My underarms were moist, the back of my neck clammy. The shower I took in my sister’s dorm was for naught, failing to prevent the pervasive body odor that betrayed me. It was an early March morning in Bloomington, the humidity transforming my shoulder-length hair into a mop of brown frizz, the surface of my face red-lumped and shining like a vinyl rain slicker. I meandered across the quad. The stacked heels of my oxfords sank into patches of Kelly-green grass emerging through the soggy ground. My right hand held the handle of my Jaeger case, its tan canvas cover protecting the faux reptile exterior. My instrument and two bows (the always necessary backup for the almost never catastrophe) rested in the crushed velvet interior. I carried my music folder in my left hand. It was less than a ten-minute walk to the music school.

I arrived at my destination in plenty of time. In plenty of time to claim my assigned practice room. In plenty of time to warm up with four octave A major, D minor, B flat minor, and F# major arpeggios. All from memory, no peeking at the scale studies book inside my folder. My bow scratched a bit, the notes in fifth position were slightly flat. In plenty of time to start the first movement of Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3, and the two movements of Bach Sonata No. 1. Mostly from memory, a furtive glance to the Bach in a futile effort to slow my pulse. In plenty of time to wait.

I heard a rapping on the door. I peered out the 12” square window to see a graduate student waiting, my escort to the audition chamber. After the short walk down the hall, I entered and scanned the room. There he was, Mr. Sebastian, the dark-haired former professor from the University of Evansville, seated at a long table, music lying in front of him. Well-known to me as a colleague of my private instructor, Mr. Schultz, the portly pipe-smoking Oberlin alum, the Central High School music director, and the celebrated conductor of the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation (EVSC) All-City Orchestra. And, as the new teacher of my William Henry Harrison High School classmate, goggle-eyed Clara with the blond pixie cut. (First chair in All-City and straight-A student as well, she left Shultz’s studio during our high school years to study with Sebastian. Clara wasn’t so much of a friend as she was someone to be emulated. After all, IU’s music school accepted her last year.) Looking past the unfamiliar man seated next to him, probably an assistant professor, I locked eyes with Sebastian. He greeted me as “Miss [last name]” with a few words of no import. I took a breath. I was finally here, audition day was finally here, and in that moment “here” was the last place I wanted to be. Sebastian nodded. I picked up my violin and placed my bow on the E string.

********

The envelope with red logo in the return address arrived in the mail. Its thinness relieved me of examining its contents. Three and a half hours of daily practice, selection to Evansville Youth Symphony, All-City Orchestra, Indiana All-State Orchestra, and University of Evansville Orchestra, placing in state solo competitions, and the faith of Mr. Schultz transforming me from a middling elementary orchestra student to an accomplished teen musician were not enough. Not enough to admit me to IU’s music school. Not enough to achieve my heart’s desire. I was not enough.

My audition at Indiana University had played out like a hackneyed scene from a high school musical. The screenwriter might have written something like this: “Gawky teen violinist from small town, full of hope and ambition, starts off strong in high-stakes audition at top 20 music school. First few measures of the Bach fugue are lovely, in tempo, in tune, then her bravura disintegrates. She fails to sound five double stops. Bounces some slurs, rather than gliding the notes. The key change from G major to D major in the Mozart Concerto emerges as though she hadn’t studied it for the past seven months. She completes the final measure and yanks the violin from her shoulder as if it were a flaming log, then shoves her instrument and bow into the case. Garbling words of exit to the professor-judge she knows from her hometown college, she nearly flattens the graduate student waiting to escort her from the audition. She knows her fate has been sealed.”

I should have enrolled at Butler University. That private Indianapolis school offered me a scholarship based upon my academic record. Number eight in my senior class of 547, the top-ranked female. The audition before a panel of seasoned music professors, familiar with Mr. Schultz and the quality of his students, would have been more of a formality, my musical resume enough.

Though IU’s reputation far outshone that of Butler, a degree from that small university would have prepared me for the music career I desired. I could have lived a comfortable life as a music teacher. Instead, I let my dreams fade into nothingness, like the violins descending the scale at the end of the Third Movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. I held tight to the rejection from Indiana University as a badge of dishonor, empowering it to banish me from so much of what I had loved.

********

During my senior year, EVSC representatives invited high school students to visit elementary schools in the district. The purpose was to give grade schoolers the chance to hear from seniors about paths in high school. A drummer extraordinaire who had been a friend since our days together in third grade, nicknamed “Pickle” (it sort of rhymed with his first name), and I visited Washington Elementary to share our experiences as musicians. The architecture of Washington’s two-story brick building, its two wings flanking a center entrance with ionic columns and a cupola, resembled the 18th-century mansion at Mount Vernon. The hardwood floors, crown moldings and baseboards, large multi-paned windows and heavy paneled doors, traditional and stately features from its 1937 construction, set an elegant stage for elementary education. A contrast in image and atmosphere to the 1960s-streamlined structure housing Hebron Elementary from which Pickle and I graduated.

Like all EVSC grade schools at the time, Washington Elementary’s curriculum required music education. Instruction began with choral music in second grade, advancing to teaching the Tonette (a black plastic recorder wannabe) during fourth grade, and culminating in student placement during fifth grade on strings, brass, winds and percussion to form concert band and orchestra. Students who didn’t want to continue music and learn an instrument could quit in fifth grade, though not before. Whether or not the students at our presentation currently played an instrument, at some point every one of them had been enrolled in a music class.

Our visit to Washington Elementary occurred prior to my failed audition at Indiana University. My planned future at that point was still my future plan, still the direction I wanted to impart to those students. I don’t recall the exact words I used. I know I stood in that classroom with all eyes upon me, the students silent and engaged. That I spoke in charged declarative sentences, extolling the value of a music education, laying out the future I saw for myself, imploring them to follow.

Did I say what I felt about music?

Attempts to define the feelings evoked by this art form leave a world-swallowing chasm between the words used and the meaning conveyed, though terms in Roget’s Thesaurus begin to bridge the gap: “‘the speech of angels [Carlisle];’ ‘the mosaic of the air [Marvell];’ ‘the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world [Mazzini];’ ‘nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune [Thomas Fuller].’” Music to me formed the mosaic of the invisible world, a wild echo of creation. Music to me expressed the exquisite and the ethereal. Music to me revealed all that was real, absolute, and unchangeable, transcending the dependency of material existence. Did I convey these impressions to those students? Because this was what I wanted those students to know.

********

I have little explanation for my decision-making. Why I didn’t seriously consider more places to audition, make more applications to second-tier and third-tier music schools. The release of the unattainable for the attainable would continue to vex me for years to come.

Perhaps it was the minimal direction for my future from my parents. Whose own opportunities for continuing their education were circumscribed by mid-century stereotypes and family circumstances. Educated at the University of Alabama, courtesy of the GI Bill, Dad told me many times: “When I was 14, I knew I wanted to be a CPA.” How common was that for any teen, much less one growing up during the Great Depression? He followed his dream path, while his core advice to me—always prefaced by “Now, swe-e-e-tie” in that charming Mobile drawl—was “choose a career where you can get a job. Like, a secretary in an office.” Perhaps this advice emanated from insecurity about his long-term health, or perhaps it was a vestige of his upbringing.

Mom graduated valedictorian of her Kentucky high school class of twenty, in a town of 2000. Attended secretarial school, learned to type 120 WPM and take shorthand. This was the path most accessible to her. Not too many women from the rural South went to college in the mid-1940s, even a brilliant one like my mother. She had no Clara to emulate. It didn’t occur to me at the time to ask her thoughts about my future, whether I should apply to a “lesser” school for music, whether I should pursue another career path. Did Mom feel left out? What would it have meant to her to be included in my decision-making? I wonder now what she might have said.

It’s hard to imagine their parents gave them much guidance, either. Dad was the son of a tailor, a Greek immigrant who only finished high school, and a mother responsible for eleven children. In the early years his family frequently moved from rental housing in search of a cheaper abode. They later attained more stability, owning a home in the 1940s. Mom’s father worked in the coal mines and served in World War II; her grandmother helped rear her and her younger brother. Working class comfortable, her family lived in a Craftsman bungalow on a hill overlooking Main Street. Even with the class differential, both sets of my grandparents must have experienced a similar scrabbling through the depression war years present. How could they have had enough leisure time to manufacture their children’s futures?

Perhaps it was the collateral damage to our family life. Dad’s near-fatal heart attack during my freshman year in high school fueled Mom’s downward spiral into depression and alcoholism. This tumult lasted into my college years and beyond. Though Dad recovered his health enough to return to his accounting practice, his cardiac troubles plagued our family until his death thirty years later. My mother never completely re-engaged, never resumed a consistent family presence. Her parental absence left Dad to augment his breadwinner role with homemaking duties and care for me as father and mother the rest of my high school years.

I didn’t enroll in music school. I entered college at the University of Tennessee in 1977 and studied Textile Science. Then two years after graduation, I applied to law school and chose Vanderbilt (the “Harvard of the South”), the most prestigious of the five schools that accepted me. I thought that’s what smart people did. Obtain an advanced degree in one of the professions, medicine, law, engineering, education, and take a job to support one’s family in a comfortable manner. I had followed my father’s advice.

My violin was stowed away in apartment closets for decades, during law school, during my law jobs in Indianapolis and San Francisco, then later in the guest room of the DC home I purchased with my former husband, I didn’t think much about my instrument, about not playing it. I didn’t talk much to anyone about the dream I’d abandoned. I didn’t identify myself to people I met as a former musician.

Music reentered my life when my daughter’s elementary school offered after-school violin lessons to kindergarten students. The notice came home with my daughter; she wanted to give the class a try. The violin teacher encouraged parents to join their children in private instruction outside of the school’s group setting. I pulled out my violin, took it to Brobst Violin Shop for a tune-up. I rented a 1/4 size instrument and bow for my daughter and told the teacher we were ready to sign up for mother-daughter lessons. My daughter and I played together on weekends with the teacher in our living room. The technique lost to decades of hiatus slowly returned to me, and the joy of making music returned with it.

My daughter’s violin instruction lasted mere months, her dropping both the group and individual lessons. This happened following the first school performance of the group. She lifted her instrument, bowed a few notes, then stopped playing and sat down on the stage, either unwilling or unable to go on. All she said after the concert was, “I don’t want to play violin anymore.” We returned her rental instrument to Brobst, and I was disappointed. My teenage dreams, dashed and unfulfilled, were not going to be resurrected in the form of my daughter.

At eight years old she re-engaged with music, pursuing the trumpet after attending an instrument “petting zoo” at the Kennedy Center. (Though a more suitable complement to her vibrant personality than the violin, the two instruments share a musical identity. The trumpet’s role in the brass corresponds to the violin’s role in the strings—each is the soprano voice of its section. Composers of large symphonic works frequently write the trumpet as melody of the brass. And violin solo parts are often transcribed for the trumpet.) Mastery of the instrument came easily to her, leading to acceptance into the DC Youth Orchestra Program’s brass ensembles and later the full orchestra. Her private lessons with a member of “The President’s Own,” a long-haired staff sergeant in the Marine Band who wore miniskirts off duty, advanced her skills and confidence. She joined her high school jazz band and later the NOVA Alexandria Band at Northern Virginia Community College.

Though she dropped violin and pursued the trumpet, my daughter’s embrace of music brought the violin back to me. It led to my resuming private lessons after a 35-year gap, with Mr. Vons, the teacher at her school violin group. That led to my joining Second String Orchestra, a small chamber group of adult musicians on Capitol Hill — no audition required! Most of the members were like me, played their instruments seriously in high school and college and then took a hiatus. I wasn’t the best and I wasn’t the worst. It was a good fit. SSO rehearsed weekly with our professional conductor, a violist in the Air Force Strings — with an Artist Diploma from Indiana University. Our repertoire included JS Bach, Benjamin Britten, George Frideric Handel, Gustav Holst, Florence Price, Carl Stamitz, Georg Telemann, and Antonio Vivaldi, as well as works by lesser-known composers and pop tunes. Being part of the group led to my playing in public again, in SSO’s free performances and benefit concerts.

I couldn’t go back the way I came. It was too late for my grey-haired self to become the professional performer my teenage self had longed to be. Still, my mid-life private lessons and chamber group participation were a portal into recreating the exquisite and the ethereal. Once again, I saw myself as capable of creating music, someone as a part of the wild echo of creation. And connecting with others through music in a much different sense than I ever could have imagined in my youth.

SSO performed in a January 2023 benefit concert for Good Neighbors of Capitol Hill. The charity serves refugees, preparing apartments for their families and assisting the adults in finding employment. As of that month, they had set up 98 apartments with donated furniture and other home necessities, as well as providing clothing and personal items to family members. During the concert, a tall Afghan man performed with us, playing a solo on the tabla, a pair of hand drums part of an ancient rhythmic tradition. The instrument is common to Indian classical music; its versatility allows use in other genres as well. The piece our guest soloist played was mesmerizing, a percussive odyssey that transfixed the audience of about 300 in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. I stood at my place in the first violin section, solemn and silent along with the other SSO members. Listening to this man play, watching this husband of Afghanistan’s only female orchestra conductor, this father of a preschool daughter. I thought about the life they had abandoned, the courage it took to leave their home and other family members, the hardships they were facing. The moment was heart-rending. It was sobering. It was painful. And yet, it was joyful, too. I felt this man’s musicianship crossing divisions of cultures and countries. Revealing all that was real, absolute, and unchangeable, transcending the dependency of material existence.