Because FS is paranoid...

... she's using this blog as a safe place for her work at school too. FS works as an English liaison and blogs for her school newspaper, so bits and pieces of her writing are housed both here and elsewhere in school-affiliated websites.

Hello dear readers (who are most likely first-years),

The subject of this post is as you can see at the top, when I was a first year...

… I was an incoming student, who'd thought she would double major in English and History. My first semester here at Mount Holyoke, I'd taken a first year seminar in English entitled "How to Read a Poem" with Professor Alderman and a 200-level course in History entitled "Topic: We Didn't Start the  Fire," a survey of post-World War II American History.

Poetry had been a short, but delightful blip in the entirety of my high school education. Or, rather, I should say blip blip since two instances in which poetry made its memorable appearance. In my sophomore English class, our summer reader comprised of Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This led us, of course, to read "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the center cannot hold," the first few lines of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming."

Quite honestly, I had to look that up. I remembered the first few lines, but I'd forgotten the author and title of the poem. And yet even my memory of those first few lines, read and re-read all those years ago is a wonder, because one day with this poem was enough to leave me, this present me, five years later able to recite again those first few lines.

Then, my senior year of high school, my teacher was particularly fond of poetry. His poetry unit lasted only a month, but in that time he plied us with Shelley, Donne, and Keats. Then, he had us all sign up for a poem to present and explicate as if we were teachers ourselves, giving an essay prompt (and then writing the essay itself), and reciting the poem. No repeats, he told all his five classes so that all told roughly 200 poems were presented to him by the end of the unit.

For me, senior year was a desperate dash of deadline after deadline: college applications, AP exams, and actual classwork of projects and homework. But I found myself lingering in front of the mirror, playing at the character of such and such poem: Lucille Clifton's young girl in the poem "this morning (for the girls of eastern high school)" and her artiste in the poem "the poet;" Keats' narrator contemplating the inevitability of death against the limitless of imagination of "When I have fears that I may cease to be;" Auden's voice of art in contrast to the everyday in "Musee des Beaux Arts;" even an attempt at the entirety of querulous, antsy narrator of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Let me just say right now that I was no 4.0 GPA, no over 90% correct SAT student. I tried, but inevitably my own wandering interests came between myself and scholastic perfection.

Yet, without all of this wanderlust in the world of English, how could I have come to that point in high school where I could bow to myself and say, "this morning / I met myself / coming in," reach a hand to my reflection and then bring that same hand to myself, curling the fingers at my sternum, feeling my heart beat beneath?

In a letter I wrote to my aunt and uncle in Houston at the time, I mentioned the experience in this way, "The Lucille Clifton poems are a required study for a poetry presentation, but I'm growing rather fanciful over the presentation so [I] memorized it and have been practicing performing it. I feel alternately wild and pleased with myself saying the words. I want to jump, to twirl, to wink, cry/smile."

I performed the poems I memorized in front of the high school English teachers, some of whom I'd had and others of whom happened to be passing by. It was my thank you to them for introducing me again and again to something new, this world of poetry. For poetry, while it can be read alone, is best in a group when it is read aloud, when the words come alive enriched by the voice of such and such person.

So, when I saw the course "How to Read a Poem" was still open during registration, I leapt at the chance to revisit this heady, new world of poetry. Here in Professor Alderman's class, I discovered what it is to read a poem. To read is to examine piecemeal the words, then the lines, then using both words and lines to contemplate the entirety of the poem.

My first two-pager on Milton's sonnet "I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs" was a disaster. All of my faults and oddities came to light: a tendency to invert the grammatical structure of subject verb, an inability to comprehend subject-verb complements, rampant nominalization, and subject mimicry. I had set out to analyze Milton and instead began to write like him.

The next essay was even more disturbing in unearthing my authorial dirt. The transferring of my verbal articulation to written analysis? Pfft. Inevitably, I came face to face with myself and my writing and thought, "The hell is this?!"

And yet, dear readers, this was all in all a good thing. It is a hard battle to fight, your own bewilderment in regards to yourself, but to have won is to have wrested creative freedom from the murkiness of your own mind.

At the end of the semester, I turned in an essay explicating Emily Dickinson's conceit of animal subjects to cast light on the thoughts and questions she had that could not be explained by organized religion. In my case, I had been able to bridge, if only a little, the divide between my ability to narrate and my ability to analyze. This last essay "To Be Zero at the Bone" marked the discovery of my own voice in academia of not only analysis, but narrative analysis.

A good essay leads the reader in and through itself in much the same way a good story does. It professes a setting, a character of interest, and a story i.e. the circumstances of the argument, the subject of the argument, and the argument itself. What makes a 30-page or a 100-page or even longer piece of literary criticism so interesting for me is due to this sense of narrative analysis unfolding before my eyes. I can delight as much in a piece of literary criticism as much as the subject novel or poem of the literary criticism itself.

I knew then by the end of this first year seminar as I know now that English must be my major. I loved my history class "Topic: We Didn't Start the Fire." I've kept all the texts from that class to this day and pass the texts on to my friends, because the material was so interesting, so well chosen and taught. Yet, history does not unfold itself before my eyes, limitless and mysterious, the way that English does.

This essay is in part not only my journey as a first year, but also my journey to becoming an English major. You know, you know your major once you've taken a class in it. At one point, you will know this must be the one, because though you are sleepless, exhausted, and at the end of your rope, you continue on without resentment, without the thought of the end that "it's only one semester," but with the thought of what could happen next?

And this next could be your entire academic career at Mount Holyoke College.

For your viewing (and laughing) purposes is my first and last pieces of writing in the first year seminar "How to Read a Poem." It is inevitable, I find, that no matter how much I edit before turning in a piece, there will be typos. There will be odd grammatical mistakes, sometimes, due to over-editing a piece. So readers, laugh with me for I too am laughing at myself.

The Piano Sings and You Listen

Occasionally the Food Scavenger (FS) does think about something else other than food. This is a situationally ironic thing to type considering that there are the explosive remnants of a bag of peanuts (salted in-shell) all over the Food Scavenger and her bed. Such is life that food is always a peripheral presence, the fuel that powers the Food Scavenger to type, to breathe, to be 24/7. Thus, on the date of Sunday, September 25, FS arrives at McCulloch Auditorium housed in Pratt Music Hall to this scene:

Hush. The piano is about to sing.

The piano stands on the stage, alone, singular, grand majesty in black. On the ground, a few feet before it a microphone is propped, ready to receive the voice now in repose. The site of this introductory silence is McCulloch Auditorium housed by Pratt Music Hall. It's another Sunday concert at Moutn Holyoke College, this time by a guest performer by the name of Victor Rosenbaum.

Hush, the silence seems to say as senior citizens and music students filter in, the piano is about to sing.

The program gives a run-down of the evening's visitation: Mozart and Schubert, Schumann and Chopin. For it is a visitation, a present suddenly awakening the past, reading the past as it were in notes of music rather than words of literature, the usual circumstance for an English major such as FS.

Victor Rosenbaum coaxing pure music from the piano.

Victor Rosenbaum appears and as he places fingers to keys the piano begins to sing. The notes of Mozart's Rondo in A Minor trickle into the silence, his fingers exerting a gentle pressure on the piano, his fingers coaxing and rousing the piano from its magisterial silence into this lilting joy, this give and take like a hand out of nowhere curling around your elbow and guiding you out of your lost self to safety.

This is the reason why you come, week after week without fail.

Before you, a young girl places a saucer of milk on the ground in the foyer of her house. She is nervous, looking back and forth, before rummaging into the pocket of her skirt for the cookie she saved during dinner. She does not think of Santa Claus, he of the hohoho and red and white and once a year visit. Instead, her mind trails off to her grandmother whispering of brownies, shy brownies, blessing a house with their helpful presence, wishing only for a little milk in response.

Yet, and yet, a little milk is too little, the young girl thinks so she saves her cookie from herself, because she does, she so does want to make a good impression on the brownie. It's a sugar cookie, fragrant with butter and a dash of cinnamon.

The next morning, both the cookie and milk are gone. The young girl is delighted. For an instant, she runs to and fro the length of the foyer, her thoughts skittering about even faster, a zig-zag joy of having found a friend.

This goes on until the young girl is a young woman, making her debut into society. On the night of her debut, the young girl now a young woman hesitates, hand against the threshold, suddenly lost. She feels a pressure against her elbow, which prompts her hand to fall and her foot to step forward. When she turns away from the light and all the faces turning towards her, she sees a small shadow duck behind an ornamental vase in the foyer and she thinks, Oh.

It is the happy 'Oh' of a friend remembered and seen again.

Your vision clears and Mr. Rosenbaum steps forward amidst the audience's clapping and bows. You join in the clapping, the clap of your palms signalling remembrance and joy, the little tale of "The Brownie and the Young Girl."

In contrast to this early piece of pure delight, the next piece rings out, a battle in its first movement of Allegro. Thus, Schubert comes riding out, piano sailing before him as his weapon and ally in musical arms against the assail of the enemy.

You smile, because of course this is Schubert, the he of immense drama, conflict, then reconciliation and resolution. (You know nothing as to his life, but his music prompts this description from you.) The battle that characterized the beginning of Schubert's Piano Sonata in C Minor begins to fade, no longer dominating, but softened, measured, a nostalgic meditation in the second movement of Adagio. The veteran of battle sits and reminisces, his life in all its intensity, its chaos, its joy, its sadness, its drama passes before him.

As you listen, you begin to hear an echo, the beginning of certain measures prompting an echoing answer from your memory of music. There are no names to match these echoes, only a sense of expectation, a hum from your mind to end such a beginning. How odd, you think. You put off the thought until the end of the song, because the third movement has crept up, a short Menuetto: Allegro in which you feel joy bubbling from your throat. Instinctively, your hands clasp, coming to rest against your heart.

This is Schubert remembering joy, you think. There is playfulness here, an Aha! and Hahaha! moment, because it is good to be alive, to have lived and had then to never live at all. Thus, the fourth movement Allegro ends in triumph, a confirmation of all that one can have in just living.

During the intermission, you scan the program and its extra slip of paper detailing the circumstances of each piece. Your instincts are proven right.

Rosenbaum comments that the piece is the "first of three great sonatas that Schubert composed at a furious pace in September of 1828, while ill and just two months before his death at the age of 31" and follows the death of his "compositional hero, Beethoven, who had died the previous year, Schubert here unabashedly borrows not only the key of Beethoven's most dramatic works, but also the theme and harmonic progression of one of them (the 32 Variations in C minor)."

Yet, the piece is clearly Schubert's. Rosenbaum ends his commentary on the piece with "But with that material and inspiration, Schubert rises to a new level of compositional mastery in his own unique voice."

The next piece is also the penultimate piece, Schumann's Scenes of Childhood or Kinderscenen, Opus 15. Because this is Schumann, within a few minutes, your heart has risen up your throat and in counterpoint, your interwoven fingers have risen up to cover your mouth, open and curving into a grin. The first few pieces of his themed work Kinderscenen sound like laughter, the heady moments of childhood when giddy happiness overwhelmed all of one's senses. Life itself was an adventure.

And yet, that childhood has gone and passed you by with nary a second look, while you strain your neck to find it, while you stand and look at the sky on a moonlit night and count the stars, wishing for one to fall so that you might make a wish.

You linger and in your lingering, remember so that as you grow old, you also grow young, memories visited and revisited till they grow anew. You can only try, you tell yourself, what is the harm in that? Till the end, you try.

The finale of the concert is Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasie, Opus 61. It sounds like a waltz, the mystique of the dance as captured by a piano and its pianist moving in concerted motion with one another. In counterpoint to Rosenbaum's moving fingers, his lips move as if he sings along with the piano or rather he sings and the piano is his voice in action. Suddenly, the elegance and mystery of the Polonaise-Fantasie brings not to mind the waltz, but a boy for whom the letters of the alphabet, the strictures of grammar, and the nay-say of society mean nothing.

"He never cries, he never speaks," the boy's mother says, fretting to her husband. They look at their son, sitting by the window, mouth opening and closing as birds trill and tease, spring is here, on the tree outside.

"A quiet boy, neither ill-mannered nor lazy, but he seems unable to learn or comprehend the importance of letters and words," writes his third-grade teacher. This is the same comment in some version or other written by all the boy's teachers.

Only the music teacher at his school writes otherwise. She sends the boy home with reams of music sheet every day. He returns the next morning without fail with the reams of music sheet filled. When she plays the notes, she transcribes the music into scribbled words of feeling. She sends her own personal notes on the music notes home to the boy.

'Listen to him,' she writes, 'he speaks music.'

The boy's parents are overjoyed. They enroll him in music classes. Gradually, they save up enough money to enroll him in a special school devoted to music.

At his first recital after the encore, his teacher rushes forward and shakes their hand. He is all smiles, he sees their son's future. The boy's parents listen attentively, but what catches their attention is not their son's teacher, but the off-hand call of one of his classmates.

"Oy, oy!"

The boy turns.

"Good concert," his classmates says, pumping the boy's hand up and down. "We all knew you'd do it. You're the boy, y'know. The boy who speaks piano."

That is all the boy's parents need, this confirmation of who their boy is and how he is to know the world around him. This is their boy (although one day he will not longer be a boy): the boy who speaks piano.

So ends the concert and so ends this trailing review of it. There's nothing more powerful than the immediacy of a live performance, when all you have is yourself, a seat, and the air swelling with music. You the listener become awash in the atmosphere of music. There's a tremor beneath you as your chair vibrates a little from the sound ringing through the auditorium.

Why might this be of interest to an English major, you ask? (Especially as told by the food-obsessed FS?) It is of interest to anyone living, but for this particular English major (for FS is an English major), a live performance becomes a live inspiration of story-telling as can be evidenced by FS' accounts i.e. verbal interpretations of music above.


Upcoming performances are:

Friday, October 21 at Chapin Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Family and Friends Jazz Concert by Big Band, Vocal Jazz and Chamber Jazz

Saturday, October 22 at Abbey Chapel at 4:00 p.m. Family and Friends Choral/Orchestral Concert by the Mount Holyoke Glee Club, Chorale, Chamber Singers and Orchestra.

Sunday, October 23, 2011 at McCulloch Auditorium at 4:00 p.m. Warbeke Memorial Concert by the Kavafian-Schub-Shilfrin Trio, members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

For more information, visit the Mount Holyoke Music Department.