from grounds to gold

This morning I blog to the sound of coffee straining... iced coffee, that is :)  My friend Christine recently clued me in to The Pioneer Woman, whose show premiers on Food Network this morning.  I sooo wish I could watch it, but starving artist that I am, we don't have cable here at the apartment and Christine is working today.  Boo!  So I will have to settle for iced coffee bliss and hope that I can find it on the internet later lol...

Things are... busy!  And not just a little.  This entire week has been one big fat crescendo of busyness.  It was just last weekend I was bemoaning the fact that the start of school and lessons again hadn't exactly been the shot of B-12 I was hoping for... apparently I didn't realize the full swing of everything was comin' for me so soon!  And most of my students are crazy about what their doing and crazy about their teacher, which makes it fun to teach them ;)  I have sooo many beginners and elementary-level students this year.  Of my 11 kids, 4 of them are straight up beginning students, either started over the summer or this past week.  Then I have 2 kids who've had a year of piano, 4 who I would consider to be in that late elementary phase (combined with being in middle or early high school, this is a fatal combination... but they work as hard as can be expected for being in that awkward phase of life) and one solidly intermediate student.  And I'm getting to know them and their families much more deeply, now that I've had a year with most of them... I guess you could say I'm settling in.

And you know, I never thought I'd "settle in" to the life of what Dr. Budds calls "a peripatetic piano teacher," but I am.  I always thought I'd go back to grad school in another year or so, which isn't to say that I won't or that it's not a possibility but... for what?  (other than the sheer love of learning... ?)  I watch my former profs kill themselves year after year, playing the political game to the best of their ability, all to be paid way less than the engineering professors and be put out to pasture in the end... I know that at 25, I'm probably a little overly disillusioned but let's not forget to mention the fact that there are tons of DMAs and PhDs running around out there with their doctorates in music who end up doing exactly what I'm doing or working at Starbucks to pay the interest on their student loans each month because they can't find an open professorship for which they're qualified enough (which, they are... it's just that... well, so is every other applying candidate).  It's pretty sick, if you ask me.

So instead I teach my students and pray for them (like my 8-yr-old who has trouble going to sleep each night because she's scared to death of intruders... sound familiar, Mom?) and strain my coffee and work on the first Debussy Arabesque for Halley's wedding music (which, yes, is easier than the music I worked on in college but I love it and it feels good to practice something pretty that I know I can nail) and enjoy the excitement of my students and try to pay down my student loans and buy myself a $5 bouquet of roses to stick my nose into six times a day because they just smell so amazingly beautiful and do so much to make me feel good... because you have to learn to rest.  And even more than learning to rest, you have to learn to create patterns of work and rest that are healthy.  "Poor and content is rich, and rich enough..." (Shakespeare).  I'd say the same holds true for prestige and power, or lack thereof.

The other night I pulled out my old textbooks and started reading again about Monteverdi.  Ok granted, it wasn't a textbook that I was reading, but it might as well have been.  Anyway, the author describes Monteverdi's life, which in summary looks something like this:
- Monteverdi worked at the court of Mantua.
- He wasn't ever really happy there to start with because they overworked him and paid him nothing (I just don't know anyone in that kind of position!...).
- Then, after all that hard work, his wife dies in 1607.
- Naturally, this tragedy brought about a fury of creativity, resulting in one of the most famous operas in the history of the canon, Orfeo, written a few months later...
- But was that enough for the Mantuan court?  Oh no... they wanted more.
- So Monteverdi quits.  He leaves Mantua.  He takes his children to Cremona to live with his dad.  Poor guy just needed a break... and to grieve properly (which also sounds familiar).
- The Duke of Mantua (his former employer) orders Monteverdi back to court on several occasions.  But Monteverdi refuses.  The pay is terrible and they want him to work (to set lines and write scores) at the speed of well... Bach.
- ... And Monteverdi knew that just wasn't his way.  He knew that for most people (Bach excluded), art takes time.  And good art takes even more time... time being a combination of patterns of work and rest and living life, since, you know... art is an expression of the human experience.

Which brings me back to my coffee... every week this summer I've been making iced coffee... you know, the recipe given to me by Christine that she found on The Pioneer Woman's blog.  It is amazing and delicious and downright phoenomenal.  But there's a process to this... gold, for lack of a better word.  What you do is you do not brew it hot and then ice it down like any normal idiot would make iced coffee.  No, you cold-brew it in bulk, mixing coffee and water together in a big pot and put it in the fridge for eight hours and go live your life until its done brewing.  It's a process that takes time... just like art, just like life.  What you put in the fridge is going to come out way different in the end.  But letting it sit... brew... ferment if you will, is what turns it from grounds and water to well... gold.

So what happened to Monteverdi in the end?  Well, this one ends well... St. Mark's hears that he's out of work (available for employment?) and asks him to come be Maestro di capella, which doesn't sound like much if you don't know what it means.  St. Mark's in Venice happened to be one of the best churches around during the Renaissance.  They had amazing (seemingly unlimited) resources, a fantastic performing space, and more importantly, everyone there had a tremendous respect for Monteverdi as both a musician and a person.  So asking him to come be music director was a huge deal.  It would be the equivalent of being asked to be music director at Westminster Abbey today.  They paid him about four times as much as he made at Mantua by the end of his career and he had full control of both his time and his musical investments, so long as the church work got done.  And he never had to beg for his paycheck.  If he didn't pick it up, they sent it to his house on the day it was due.

And my story is highly unlikely to end as beautifully as Monteverdi's did, but I read an article the other day that seemed to sum it up really well...

"You have to do what you have to do.  You can't go to law school if you don't have any interest in being a lawyer.  You can't take a class if taking a class feels like it's going to kill you.  Faking it never works.  ...

...You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success.  You don't have to explain what you're going to do with your life.  You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards.  You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score.  Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts...

You have to pay your electric bill.  You have to be kind.  You have to give it all you got.  You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth.

But that's all." (taken from "The Future Has an Ancient Heart,"  The Rumpus Advice Column #72, www.therumpus.net)

... yes, that's all.

Sources:
- Schoenberg, Harold C.  The Lives of the Great Composers, (Third Edition).  pp. 23-35.  New York:  W.W. Norton and Co.
- Drummond, Ree.  "Perfect Iced Coffee," posted Jun 13, 2011.  The Pioneer Woman.  www.thepioneerwoman.com
- "The Future Has an Ancient Heart," The Rumpus Advice Column #72.  The Rumpus Book Club.  www.therumpus.net