Summer Music Camp

This is like summer music camp all over.  It's just much shorter, and there isn't any sort of awkward romantic situations, or excess alcohol.  So maybe it isn't like summer camp at all.  Except that it is really revitalizing.  In my teaching are the voices of some of the artist I remember working with at those camps, even though I was much older and working on serious string quartet repertoire.  But those words and sentiments are channeled to these young children, the thrill of playing the early Suzuki song Allegro because it has so many characters, and allowing that to be the most important part of playing it.  Yes I can give technical advice, but my voice in this setting is allowed to be poetic before saying goodbye to them and sending them back to the daily work.  I know the other reality of daily work; but then what reality is real but the one we practice?  If we practice fresh interactions, perhaps our relation with the world will always be new.

The other teachers here are also wonderful to interact with.  There are many different ideas and approaches to take with me, and this is such a small sampling of what they might be able to offer.  This is a small workshop and only 3 days long.  Perfect for me now.  But an exciting taste of the discoveries of something longer with more students and more teachers with whom to interact.  

And we got to play a concert this evening.  It's been awhile since I've rehearsed or performed chamber music and again, this was a very small slice but a beautiful one.  I love chamber music in a very special way.  And to listen to a colleague play Beethoven before I played the Swan was, as often happens when I listen to Beethoven, an opportunity to fall in love with life, so that saying goodbye to it in my own performance of the Swan was all the more poignant.  

One of my suite-mates in the dorm here is an Alexander teacher and offered to give me a lesson.  So I got to experience this incredible work for the first time, having my body moved by an experienced practitioner, guiding me to release tension that he could feel in his hands that I was not yet aware of.  An inspiration to pick up this work and Feldenkrais again in the coming year.  

We get to a place where we must keep generating our own discoveries.  As I watched the other teachers on stage, reading their bios between performances, I realized that we are no longer at the summer music camps of our youth where our teachers were guiding us to find the soul of the music we played alone and with others, or where we stressed over bow strokes and vibrato.  We are past that, even though we are not.  We must teach it, and to teach it, it must grow within us.  And so we have to feed it something from which it can be sustained.  It is through colleagues, through chamber music, through conversations and sharing, through touching, through making music with students and with one another, through hearing our own words and actions share what we think is of value.  These are the fertile grounds of rebirth within and the ability to pass it on to others to one day do the same.