into a lush chord that reminded me of Gershwin. Wafting over the harmony, a soprano voice entered with a beckoning call, “Princess,” in an intimacy that unsettled me.

The song playfully addressed a princess – the meaning of my name. I sunk into Ravel’s gentle, poignant blend of text and harmony, letting in its tenderness to touch my soul.  I held my breath when the music shifted again to just the piano and voice at the phrase “nommez-nous” (“name us”) and my heart opened up an aching sadness.

With a final call, “Princess, name for us a shepherd of your smiles,” the music went alongside and consoled my brokenness. Here again, like the Grieg concerto passage that had once stopped me in my tracks, another music sounded an intimate interiority that found a place within me long buried.

How desperately lost I felt in school. A princess disinherited of her riches, I felt stupid for my loss of reading comprehension, my loss of nerve to play out with confidence, my loss of pride. This little song had peeked into the emotional trappings of my sonic inner world and invited itself in. To my inner landscape I added this lovely song as sustenance to coax back my musical sense of self toward another step in recovery.

Link to Supplemental Listening Anecdote, “Learning Music”

Teaching Music Appreciation Course

Professor Richard Crawford, also a great storyteller, presented another way to look at music history. He taught a graduate pedagogy course on teaching general music listening (music appreciation) to college undergraduate. He encouraged his students to apply analysis to craft engaging pedagogy about a tune. The class appealed to my teacher’s heart as well as my secret desire to teach college.

Dave and I enrolled in the class together, and our first assignment was to teach the form of a simple song. I don’t recall my selection, but Dave’s caused quite a sensation: “The Hunting Song” by satirist Tom Lehrer. Several classmates clucked disapprovingly at the lowbrow tune. Dr. Crawford loved it.  After composing himself from a laughing fit, he heartily defended Dave’s choice and praised him for creative thinking, advising us all to select engaging repertoire over orthodoxy.

The toughest – but also the best – assignments in Dr. Crawford’s class were the Listening Journals: Single-page handwritten entries of musical repertoire we encountered in our daily lives. The music could be anything we’d heard at a concert, on the radio, even auditing albums in the listening room at Liberty Records in downtown. In the margins of our journals, Dr. Crawford commented with corrections of information and ideas for deeper consideration. These thoughts revealed the caring attentions of a teacher who loved music deeply. He, too, relished the journey offered in traversing musical sounds, and he wanted to show his students to this journey.

I wanted to be like my music history teachers as much as I wanted to be a hornist. It didn’t occur to me that I could pursue either, or both. I felt too stupid and incompetent at the time. How dare I even dream of grasping the kind of understanding about music’s stories that my teachers possessed?

As a hornist, I assumed women weren’t allowed in top performing or teaching jobs. What few I knew about were anomalies, such as Gail Williams, co-principal hornist of the Chicago Symphony. During my graduate studies in Michigan, I attended a recital she performed at the university.  I was both amazed at her technical facility, and the fact that a woman hornist had attained a top orchestral job. A woman music historian or theorist seemed even rarer.

Now that I am a tenured university professor, I teach both music history and horn. I make sure that my students see me as a performing musician as well as a scholar. I assign my own students the ubiquitous Listening Journal to reinforce learning the elements of musical style within specific eras and genres, just as Dr. Crawford did for his students. Journaling provides low stakes writing exercises, and it also offers a contingency plan for other troubled students.

Journaling about music listening encouraged my inner musical landscape to expand. I wrote down pathways of sound and thought that became the patterns for later untangling me from the bounds of my mother’s stories. Perhaps, I reasoned, one of my students need to find similar pathway for themselves.

Equipped with the wit and wisdom of my music history professors, I scribbled various facts and ideas into the margins of my horn music. A new connectedness was forming between my inner and outer worlds through these little notes. I wanted to explore more deeply the stories about music’s being. It seemed that if I could grasp these stories, then I could somehow make sense of my own being.

EXTRA: For a short supplemental anecdote with musical excerpts related to this chapter, click this link: Learning Music