The Ossia Year

Yesterday, we went to the church of San Luigi Francese, aka Saint Louis the French, to see the Caravaggios so beautifully shown in Ripley. (Nothing like watching American tourists in Italy while being American tourists in Italy! I love the original movie, but I also really love this new show.) Then we ate at the favorite Roman restaurant of my mom’s friend Eve, the author of the incredible treasure hunt we’ve been using to explore and learn more about the Eternal City. The boys and I shopped the Campo di Fiori for gifts and bulk candy afterwards. The boys each got little bags of pasta with souvenir spoons for friends, and I found a gorgeous black silk dress that I’ll wear at the BMOP concert next week (NEXT WEEK!).

Today, we’ll go to see the Castel Sant’Angelo, the hulking former prison on the banks of the Tiber near the Vatican, then split up: C wants to return to the Capitoline Museum, and I want to get to the MAXXI (21st century art museum— get it?). Tomorrow, we go to Pompeii. It’s hard to imagine we’re not going to be exhausted by that (it’s more than 2 hours travel there and back) so Thursday will be relatively mellow: hopefully nice enough weather to go back to the beach in Ostia. Aryeh and I spent Sunday there with my friend Daniella and her girls, all visiting from Berlin, and their sweet Italian/German friends who live in Rome. Aryeh the only boy, but playing with all of them just so happily. He’s had so little time with kids his own age. And for me to get so much time with a dear friend from high school days (we met at NY Youth Symphony!) was precious.

Little trivia fact: the direct train line to Ostia and its beaches was put in by Mussolini. It’s just 1.50 Euro to go and it’s a lovely gift to the people of Rome, even if the giver was a monster.

Some shots from the beach and the last few days’ adventures…

The milk tastes better here. I’m a firm believer in no cookie without a big, cold glass of milk, and I’ve eaten a LOT of cookies here. All of Europe is proud of each country selling its own milk, even when the supermarket chains (Carrefour, Spar, etc) are the same everywhere . Why is Italian milk more delicious?

Also, while I think it’s safe to assume that the US’s global superpower role has been waning since Trump, we see SO many NY Yankees logos everywhere we go. Other sports teams, too. In Mexico it was US football. Here it’s more NBA. I haven’t had a lot of political conversations on this trip, but the one night at the hostel in Madrid, the boys and I had the “family dinner” with some other guests- from South Korea, Portugal and the UK. The British lady started her sentence with, “I can’t believe you guys are about to nominate…” and I thought she was going to say “Trump,” but instead she said “a guy with one foot in the grave.”

We’re in Rome, in our last Airbnb of the trip. When we started in Italy, up north in Pino Torinese, my friend Mary Ann told a story about a masterclass given by the great cellist Amber Bylsma. One of the kids was playing Boccherini. Bylsma asked him if he’d been to Italy. The kid said no. Bylsma said, “you have to go to Italy to see the light there to understand Boccherini’s music.” It’s true! The light here is different! I saw it most clearly in Florence, but also in Venice and Sicily. I don’t know what it is about this long, boot-shaped strip of land in the middle of the water. Just golden and warm.

Today we took a day trip to Ostia, the beach town that was Rome’s ancient port. The smell of the flowering trees was intoxicating, just as the smell of the lemon and orange flowers in Sicily had been. We stopped in a church after the beach, on the way back to the train, and these paintings really brought home for me how Christianity is at its pure, uncorrupted soul, about the poor and downtrodden. There’s obviously a lot on top of it, and centuries of personalities and abuse and money. But these images really got to me.

I’m looking at the Valley of the Temples— Greek temples, in Agrigento, Sicily. this morning, Griffin and I took a tour of the lower levels of the church next to our hotel in Siracusa- on the Via Della Giudecca. Three(!!) levels down was the miqveh made out of the Ancient Greek cistern. It’s the only current entrance to the tunnels dug by the ancient Greeks when they built Siracusa, then used as bomb shelter by civilians during the bombing of WW2. There were scribbles on the wall left by someone marking all the planes that dropped bombs: German, British, American, plus parachuters. During the war, 10,000 people sheltered there for three years, and there were 22 entrances all over the island of Ortigia.

Then, the other side of the plaza held this incredible book store owned by a Jewish publishing house based in Krakow. So many beautiful posters and notebooks, plus books in Polish, Italian and Hebrew. Yiddish alphabet posters, as well as other alphabets: Chinese and Japanese. But the thing I bought was a collection of Freylakhs from Ukraine. The publisher also gathers klezmer from around Eastern Europe.

My family is gathering for an early Seder right now as I write this. They’re in my aunt Susan’s house, where we’ve held countless Seders in the past. But she’s selling the house, so it will probably be the last one there. A lot of feelings at this moment.

Why am I writing about the NYC musicians union while in Sicily? A bombshell story came out on April 12 (my birthday) about a scandal at the NY Philharmonic involving rape, date rape drugs, and tenure. But the real scandal, in my mind, is how, after the Phil had fired the two accused men, Local 802, the NYC musicians union, fought for them to get their jobs back, including back pay.

But let’s face it: this union protects those who have broken through to the top levels of the NYC music scene. They’re the ones who guarantee that if you play with a band on Saturday Night Live or one of the late night talk shows, and your image is shown on screen for like 2 seconds, you get a huge sum, on top of what you’re making for playing there. At least, this is what my high school viola teacher told me! I’m not a journalist; i haven’t done any research. Everything I’m writing here is from my own experience, and I left NYC for Boston over 10 years ago. I would love to hear from my friends in New York to know what they think of the union now.

I joined Local 802 myself when I was 19. Sophomore year at Mannes, I got asked to play with Da Capo Opera, a little outfit on the Upper East Side. I was psyched!! The contractor told me I’d have to join the union to play, so I did. The fees were still less than what I’d make on the gig, so it seemed worth it. (Side note: Da Capo was my first time playing in a pit. The trombone player liked me and made eyes at me all through the opera. This was my first time experiencing the effect that “pit lighting” has, because while I thought he was cute under the stage, by the light of day, I saw he looked old enough to be my dad!)

As the year went on, I played a couple of times with Da Capo. One of the regular violinists who was a grad student at Mannes told me she wasn’t in the union, and Zoe, the contractor, had just told me that to get me to join. Oh well, I thought. It felt cool to be in it, even if it wasn’t leading (so far) to any gigs besides Da Capo.

Then, before winter break, there was a big announcement to the Mannes Orchestra. The Metropolitan Opera Guild held a yearly bunch of concerts featuring young, up-and-coming singers, for school-aged audiences. They were going to start an “Apprenticeship Orchestra Program” to train young orchestral musicians to play with the young singers. It would cycle between the three NYC conservatories— Juilliard, Manhattan, and Mannes— and Mannes was going to be first. It would be over March break, so you’d lose your vacation, but you’d be getting paid, and getting to work in the freaking Metropolitan Opera House!! Only 20 or 30 musicians were asked, and I was so excited to be one of them. Mannes was mostly grad students; I was a baby there, comparatively, so it really meant a lot to be included.

As March approached, though, things got weird. At NYU, where I had a regular gig playing for their chamber music class (the perks of playing viola!!), and at SUNY Purchase, where my boyfriend went, I saw these flyers hung up all over the place: “Mannes Students Being Used as Scabs!” The Met Opera Guild thing had been a union gig, and Local 802 wanted it back. The flyers had stuff about dental insurance on there, which seemed weird to me— how do you get dental insurance on a week-long gig?? But now I understand it must have had to do with the employer paying in to the musicians’ insurance. Anyway, these flyers were EVERYWHERE. Juilliard, MSM, Columbia.. all the schools. Then my teacher told me in a lesson that the union had called her and warned her that they knew I was her student and she should warn me that if I did this gig, I’d never work in New York again. Again: I was 19!!! This was so scary. But I also felt like… why?!? Why were they trying to stop this? Young singers, young audiences, why not young orchestra?? If I hadn’t played with Da Capo, I wouldn’t have had any opera pit experience. Not that it’s SO markedly different from regular orchestra playing, but you have to be super flexible (recitatives, wildly expressive singers) and, if you’re a violist, ready to play some REALLY boring parts, often pages upon pages of “footballs,” aka unending whole notes.

In the end, Mannes decided to pull us out. The union had gotten the list of the students, and was threatening all of our futures as musicians in New York. Mannes gave us each a check for $100 (we would have made over $1,000 each for the week). And the gig stayed a union gig, and as far as I know has been so ever since.

I was so angry. Here was a big institution with a program that had such a cool mission— to bring opera to young urban audiences— making an effort to create a training orchestra that was equally split among the 3 big NYC music schools, starting with the littlest, scrappiest one! Yet the union was so protective of its older musicians having this one, week-long gig (or maybe it was 2 weeks?? I’m forgetting now), that it engaged in an all-out threat war on STUDENTS to keep us out. It left such a bad taste in my mouth. I wrote an angry letter to the Local 802 office and said I would no longer be paying my dues and was quitting the union.

Then, that summer, I got a letter that changed my life. I was at an orchestra festival in Germany. My mom told me that a giant envelope came from Eastman, in Rochester. I asked her to open it and read it to me over the phone (the days of landlines and international phone cards!!). “Congratulations,” the letter read. “We’ve increased your scholarship! Here is the George Eastman Grant, and a $500 Bookstore Award, etc etc.”

I had chosen Mannes over Eastman, but the decision was so difficult that I’d told both schools after the deadline. I LOVED my viola teacher at Mannes, but wasn’t crazy about the scrappiness of it all. No campus, dorms in a welfare hotel; in 2 years, I’d lived in 4 different places, including with my boyfriend up near Purchase, and my parents’ house. So I could very easily entertain the idea of transferring. I emailed the head of the financial aid office, to ask what this letter was about. He wrote back that it was a mistake on his part— he’d left me on the rolls of current students for the last two years (I heard from my friend Laura Hollander who went there that she often saw my name on lists by the FA office and was super confused!). But, as he put it, “It would be unprofessional to rescind the offer,” so if I wanted to go, I was welcome. That was that. I transferred to Eastman that September.

A year or so later, I started getting called to play with the Erie Philharmonic, and orchestra that hired both Eastman and Cleveland Institute of Music students as it was situated halfway between them. I had to be a union member, any local, they said, so I joined the Rochester one. The office told me I had a black mark on my name thanks to Local 802. So I contacted the office in NYC, paid something like $100 in back dues, and thought the matter closed. Then, last year, the union rep from Rhode Island Philharmonic, where I often sub, pulled me aside. “You need to clear your name with the AFM! (American Federation of Musicians, the central office for all unions). They say you owe money to Local 802.” I was shocked. This was 20+ years after that whole brouhaha!! I called the AFM office and they said I was fine. I won’t get into the weeds about how it had happened, but it’s strange how this story continues to come back to haunt me.

When I was on another youth orchestra tour— this one with Verbier Orchestra— I kept a travel blog to keep my family up to date with my adventures so I wouldn’t have to worry about buying postcards everywhere. For one leg of the tour, we were conducted by Charles Dutoit (for the other leg: James Levine!) and I really didn’t like him. It was an all-Russian program, some of the same pieces I’d played with Rostropovich at the other festival. Rostropovich, even though he was so old and cranky, was authentic and real. He talked about us all having the same heartbeat, and that heartbeat being the metronome of the music. Dutoit had obvious hair dye- which to early 20something judgmental me was unforgivable— plus he just seemed so… fake! I wrote something like that on my blog. My aunt warned me: “You should be careful what you write about people in power in music. It could damage your career.” (As it turned out, Dutoit was assaulting women all through that time, according to allegations that led to his engagements being cancelled by the BSO and SF Symphony). I tell that story just to say how much I appreciate the posts on this NYPhil debacle, and other issues of discrimination in music, by Katherine Needleman. She’s the principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony and teaches at Curtis. She has tenure, but she also has a lot to lose, putting herself out there. The fact that her latest post was shared, to date, 835 times, says a lot.

If you’d like to send a message to Local 802 that it shouldn’t continue to protect and promote abusers, at the expense of younger, less powerful musicians, you can sign this letter.

Mumble-mumble years ago, my birthday fell on a Friday, like it does today. I was sitting in a class called Long-Term Melodic Memory, thinking about what gifts I had given myself since my last birthday. Foremost in my mind was taking Joe Maneri’s Microtones class. Joe Maneri was like a fairy godfather for kids who wanted to make weird music. He had this class that would often run longer than 4 hours, in which he’d hold forth, play, have us play, sometimes kind of dance from the chair he was ensconced in. It was a magical class. Problem was, that was first semester, and here it was second semester and I had to take this ear-training class for my new added-on major (I was doing two degrees in 3 years), so I couldn’t take Joe’s class. I wrote him a note, telling him that it was my birthday and I was taking stock of the past year, and so grateful to have met him. My pen was a roller-ball and the ink was still a little drippy on the paper, but I folded it up anyway. His class was around the corner, so I put the note in my pocket and told Mr. Sandvik I had to go to the bathroom. (Poor Mr. Sandvik probably had a lot of us improvisers who were unhappy about missing Maneri’s class…). I went to the door of Joe’s class. He was holding forth, as he would do, with his eyes closed. I opened the door a smidge. “She wrote me a note,” he was saying. “And the ink is still wet.” I almost audibly gasped. I snuck up to the desk and dropped the note on it, making as little eye contact with my friends in the class as possible.

The thing about Joe was that he was always talking about telepathy. He said he practiced it with 3 friends who lived around the world- one in Germany, one in South Korea, I forget where the other one was. They’d send each other colors at a predetermined time every week, then check in to see if they’d guessed, or received, correctly. Joe said, “If we, as humans, spent as much time trying to evolve our brains as we do our technology, just think where we’d be.” That always stuck with me. It was a course on deep listening— he divided the octave into 72 microtones!!— as well as improvisation, so his emphasis on developing intuition made sense in that context. It was just so mind-blowing when you’d see his actually kick in.

I tend to think of birthdays as times to make resolutions, more than new years. Yesterday I took a walk while the boys were playing frisbee in the piazza, and felt weirdly chill. This whole trip I’ve been hoping to have some grand move forward in my career or in my self-image, either way asking a lot of my bandwidth while we’re traveling and homeschooling! As we’re heading into our last month or so, I’m letting that stress go.

The boys just gave me a Calvino book in Italian- Invisible Cities, the one in which Marco Polo describes all these fantastical places to Kublai Khan. What a perfect book to have on this crazy journey. I don’t have any elegant way to tie this into thoughts of Joe Maneri, except for that at a certain point in my life, 20+ years ago, Calvino was my fairy godfather. I read everything I could get my hands on by him. I love how he could take a very artificial challenge- say, “Write a book based on the arcana of the tarot card deck,” or “Write a book about physics equations talking to each other” and make it into this very silly, lovely, absolutely readable, life-filled book. I think it comes back to intuition, so I’ll say that’s the thread.

Tonight is my last night of being 44. On the island of Sicily. tomorrow we’ll go to a puppet museum for my birthday, and then go out for dinner to a very cute old restaurant I walked by the other day.

We booked our flight home and our last stop on the trip in the last few days. We’d canceled the Japan leg (maybe I wrote about that before) as we’re just too tired of big trips with lots and lots of baggage and want to go when we don’t have to do school. We’ll go in the summer of next year. So the question was where to go instead. We considered practically all of Europe, but decided instead to explore a place we’d already been but wanted more of. Turin was first on our list, but then Rome captured all of our hearts. Plus Christopher found a soccer camp that Aryeh can do there.

In the last week, we traveled to Naples for a night. I liked it a lot, the boys not as much. We did visit this very cool castle at the top of the city, with amazing views of Vesuvius. It’s called Castel Sant’Elmo. Considering that it’s so easy to get there from Rome, we’ll probably go back so we can visit Pompeii.

Feels like I should have some wise words as I’m about to enter this most middle-aged of ages. Not much to say except for that I love my students— just had a couple of online lessons and feeling extra grateful for them. And the family, and this time together with so many memories being made. Hoping we can hold onto them.

I’ve shared a couple of articles on Facebook about the Chicago Symphony hiring wünderkind conductor Klaus Mäkelä (as well as the travails of typing his name). My friend Cecilia just sent me this great blog post about it, comparing his hire to that of Thomas Sonderland (not gonna even try with the ø’s and ä’s I’m sorry!) at the Minnesota Orchestra, featuring this fantastic quote:

“At the end of the day, here’s my concern: I don’t want audiences to lose an ally, if a day should come when they need one. I want this art form to endure, and to make people’s lives better. That’s literally all I want.

*

Remember: an American music director is only a conductor in his spare time.

First, he is a fundraiser, a psychologist, a detective, a scholar, a gladiator, a mediator, an inspiration, a party guest, a punching bag, a schmoozer, a showman, and a symbol. Oftentimes, what he does on the podium is of secondary (or, depending on the day, tertiary) importance.”

The article is by Emily E. Hogstad, on her fabulous blog Song of the Lark.

Why am I so taken with the hiring drama of major American orchestras? I’m a freelancer who shouldn’t care! I don’t know. Its the royalty of our weird little niche world. Classical music is so old-fashioned! (Note her use of all male pronouns up there. Not wrong.) Maybe it’s the same reason I loved Succession, but with great music involved, too. Hey, Succession also had great music! There’s been a movement at play with orchestras having composers of color in residence, and it’s been so amazing to see the music that’s come out of that. So why are the conductors still overwhelmingly white (& usually from Europe), and male? Is it because of the boards? The pipeline of talent? Hopefully it changes soon.

To celebrate Aryeh’s birthday, we’re spending about 30 hours in Venice. it’s crazy. We just went from Turin to Florence yesterday. But dude wanted to be in Venice on his birthday, and I found some nutso cheap tickets for the family (in a premium class car, no less!) on Trainline- an app I heartily recommend for travel around Europe, along with Omio. Anyway, we’re tilting along in misty, rainy weather between Ferrara and Padua. This little country at the bottom of Europe- and I know it’s not little, but when you’ve been traveling in Spanish-, French- and English-speaking countries and then are doing your Duolingo to be able to communicate in this ONE country that doesn’t have quite the colonial linguistic footprint the others have, you’re really aware of how small it is, competitively- is so interesting. I grew up with a deep love of Italian design, because the cabin my parents bought in the Catskills had been made and lived in by an Italophile architect with loads of Italian design magazines and catalogs that he left there. The country’s awareness of that legacy, along with its history of only actually uniting and becoming a country 160ish years ago, plus the physical realities of just occupying the most beautiful strip of land in Europe, from the alps we could see in Turin to the sun-drenched everything else… I’m not sure where I was going with that sentence, but I guess I’m trying to say we love it here. The first week was spent in a rural town outside of Turin, where I was playing chamber music with two lovely friends from different parts of my life who are now expats living here, one in Belgium, one here in Italy. Absolutely fantastic week, though it wasn’t great for the boys, as our Airbnb was a bit more remote than the host had described it. But she, the host, was herself such a bubbly, friendly character, and she had the most beautiful, red (!) German shepherd, named Tai, or Tata for short/long, we still had a good week on average I’d say. And we liked the area so much we decided to cancel our week on a farm that I’d booked on WWOOF, to have another week in Turin itself. We saw almost no other Americans, except for the one time we went to the pizza place around the corner from our place, which, to be fair, was the best pizza I’d ever had, so it must have been on some kind of Google Review matrix. Oh yeah, I’m eating gluten now. Not bothering me in Italy!!!

On the train, this is what has been making me surreptitiously conduct a little 4-pattern in my seat. This song breaks my brain!!

Also, happy birthday, Aryeh!!!

We’re into our second week here, and first off: Europe, y’all need to switch to these coffeemakers:

Everywhere else they use Nespresso machines, which are equally doubtful in terms of their effect on the environment with those awful little aluminum K-cups. But this one is so good, we talked about looking for it in the states.

Sometimes I feel bad when what I write in this travelog is all about me. Then I think: “any of the boys could write a travelog!” This one’s mine, and it’s on my website, so there! 😝

Thinking about aging, about women in the next chapter… I just read this incredible interview with Isabella Rossellini, and it’s going with my thoughts about Iris Apfel, who just passed away at the age of 102. And the obit of Iris reminds me of something Emerald Fennell, the director of Saltburn, said about herself: “I’m a maximalist.” I love that word. Maybe it’s especially hitting me because of all the time I’ve spent with the music of the most famous minimalist around, though actually I found the entry point into his music, for me anyway, is unlocking the most dramatic, uninhibited levels of expression. Anyway, obviously Iris was a maximalist, and that’s why we all loved her. But there’s something, too, about the fact that neither she nor Isabella chose to fight their aging. In Spain and France, I really noticed a lack of fillers. Of obvious face work having been done. So many gorgeous, lined faces, in Paris especially. Here in London, I saw a BUNCH of ladies these last few days with the super puffy lips, and some others with obvious facelifts. I just don’t get it. We only see the work that’s been done. And I’ll try to see what they were hoping to achieve, but it just looks like a mask. Why spend money on that? Why recover and deal with pain for that? Is it because, as Isabella says in this article, we are having a hard time with the transition between roles? Feeling like once we’re past that age of being seen as attractive, of young motherhood, of the roles women are appreciated for, we may become invisible? I know that fear.

I hung out today with another friend whom I haven’t seen in ~20 years. Her son is only 3, and my boys were very taken with him. Griffin said he wanted to adopt him. Walking around the science museum, it brought me back to being at the Boston Science Museum when my boys were that age. Now I can leave them alone in an exhibit and so my own thing. I can let them walk away from me and know they’ll be ok. We’re far from the point of empty nesting, but we are talking about college, and for me that means thinking about that next stage, when I’m not a mom for a majority of my waking hours (or all of them, while we’re homeschooling!). My own mom is the coolest. She did a number of career 180s in her life, and still makes art and keeps up with friends and family and culture and the things she’s always cared about. I don’t have far to look, when it comes to a role model of a creative, dynamic life. In the middle of this bubble year- a year different from all the rest of our lives, and a year in which I feel like I am in a bubble with these boys a lot of the time, for all the joy and craziness that that entails, that’s a nice thought.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/magazine/isabella-rossellini-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Z00.BdJ1.ckiBLZUQLDA-&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb