When growing up, music was a passion for me. It involved me, enraptured me, consumed me, on a multitude of levels.
One level was of the "I play a musical instrument" variety. In elementary school, I was not selected (for whatever reason) to advance from "recorder" to "legitimate band instrument," which was somewhat disappointing. But in fifth grade, the world opened up to me with what I will affectionately (and in retrospect) call "Plan B" - string instruments. My elementary school, Hickory Grove, was starting up a string orchestra! It was different. It was cool. It allowed me to get "out" of my regular class for an hour or so daily, and as much as I revered Mr. Felix, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I don't recall all the details - hey, it was 1975, my memory is a bit hazy - but soon there I was, learning to play the violin.
(Note - this may be the first time that "violin" and "cool" go together in a thought process. Such can be the mentality of a 10-year-old.)
If anyone thought it was to be a fad, they were sadly mistaken. I stayed with the fiddle throughout the rest of elementary school, continued through junior high and high school, and even played my first year at Central Michigan University, after which I packed up the imitation Stradivarius. Oh, I played it on occasion after that - notably during my fraternity's Greek Week music performance - but even early on, it was obvious that my work habit was not going to lead me to a future in a professional orchestra. And I was OK with that.
There were some very cool things that happened during my high school orchestra tenure, though. ("Cool"? Again? Hmmmm ...) The summer before I started high school, as I was heading to band camp, the radio was blasting the sounds of the Charlie Daniels Band's The Devil Went Down to Georgia, which made for a wonderful camp experience. My favorite group in junior high (and even early high school) was the Electric Light Orchestra. When Charlie Daniels released Devil, it just enhanced the concept that ... maybe ... if things worked out ... there was an option for recording commercial music while playing the violin. My buddy Tim Olson and I had dreams of performing Devil for Halloween one year with full orchestral accompaniment, but it never happened.
At our regional state music festival my sophomore year, the main piece our symphonic orchestra played was Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. The piece includes an absolute "stop" early in the performance - I mean, after building up to an amazing crescendo, EVERYONE has to stop on a dime. We were performing in a high school gym, and when we hit that moment, the music reverberated for what seemed like an eternity. The parents in the audience all looked around, trying to see the musical waves bouncing around the room. The judges all looked around. The orchestra looked around. It was impressive. We managed to refocus and continue our performance, and ended up with straight "I" rankings ... although one of the judge scores was originally recorded as a "II" (which, in case you're not sure, is not a good thing). The regional rep came out about 10 minutes later, apologized to us, and changed the "II" to a "I+" ranking - the first-ever "I+" ranking in Michigan music festival history (or so we were led to believe; we never looked it up to discover whether this was true).
About a month later - April 1980 - we went to the state festival in suburban Grand Rapids, about three hours northeast of Detroit. Instead of staying at a hotel, we roomed with different families in the GR area. The big news that weekend was that the US mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran failed that morning; while at our host family's residence, as we were trying to get ready for that day's competition, we were captivated by the events in the Middle East being presented on television.
Late during my sophomore year, I took up a second instrument - the viola - as well, giving me multiple instruments on which to torture my parents' ears. That summer, during my second stint at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, I auditioned for the jazz band, my violin decked out with a transducer, amplifier and speaker, making me the first-ever electric violinist at BLFAC. I ended up playing violin on only a few of our selections, spending the rest of the summer learning various percussion instruments (the triangle, cowbell, etc.), because no one was quite sure what to do with me and the music selections really didn't have much in the way of violin parts. However, it was definitely fun, and I was in the jazz band again the following summer.
I had started preparing for jazz band during my sophomore year. Another log that was thrown on the orchestral fire that year was the announcement by Bloomfield Hills Lahser High School's orchestra director, Valerie Palmieri, that we would be competing at the Ottawa International Festival of Music my junior year. It ended up being a series of firsts: my first major bus ride (Detroit to Ottawa isn't exactly a short trip); my first time staying in dorm rooms (we lived on the University of Ottawa campus while in Canada, eh?); and my first time in charge (so to speak) of the orchestra.
Let me explain. Lahser sent three musical groups to Ottawa: the full symphony orchestra; the string orchestra; and the jazz band. I was in the first two - my jazz expertise wasn't all that impressive in the grand scheme of things (although we did have one of our senior cellists playing with the jazz band for a song). For the full symphony orchestra, two of us - myself and Janis Koehn - each played violin and viola, switching back and forth between the three selections. And with the string orchestra, I was exclusively on viola, but during one of the most difficult pieces we played, the Pachelbel Canon in D, my job was to "plink" the rhythmic notes to keep us paced properly.
I was the only one with this responsibility, and that responsibility multiplied when Mrs. Palmieri told us ahead of the performance that she would be leaving the stage before we started playing the Pachelbel, leaving us to self-pace and self-coordinate the piece. We didn't believe her. What high school orchestra conductor leaves the stage in advance of a performance before a panel of judges at an international competition?
Shame on us. We played our first piece (the Albinoni Adagio in G Minor), then Mrs. Palmieri bowed, put her baton on the music stand, and walked off the stage, leaving 30-plus high school students to perform sans conductor. We started playing; I started plunking; and somehow, never lost the beat, never sped up, never slowed down, never got my fellow string musicians off track. It was exhausting, mentally and physically - something I had never realized could happen playing the violin or viola.
Senior year was a whole different experience. I had the opportunity to play in the high school's new orchestra pit for our production of Oliver! We scored straight "I" rankings (for the third consecutive year) at the state music festival. Our Halloween concert featured Mrs. Palmieri dressed as Miss Piggy from The Muppet Show (definitely quite a sight from the musicians' point of view). And during one performance that year, we played P.D.Q. Bach's Sonata for Viola Fourhands and Harpsichord. Even though we didn't have a harpsichord. P.D.Q. Bach is the "Weird Al" Yankovic of the classical music world; Sonata is performed where one person holds a viola at center stage; two individuals take a long piece of string (or dental floss, whatever works) and walk back and forth across the stage, the violist adjusting the instrument so the string hit the correct musical strings accordingly; and the fourth person actually "fingers" the correct notes.
So why I am pounding out memories from more than 25 years ago? I was going through some old photos this weekend, and happened upon several from my years in orchestra. One thing led to another, and ... voila! (not viola!), the floodgate was opened.
Think I'll listen to some Vivaldi tonight.
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