6
Academic Overture
JOANNE
Mr. K was always yelling at students for being mahnyiaks. But in seventh grade, I began to wonder if he was the one who was nuts.
I suggested as much at dinner one night. “He’s gone off the deep end,” I said. “Absolutely insane.” My sisters just nodded. Mr. K had become a frequent topic of dinner conversation—and sometimes, as my sisters got older, of amusement as well. But this time he had gone too far.
We were wolfing down our meal because all three of us were rushing off to orchestra rehearsal. My mom had joined a gourmet-cooking group not long before, and the Hawaiian Medley frozen vegetables and canned fruit-cocktail appetizers were gone, replaced by exotic dishes like cheese fondue and teriyaki chicken with pineapple. The vegetables she cooked were fresh rather than frozen now, but Michele still couldn’t stand them and still snuck them under the table to feed to Skippy.
We talked all at once as we ate, cutting each other off and plowing right over each other’s sentences. Usually, just the girls talked—my mother and the three of us daughters. My dad couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He had very little to add to our typical girl-world conversations, most of which made him squeamish. Every once in a while, he would interrupt us, saying, “Can’t we get through one meal without discussing bodily fluids?”
That night, though, we had more important things to discuss: namely that Mr. K had pushed us way too far. It was one thing to set high expectations; it was another to expect the absolutely, completely, incontrovertibly impossible. I had been promoted to the high school orchestra just months before, along with the other girls in my quartet. Both of my sisters were already big shots in the group: Michele was co-concertmaster and Ronni the principal flute player, leading the section.
The problem was, the music Mr. K expected us to play was insane. At the first rehearsal of the year, he handed out mimeographed parts for Johannes Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture. The music terrified me. I stared at the vaguely shiny sheets of the viola part, held together at the edge by translucent Scotch tape blotched by fingerprints. I may as well have been looking at hieroglyphics. There were strange notes, strange key changes, and unexpected rhythms. It was fiendishly difficult, well beyond the level of anything I had ever played before. Even for Michele, who had performed the piece with the All-State Orchestra, and Ronni, an All-State flute player, it was a challenge.
Mr. K had been making our quartet practice the piece together during our Tuesday night rehearsals, pushing our usual Haydn off the agenda while we diligently tried to perfect some of the trickier string entrances. Academic Festival Overture has a great booming melody—you’d know it from the antic parade scene in the movie Animal House—but underneath that big brass line there’s a whole lot of mystifyingly difficult string playing darting in and out.
As we streamed into the high school practice room after dinner and took our places, I waved my bow in greeting to Melanie, Stephanie, and Miriam, who wiggled their bows back at me. In that first blush of adolescent friendship, each time we saw one another was a fresh thrill, even when we’d only been apart for a few hours. Then I settled into my seat in the back of the viola section, and the other girls sank out of view in the farthest reaches of their own sections. It was unfortunate that the four of us were so spread out that we couldn’t even see each other, because Mr. K chose this moment to show us off to the older kids. The whole orchestra apparently had been screwing up the staggered entrances.
“Quartet weel demonstrate proper way to play,” he announced. “Girls, you play.”
The hair on my arms stood straight up. My heart dropped to somewhere in my bowels. I had never been singled out in front of older kids. I noticed that the other violists were now craning around in their seats to get a good look at me. Their faces betrayed a bit of curiosity, and a bit more of hope that the uppity young new kid would fall on her face.
The four of us timidly tried the passage. We were used to looking to Melanie to give us a nod to start, and then to each other as we played. But the other girls were nowhere in my line of sight. As we started to play, they sounded impossibly far away. This was so unlike our rehearsals in Mr. K’s tiny waiting room, when we were within fingertip distance of one another. The notes came out all wrong, the timing out of sync. My heartbeat sounded louder to me than my own playing.
Tentatively, we tried it once more. I was so nervous that my bow skittered along the strings. Melanie sounded louder, more insistent this time, as she tried to lead us—will us, really, or more like pull us—from the other side of the room. You could tell the rest of us were straining to follow.
“Again!”
I took a deep breath, mustered my courage and attacked. This time, the four of us cut through the silence in the rehearsal room with a precision I had no idea I was capable of. Mr. K glanced at the high schoolers arrayed in front of him with a look of satisfaction. “Like that,” was all he said.
As the performance got closer, Mr. K upped our rehearsal schedule. Almost every day it seemed we were rushing off to the high school in the afternoons or after dinner. We practiced so frequently that my fingers almost bled. The marks that violin and viola players get on their necks from gripping their instruments—the aptly nicknamed “violin hickey”—grew raw and inflamed. Mine started oozing and I had to slather it with antibiotic ointment each night.
Mr. K didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t care. But it was a pointless exercise. The orchestra simply wasn’t able to play the Brahms. I knew it. My sisters knew it. Mr. K was the only one who hadn’t figured it out.
One night at rehearsals, Mr. K finally realized it, too.
“Who eez idyot who play wrong note?” he yelled, cutting off the orchestra with a dramatic “you’re out!” crosswise sweep of his arms, looking like a crazed umpire in an undertaker’s suit.
“You play eet!” He was pointing his baton square at Michele’s face, as he sought to find the culprit in the first violin section. This was among the most dreaded of Mr. K’s methods. He would single out the players, sometimes two at a time, sometimes all by themselves, and make them play in front of the whole orchestra.
Michele played the passage without any mistakes, then sat back with a visible sigh of relief.
“Now you!” The baton was shoved between the eyes of the violinist sitting next to her. This girl, too, dispatched the phrase without error.
“Now you!” he yelled, moving on to the next violinist.
“You play!”
“You play!”
And down the line of violinists he went, one after the other, in search of the culprit, the idyot who dared play a wrong note.
It was an excruciating moment. The violinists started to tremble when he got that diabolical look in his eye. You’d get heart palpitations just watching the kids with their sweaty palms and shaky fingers.
As he went down the line, toward the less advanced players in the back, each violinist played worse than the one before—their hands shaking, their arms cramping up, their notes sounding like painful screeches. More than one broke into a flop sweat. They wiped away the grimy drops trickling down their acne-covered faces with the backs of their bow hands. Sometimes they started tearing up.
Usually, when Mr. K finally did single out the idyot who played the wrong note, he forced the poor violinist to play over and over again alone, exposed, until he got it right. The unfortunate soul would miserably try to play while simultaneously trying to disappear, and you could see him physically shrinking down into his seat as he stared at the music and willed his fingers to move. Mr. K sang along for emphasis, his big coarse voice always off-key.
The problem now was there wasn’t just one violinist who couldn’t play the passage; almost the entire section was muffing it. It was just too damn hard. Mr. K’s face was darkening. I saw something else there as well: defeat.
It’s about time, I figured. We’ll never get it. Mr. K’s shoulders sagged and he lowered his arms. His conducting baton hung limply at his side. Maybe he’ll just send us home, I thought.
But then you could just see it. He raised his head and looked out toward the back of the violin section.
“Melanie!” he barked. “You play.”
She played the passage quietly but spotlessly. The other violinists leaned in to listen.
“Again!” Mr. K said. But this time, he pointed to one of the violinists having trouble, barking: “You play along with Melanie.” The kid picked up his violin, furrowing his brow as he strained to mimic the correct notes she was playing. It was a noticeable improvement.
The gleam returned to Mr. K’s eyes.
After that, Mr. K employed a new solution when somebody screwed up. He motioned Melanie to play along with whoever was having trouble, while he stood there clapping out the rhythm and singing along the notes. It worked surprisingly well, this method of the strong helping the weak.
The closer we got to the performance, the harder Mr. K drove us. At rehearsals, he waved his arms wildly from side to side and leaned so far forward that it looked like he would topple from the podium right into the second violin section.
His giant, exaggerated motions, accompanied by his ever-stomping feet, had an effect akin to putting a gorilla in a tutu on-stage in Swan Lake. I had played under a couple of other conductors by now, and my parents had taken me to see professional orchestras, and it never failed to surprise me how small those conductors’ gestures were. It seemed that they barely moved; their baton motions were economical and precise. Mr. K used an oversized baton that only made his exaggerated waving that much more frenetic. He seemed certain that big sound required giant gyrations and that soft sound… well, that required giant gyrations, too.
One day, through the music, we suddenly noticed an odd sound. A distinctive slap-clomp slap-clomp slap-clomp. Up on the podium, Mr. K had stomped his feet so hard that his soles had separated right from his shoes. As he kept pounding out the beat, oblivious, the tips of the soles flapped open and smacked together with each step.
All around the orchestra, you could see the smiles on the faces of the kids as they furiously played the notes. Nobody dared tell Mr. K.
Michele was one of Mr. K’s top violin students. Pretty and popular, she had a penchant for tight bell-bottom pants worn with midriff-baring shirts.
“Cover up your belly boot-ton!” Mr. K said every time she walked into his studio.
For months on end that year, Mr. K gave Michele just one assignment: the first violin part for Academic Festival Overture. Every week he rehearsed that piece with her during her lessons. He drilled her on it as if it were a concerto for a solo competition. He did the same with me and his other private students. Before long, we all knew the piece almost by heart.
Michele played piano, too, and for fun would make up songs of her own, sometimes writing out duets that she could perform with Ronni on the flute. One day at school, after she packed up her violin at rehearsal, Michele handed Mr. K a piece of music she had composed herself. For the first time, she had tried orchestrating it for string instruments.
Mr. K walked her into his office as he looked it over. You could see he was singing it to himself in his head. “Not bad,” he said, glancing back up at her.
He sat down at his desk with a pencil and called her over. He talked through the piece with her, just as if she were a professional composer, a peer. He praised the harmonies, dissected the structure. Then he offered a suggestion—“Thees part eez awkward for violin”—to improve on a section that needed work. She took his advice, sitting at the piano in our living room and noodling over the harmonies for days. When she handed him the reworked piece, he looked it over and sang it to himself again. Then he nodded in approval.
The piece had no name, so he gave it one: Petite Fugue. “Let’s haf orchestra geeve eet a try,” he said, and if Michele were to pick a moment when she decided to become a music teacher herself, that would be it.
Our gala spring concert that year included the premiere of Petite Fugue, with Mr. K introducing Michele to the audience for a round of applause. Then we launched into the finale: Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture.
In the audience, the first emotion that registered was surprise. The seats were filled with parents who had been driving back and forth to endless rehearsals and listening to their kids sawing away alone on their parts in their bedrooms. In truth, most of those kids had sounded pretty awful. The parents didn’t expect much. On their own, there wasn’t one kid in the bunch who would make you sit up and take notice. But that night, mothers and fathers turned to each other with looks of astonishment. Could this really be our kid up there on the stage?
It was uncanny. While Mr. K was sweating and spitting and stomping on the podium, I felt myself happily disappearing into the music. The violists in front of me were swaying with the beat. Around me, the other kids were doing the same. Mr. K had achieved the impossible: he made us better than we had any right to be. It’s an extraordinary feeling, when you realize you’ve exceeded your own limits. Maybe Mr. K knew that all along. We had just figured it out.
We couldn’t quite believe what we were doing and how much fun we were having. Apparently the audience couldn’t believe it, either. It was spectacular. It was impossible.
It was insane.
When it was over, the audience members leaped to their feet in a standing ovation.