Aspirations

As a child I would often fantasize about moving to a new place and to start over. I had very little in childhood to affirm my personal worth. The people around me (in my family) seemed more important (smart, gifted, demanding of attention), so I learned not to expect attention.

Instead of crumbling, I was somehow able to create my own happiness by giving without expecting anything in return.

The first time I followed my childhood fantasy was at twenty. After graduating from Juilliard, where I believed that the only reason anyone wanted to be my friend was because of my father's status in the musical world, I went off to Austria to play flute in a summer festival and find a way and a place to build a musical life. I lived the dream (new language, no history) for a while, but the job I found in rural Austria was not sustainable.

I went off to Vienna, where I ended up being accepted in a somewhat elite musically oriented society because of my father's status in the musical world. After my time in Austria and then time in Hong Kong (where I ended up not getting an orchestral piccolo job, and could not find permanent work that would grant me a visa), I moved back to Boston and learned to type. Then I got married and moved with my husband to Illinois, where I hoped to start our new life in a university town in relative anonymity. But my family reputation preceded me.

While in Boston I gave flute lessons to a retired doctor who was married to a violist who studied with my father. The 1985 viola congress happened to be in Boston, and a violist who lived in Charleston (my university town in Illinois) was there. She struck up a conversation with a fellow audience member at the conference who just happened to be my student's wife. My student's wife mentioned that I was moving to Charleston in a few weeks.

It was nice to be welcomed to town, but I had to give up my childhood anonymity fantasy, and go about life as an adult. I taught a bunch of flute students, and got a job at the university radio station. I enjoyed the work of motherhood, partly because it requires a great degree of selflessness to do it well. I had selflessness to spare. And I love the adults (and parents) that our kids have become. I remember being physically exausted for at least a decade, but I always had emotional energy in full supply.

But I needed to do something for myself, so when our younger child was three I returned to string playing (I had played violin from age seven to eleven).

I left the radio station when it became clear that they didn't want to continue having a classical music program, and I began a master's degree program. The faculty at the time must have either been unimpresed or intimidated by the work I did, because, with rare and fleeting exceptions (that I was not equipped to recognize at the time), nobody did anything to let me know that it was of any value.

One of my classmates asked me to take over a job she had teaching music appreciation at a nearby community college. I taught there for many years. Once the class was no longer required for education majors, demand for it dwindled, and my classes were eliminated.

I retired with a pension equal to the salary I earned while working (not much, but not nothing either). And I have managed over the decades to become (without holding a real job with any level of prestige) a competent professional string player, a CD reviewer, a good teacher, a good arranger, and a decent composer (as well as a decades-long blogger). I have been engaged for decades in community music. I have written music that seems to please people, developed relationships with publishers, made music available to people through both publishers and through the IMSLP. I have made meaningful and lasting friendships (musical and otherwise) with people all over the world, and finally, at the age of sixty-three, and after "slaying dragons" I have carried around since childhood, I feel a solid sense of self worth.

I suppose a lot of musicians seek out a path towards fame and fortune, and they do what they can to make their way professionally. It often requires a lot of self-promotion and constant public-relations-oriented work in order to remain visible and relevant in a crowded world. Location matters too. I don't have the energy for that kind of work, and am comfortable in my low-cost-of-living life, with time to write what I want, when I want to. I'm happy that I can do work that is good and useful, and that I can play an active part in musical life.