13

The Conservatory

MELANIE

My dad narrows down my college choices for me. I am only allowed to apply to music schools and only those with a music education program, so that I can become a teacher. That eliminates Juilliard and the Curtis Institute of Music. Indiana University, with its superb music department, is too far away. The Manhattan School of Music is in New York City, according to my father a “wolfish” place where I might not survive.

After much thought, my dad settles on the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he knows a violin teacher, and the New England Conservatory in Boston. When I am accepted into both, we choose New England because it offers a larger scholarship.

My first day, Dad and Steph help me move into the eight-story dorm. We wait for the ancient elevator with a line of other families stretching almost out the door to Gainsborough Street. Milk crates overflow with sheet music, and garbage bags are crammed almost to bursting with bedding and clothes, all stacked high around tuba and cello cases, with barely enough room for the people squeezed in between. The elevators groan in protest as the doors laboriously slide shut. After we finally make it up to the top floor and unpack, I hug my dad and Steph good-bye near the stairs.

As they head down on foot, the stairwell is deserted and silent. Then Steph’s voice pierces the air.

“Daddy? Are you crying?”

If you listen hard, you can hear the faintest sound of sobbing.

“Just a little. Okay?” comes my father’s reply.

My dad may be the one crying, but I am the one who is worried. I have been running our house for four years. Before I leave for school, I go over the checklist with Steph: cooking, cleaning, laundry. I show her how to bake chicken with lots of garlic, the way my dad likes it. His roast beef must be so well done that it’s almost burned. No pink! Mashed potatoes have to come from a box: my dad, having discovered American convenience foods, thinks potato buds are like a small miracle from God.

I am afraid that with those two tempers on the loose in the house, their battles will get out of control. I can imagine Steph after a screaming match, flying out the door and slamming it so hard behind her that the windowpanes rattle. I can see my dad, alone in his studio late at night, after his last student has left, eating tuna fish from the can. Without me there to mediate, who knows what will happen?

My mom, still in the hospital, isn’t able to help. After I head off to college, she moves into a single room. It has the heavy air of permanence, rather than the transience of the room she shared with two rotating patients. She converts the shower stall into a closet for the dresses she continues to buy; a seamstress splits each one straight down the back so she can slip them on while in her wheelchair. The new room is a tangible manifestation of the realization we all share but that none of us speak aloud: My mother isn’t coming home. She will never live in her own house again.

At school, worried about my dad and Steph, I call home as frequently as I can. On Saturdays, I commandeer the lobby pay phone next to the cafeteria, watching the swarms of waist-high conservatory prep students carrying tiny violins, parents in tow. The little kids, some of them barely out of preschool, remind me of Steph and me, in what seems like a lifetime ago.

“How’s it going at home?” I ask anxiously, when Steph answers the phone.

Surprisingly, things aren’t as bad as I feared. In my absence, it seems, a truce of sorts is forming.

“Not bad,” she answers.

“Are you guys eating cereal for dinner every night?” I ask.

“Nope.” In fact, Steph tells me proudly, she tried a new recipe for egg-drop soup for dinner just the other night.

“How was it?”

“Awful.”

Steph giggles as she tells me how my dad choked it down anyway and tried his hardest to be diplomatic about it. “He ate most of it,” Steph tells me. “Then he said, ‘Eeet’s good… buuut let’s not haf eet again for a looooong time.’ ”

From a distance, I can see more clearly that the two of them—my father and sister—are far more like each other than either one is like me: short, dark, with fierce tempers. Passionate. Emotional. “Steph’s eyes were soulful from the moment she was born,” my dad’s old student Darlene Brandt always says.

For my dad’s birthday, Steph writes him a poem:

The father looked at his daughter

But he saw only rebellion in her gaze

Not recognizing it as the same fire which brimmed in his eyes

But insolence, which masked their light…

So alike—so unyielding

Emotional mirrors staring at each other

Yet not recognizing the images reflecting back

More than twenty-five years later, looking through my dad’s papers, I will find that poem carefully packed in a shoebox and tied with a frayed brown string. Beneath the poem lies a stack of all the cards and pictures, in bright crayon with bits of yarn and felt attached, that Steph had made for him since she was a little girl.

“Don’t play like a music educator!” My chamber music coach, Benjamin Zander, spits out the words as we rehearse Schumann’s Piano Quintet. “Play like a violinist!”

At the New England Conservatory, I quickly learn that life is all about performance, not academics. My double major in music education along with violin performance mostly earns me grief. Some of the students don’t know the school even has a music education department. My violin teacher, Eric Rosenblith, thinks there must be some mistake.

“My dear, my paperwork has you down as an education major? You’ll have to go see the registrar and correct this…” Shuffling through a sheaf of forms, Mr. Rosenblith peers at me over his glasses.

I’m unpacking my violin in his big, sparsely furnished studio for our first lesson.

“No, that’s right. A double major, actually, education and performance.” Nervously, I wipe my sweaty palms on my pale pink skirt. I’m eager to get started and determined to make a good first impression. I am also clueless about the implications of what I have just said.

As head of the string department, Mr. Rosenblith can have his pick of any student at the school, and places in his violin studio are highly coveted. Why should he squander one of them on someone who might end up conducting a high school band someday?

In my naïveté, I don’t realize then what a disregard for his stature I have just betrayed.

“But, my dear, may I ask why?”

I answer honestly. “My father wants me to. I mean, I want to, too.”

He regards me with curiosity.

Nervously, I plow ahead.

“He’s a teacher, the head of a music department actually. I’m going to be like him, I hope, do what he does someday. Also, he thinks it’s important to have a degree that will help me get a job when I graduate.”

My dad’s words still resonate in my head. He has ranted countless times, how “keeds grahduate from conservatory weeth useless degree, like piece of toilet paper, that qualifies them to do ahbsolutely nothing!” But I don’t think Mr. Rosenblith would want to hear that part.

He is silent, so I go on. “But I also love playing, I want to see if I can get really good…” I trail off.

Mr. Rosenblith nods and changes the subject.

We talk for a long while. He asks about my family, former teachers, pieces I know and would like to know, practice routines. When he finds out that I usually practice about two hours a day, Mr. Rosenblith is taken aback.

“I am surprised that you got this good on so little practicing. Things are different here, and that’s what concerns me about your schedule. How are you going to find the time to practice your thirty-five to forty hours per week?”

Forty hours a week? Is he serious?

“You will have to take so many classes…” He draws out that last word with obvious distaste. “I would hate to have to drop you as a student…”

I hastily wipe away the tears brimming in my eyes. “I’ll practice, I’ll work hard, I promise! I can do it, please just give me a chance.” I’m confused. I have spent my entire life surrounded by music, and in my world, music teachers are admired, even revered. It never occurred to me that there could be a stigma attached to pursuing a music education degree.

Mr. Rosenblith isn’t the only one who is puzzled. I notice conductors, coaches, and teachers looking at me quizzically. Sometimes they pull me aside, asking, “Why would you want to be an education major?” I explain that I want to be a teacher, and they walk away baffled, shaking their heads.

I don’t get it. They’re teachers, aren’t they? Don’t they value teaching? At my sophomore violin performance evaluation, one of the faculty members writes a comment: “Excellent talent. Don’t waste it!”

Juggling both majors leaves no time for anything other than rehearsals, lessons, coaching sessions, and classes. I get good grades, though I know better than to advertise this to Mr. Rosenblith. “If you are getting good grades it means you are working too hard in your classes and not hard enough on your violin. Can’t you get away with a gentleman’s C?” he queries one of my fellow students in our weekly master class after “too much studying” is given as an excuse for a poor performance. To me it is unthinkable not to do whatever classwork is required. Besides, I can’t imagine trying to explain a C to my father.

Somewhat to my surprise, it turns out that I love the extra practice time. The hours melt away as I find myself utterly absorbed in the regimen Mr. Rosenblith assigns. My dad is right: hard work really does lead to happiness. Actually, for me right now, hard work is happiness. And even though he is no longer there every day to tell me to practice or to say “discipline yourself,” I realize that somewhere along the way my father’s words have become a part of me. In return for my efforts, Mr. Rosenblith showers me with praise, affection, and extra lessons, all of which I eagerly accept.

Gradually, teachers begin to overlook my odd penchant for flute classes and choral conducting seminars, and to consider me a “real” violinist, though I never make it into the group that I mentally dub “the elite string players.” They are the principals in the orchestras, the concerto competition winners, the most sought-after chamber music partners. During their breaks they congregate in the cafeteria, smoking cigarettes and sipping black coffee while comparing opinions about Beethoven’s metronome markings. They ignore me as I trudge by with a stack of textbooks, a clarinet under my arm, and a violin strapped to my back, and I can’t help feeling envious. They are the confident ones, the ones who never doubt that they’ll make it in the performance world, the ones who don’t worry about having a teaching degree so they can be sure to have a job someday.

The workload is crushing, but I don’t consider abandoning the music education degree. I never think about being anything other than a music teacher, just like my father. That’s what I’m meant to do… isn’t it?

With one semester to go, I finally reach the home stretch. Almost there. The final requirement for my education degree is student teaching in a classroom. Just before I start, I drop by the apartment of a friend, another music ed major who is already deep into his student-teaching gig.

He’s at the kitchen table, poring over his lesson plan. That is the moment it strikes me, the realization that for an entire semester I will be working at a school all day and planning at night. How will I find forty extra hours a week to practice the violin? So far, I’ve managed through a combination of long hours, skipped meals, caffeine, and no sleep, but I’m about to run up against the finite number of hours in a day. It will be mathematically impossible.

Can I get by for the next five months without enough time to practice? Can I imagine not playing the violin?

Maybe I can do it, I think.

No, I can’t do it! I can’t give up playing my violin for a whole semester!

My decision is made. Just one step away from getting my music education degree, I drop out of the program. I will graduate with a single major: performance.

Who knows if I can really make it as a performer? The vast majority of conservatory graduates don’t ever land jobs with major symphony orchestras, and many don’t make a living in music at all. But I am determined to give it my all to find out.

The next step is telling my dad.

I brace myself for recriminations. I rehearse in my head how I will explain.

“I love kids… I love music… I love teaching…” I tell him over Thanksgiving break. “But it turns out that I love playing most of all.” I have already been accepted into New England Conservatory’s graduate school performance program.

“I wish you’d get your teaching degree,” he says regretfully. But then he smiles. “I understand about the playing. I guess all those years of forcing you to practice paid off.”

Together, we start to believe, or at least to hope, that my violin will take me where I want to go.