The Ossia Year

We got that question, with the implied incredulity from the extra punctuation, from every English person we met on our travels before getting to England. Last night, a gentleman at the next table asked us the same in the present tense when he heard our accents. I guess it’s not considered a tourist destination, but it’s lovely, and I don’t regret a bit that we came! And the answer is because of our brother- and sister-in-law, Bryan and Olya, who teach in the drama department at the University. Exeter is a university town. The students are everywhere. Our first night, when we were walking to B and O’s for dinner, we heard two groups of guys shouting insults back and forth, only they were not insulting. “Ya fucking cherub!!” the guy on our side of the street yelled. “You have perfect eyebrows!!” was the answer from the other side of the street.

You know that book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”? I feel like I’m getting a lesson in how to be highly effective from Bryan and Olya. They live in a sweet two-story brick townhouse, just like so much of what you see here (I felt like I’m in a Sally Rooney novel walking around, and yes, I know that’s Ireland). But they’ve made it spectacular and magical inside, with a tangle of plants and beautiful prints and pottery by local artists. The Saturday after we arrived was the 2 year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and B and O are very active in the community here, bringing over refugees, and helping found a “Ukrainian Devon” society to provide support for folks living here in Devon, hosting musicians from Ukraine who come to perform here, and sending support to Ukraine. Saturday they held an event to offer poetry, community, and a space to grieve. First there was an outdoor gathering, completely packing the street with Ukrainian flags. Then everyone came inside to a church on High Street, where a number of women were making food and setting up. A parade of poets and readers, along with a translator, read, then there was a break, and I played three movements of Glass and Caroline Shaw’s in manus tuas. Such a good piece. Olya, afterwards, said, “Caroline must have been to Ukraine, or have some Ukrainian in her heart, because the piece was so perfect to what we are feeling now.”

Olya is in the process of opening a bakery. Their previous place, MakeTank, which was a haven for arts and creativity, as you can imagine by the name, lost its lease. The landlord is a trust basically owned by the royal family, so kids from the local school have written letters to King Charles himself, asking him to reopen MakeTank! In the meantime, the new bakery space is a warren of light filled spaces, including a studio they’ve already opened to a local artist who makes colorful, brilliant, cartoon-like works. On our long walk yesterday to the Quay, Exeter’s restaurant- and shop-filled banks of the river Exe, Olya stopped at a vintage lighting store and then a craft shop to scope out options for the new space, plus took me and the boys into a vintage book shop in a medieval-looking timbered house, chatting with the shop owners in every place. I love the roots they- Olya and Bryan- have built in their community, and that they take that support to put it into real, creative work and action. The new bakery, Flowers on Toast, is also going to be a center for creativity, not only delicious food. Bryan had shown us some of the reels his students have made in his film acting class, and as a different kind of performance teacher, I was moved to see how the kids have taken his lessons and made works completely of their own choosing and direction (many had chosen monologues and scenes from Netflix. 2024, ladies and gentlemen!). I’m taking all of this back home with me. So glad we got to see them in their element.

Need more pics of Olya and the bakery, but for now, here’s C and O with the divine Miss Michiko, and her Ukrainian sweater.

I’ve never been on a cruise. I have a weird memory of throwing up over the side of the boat when a friend of my mom’s, a nun who worked at the Kenmare School in Jersey City where my mom volunteered, took us out on her sailboat on NY Harbor. I’m not a boat person. But this travel across the English Channel is changing me. We splurged on a “Commodore Suite” since it was an overnight trip, so we’d be saving on a night of Airbnb. Four beds, TV, balcony… but then Brittany Ferries postponed our boat from last night to this morning, so we had an extra night in St. Malo, the picturesque, old-New England-looking walled city where we spent our last little part of our French trip. Bummer, but not really, since this way we’re not worried about getting sleep, which would be hard to do when there’s so much cool stuff to see on this ship and out in the ocean. A rainbow between two fortress-laden rocky islands bade us goodbye as we set off. I just read an issue of Bon Appetite I’d downloaded last summer (best restaurants list includes 2 in the Boston area!!), listening to Djo and Mitski— there is great new music being made!! I’ll pick up Moby Dick in a second. Been reading that since we were home in December. There’s a poster on the upper deck of whales and dolphins of the European North Atlantic, so I said hi to Mr. or Mrs. Sperm Whale.

1. Just because you’re somewhere doesn’t mean you can be a tourist there. This is dumb because: duh. But it’s a helpful reminder as we have now entered the batshit crazy part of our journey that we’re not going to get to see much of every place we get to from now on. We just had a week in Marseille. It was so lovely and historic, and actually we were, in the end, able to do a shocking amount when I stop and think about it. But the two big “adventures” Christopher and I each had hoped to take the boys on— me to the calanques, a set of cliffs and inlets about half an hour to two hours, depending on which “calanque” you chose, away from the city that three different people had told us we HAD to go to, and C to the Chateau d’If, the fortress on a tiny island much closer to Marseille, where both Alexandre Dumas was imprisoned and a rhinoceros sent as a gift to a French king was famously abandoned— well, we couldn’t do them. We did do another great -nque activity, and twice at that: pétanque, our family’s new favorite activity. So fun, and so much shit-talking and relatively little sensitivity about it! We played kids vs parents, and wouldn’t you know, had our asses handed to us! Not every tournament (we did multiple best-of-7’s and -5’s) but enough that we’ve decided for Griffin that when he gets back, he’s gotta start an Arlington High School pétanque club.

We also made it to some really awesome museums: the Beaux Arts that’s in the Frenchest building you’ve ever seen.

And the Mucem: museum of European and Mediterranean civilizations. Holy cow, that one really won my heart. The mix of high and low- crafts and everyday items, gorgeous movie and advertisement art, graffiti, religious items— in the “Populaire” exhibit of favorites from their collection was a blast.

And the exhibit titled something like “Alternative Empires” was like a what-if extravaganza. What if the European system of, you name it: language, calendar, music, hierarchy, hadn’t become so globally dominant? My favorite part, naturally, was the listening booths, each of a different culture’s musical storytelling traditions. So simply done: just wood boards with holes in them like my Grammy used to have in her kitchen, filled with hooks to hang her pots and pans on. They were painted teal and had simple ecru line-drawings of the instruments and clothing of each group. And you’d just sit in that little corner with headphones on. I don’t know why it inspired me so much, but I started getting all sorts of ideas of music I wanted make out of each of them, especially the Gnawa music/chanting from Morocco, and the Jongo from Brazil.

Oh yeah: and SOCCER, or football, whatever. It’s like this global religion that we Americans (for the most part) are on the outside of. We went to a game in Marseille and it was NUTS. Earsplitting from beginning to end, and our taxi driver the next day told us she thought the stadium was EMPTY! “Very sad,” she said. She also told us she’d waited for 26 hours, “making barbecue on the sidewalk” to buy season tickets. The game went by so fast, especially compared to when you watch it on TV. It was super fun and we’re all Olympique Marseille fans now. They were playing the team from Metz, and I kept wanting to sing the “Let’s Go Mets” song, stupid NYC-born-mom joke, but the boys reminded me I’d probably get beaten up for it. Passionate fans. Speaking of, we’re in Bordeaux now, and there are folks everywhere wrapped in green, orange and white flags cheering and setting off fireworks. I did some googling and figured out: Ivory Coast beat Nigeria in the Africa Cup of Nations today. 🇨🇮

Ok, this was all meant to say I was going to write dumb stuff, as in duh stuff. The other “revelation” was that you don’t realize how much of an impact a place has on you until you’ve left it. Duh. But because we’re kind of starting to speed up the rate of change, it’s going to be harder for me to calculate those impacts AND it may be harder for me to write it down. Tarragona is on my mind today, and it was two cuties (lol cities but I’m gonna let that one stay!) ago but I’m not ready to say exactly how it changed me or how it’s staying with me.

It’s our last night in Tarragona. This town has won our hearts. In the month we’ve been here, we’ve visited the Roman Aqueduct, Circus, Amphitheater, and other ruins (this was the capital of Roman Spain, and even the capital of Rome for a few years, while Julius Caesar was living here). We’ve visited the modern art museum, the cathedral, and the skate park. We had insanely good ramen in a Japanese place that was outfitted to look and feel like a Tokyo subway car absolutely papered with panels from manga, many of which the boys joyfully recognized. We had insanely good ice cream from Italian gelato places and (my favorite) the Galician spot up the ancient steps from our place. We had a giant pan of paella for our last big lunch here. One of the first nights here, I noticed a huge paella pan in the kitchen, so I tried my hand at it (twice) and will for sure be ordering a giant pan on Amazon after we get home. Yesterday, Aryeh played soccer, excuse me: FUTBOL, with a couple of local kids in the nearby square of Santa Tecla and got WORKED. But was glowing, he was so happy.

Last weekend, I flew to Murcia, south of us about a 6 hour drive (my brain is too tired for km or miles), almost in Andalusia, and past Valencia. My friend Cecilia is a newly minted professor of viola at the University there, and she invited me to play my Philip Glass and give a masterclass. Holy cow what a beautiful city. I hadn’t seen Cecilia in… 15 years? We played together on this one-off tour through Europe with a chamber orchestra that literally never played together besides that tour. The viola section- Cecilia, Esme and Miranda- was the highlight of it for me. During the pandemic, the four of us plus my friend Christine got together to play the 5-viola arrangement of the Erlkönig, which we tried to put together via that ill-fated app, Acapella, that we all were playing around with when we were forced into solitude by COVID. Unfortunately, it glitched too much when the fifth voice (Cecilia) was added, so we never were able to share it with the world. But the process of putting together music with friends in Madrid, Toronto, New York, and Kansas City, from our own little bunkers, was a blast. Maybe someday we’ll try again, now that we’re all better at video editing. Maybe someday we’ll get to play it together in real life. Anyway, it was a huge treat for me to get to meet Cecilia’s students. A sweet, curious and enthusiastic bunch. I only regretted that my Spanish wasn’t up to the task, and I ended up doing most of the class in English. Boo.

Tomorrow we take a 7 hour bus ride from Barcelona to Marseille. Adios, España. Me encanta para siempre.

…or so. I don’t know how many hours we’re here exactly. Two nights and one and a half days. It’s such a gorgeous city to step out into. This is the Ministry of Agriculture, right across from the train station.

And this is what they’re showing on their Disney.

As I took those 2 pictures, Aryeh said, “This city reminds me of…” I tried guessing. New York? No. Montreal? No. “What’s that city we went to that’s right near where we’re staying?” Barcelona??? “Yeah, that one.” 😆

We had a very homey and delicious lunch at a Dominican restaurant. Felt like home (NYC home), and got me thinking again about the legacies of colonialism. In Mexico, there is much more comfort with their history of colonialism than ours in the US, maybe because indigenous people weren’t shoved off the map, maybe because SO many languages are still widely spoken, and pre-Colombian structures remain all over the country, or maybe because they threw out the Spanish long before our own Civil War and end of slavery. Anyway. It’s interesting to go straight from there to here, the land of their colonizers. Check out what’s being celebrated on their— Spain’s— stamps:

If the print is too small, that’s the 500th anniversary of Cortés founding the city of Veracruz in Mexico. Imagine if the UK were printing stamps celebrating the departure of the Mayflower! Do they do that and I just didn’t know? It’s so… interesting!! To this Yankee, anyway.

Lying in our sweet hostel room (Latroupe, highly recommend!!) digesting and siestaing before we head out to take advantage of the Prado’s free evening hours.

I’ve kept up lessons with three of my private students in Arlington while traveling. In Mexico, we were two, then one hour behind (Mexico doesn’t do Daylight Savings) and the biggest challenges had to do with wifi on my end. Now I’m 6 hours ahead, and I’m giving lessons at 10pm my time. I was in bed watching a documentary on Pablo Casals when a message reached me from a student’s mom wondering if I was actually gonna teach her kid. She wrote much more nicely than that, but it was a good 15 minutes past when we were supposed to start, and I’d totally blanked.

Already it’s hard enough to teach remotely when working on new techniques like shifting or vibrato. I had whole classes of total beginners I taught in that first awful COVID year, and there were things about the screen that actually helped, like extreme closeups of my hands and fingers! I’d never stick my hand in a kid’s face in real life. But those challenges plus me being at the end of a long day with homeschooling… let’s just say I’m not killing it. Yet. The students are so sweet and making amazing progress themselves, so I’m not worried about them at all!

Meanwhile, in that Casals doc (Casals was born here in Tarragona!), there’s some incredible footage of him giving lessons. He could be kind of… unkind. Like, just playing over his students to show them what he meant. But there’s also this clear, lofty expectation he has of them that’s so inspiring. I’ve been trying to play Bach every day, in his honor— and cause it’s just a nice habit if you’ve got the time!— and the words of Patricia Zander have been resonating with me. She was my chamber-music coach my first year at NEC. Our violinist went home to Holland for a month, so Ms. Zander offered the 3 others of us in the group coachings on our solo Bach while Marjolein was away. We were so lucky! The most memorable thing she said was: “When you play Bach, you need to give the impression that you’re playing in tempo. But of course you’re not, exactly. It would be so boring if you were.” Casals’s interpretation of Bach is so fluid. It made me think of how your pulse quickens and slows depending on how excited or calm you are. Working so much these past months on Philip Glass, I’m waaaaaayy more free with those pieces, partly because the cellist he wrote the pieces for, Wendy Sutter, plays them so freely, it unlocked that option for me. Plus I think they would be insufferable without pushing and pulling. I take the “Songs and Poems” title literally, and phrase at times as if there were words. But why don’t I feel that comfy playing Bach that way? “Performance practice?” Tradition? I don’t know.

When I hung out with some friends while we were back home in December, one asked me, “So, tell us what you’ve learned from your time abroad!” And I felt so lame! I had nothing to say! I fumbled a bit and then said how glad I was to be from Boston, both because of how awesome the music scene is, so many great friends whom I miss, and because it’s nice to see it has a good reputation abroad! Or in Mexico anyway. But I don’t really stand by that answer, I was just trying to find something to say. I probably won’t have any good answers to that question, or at least not until after I’ve been home from this trip for a long time and have some perspective. But getting this new lens to view Bach, via Ms. Zander via Casals, via getting to see and play in his old stomping grounds, is a nice takeaway.

I can’t seem to photodump on the “Journal” page like I used to, so anyone who’s reading this who doesn’t follow me on Instagram, that’s an easier place for me to share pics. In the meantime, this was the Roman aqueduct we walked across right near Sant Salvador, where Casals built his home before he left Spain.

I just redid this whole page, since the infinite scroll was insane to me. I keep this page mostly for myself, since it’s much easier to tap or dictate into this little app wherever and whenever, than to actually make the time to write in my paper journal.

The difference between being one hour behind most of our people, and six hours ahead of them, really changes the nature of this trip. Early on in our time in Mexico, the boys could FaceTime with friends while they parallel played video games or just to showed them Mexico. I was able to teach my viola and violin students after their school and mine. But this week I did my first lessons, and they had to start at 930 or 10 PM my time! It’s made the trip feel extra real: now we’re extra far. No complaints, we absolutely love Spain. Ok, one complaint. As amazing as the food is (& cheaper than Mexico when it comes to the supermarket!!) I’m very much missing getting freshly made salsa literally everywhere. Tough life.

Jet-lag is a bitch!! I’m drinking cold Yerba mate tea, and one of the chocolates our Airbnb host left for us, trying to stay awake so I can sleep at the right time. I’m starting a new 100-days-of-practice challenge. Not feeling like I have any New Year’s resolutions per se, but the words of Shinichi Suzuki are really sticking with me: when you think of something, do it. Easier said than done, of course, but he writes about it so inspiringly, telling the story of how one day his sister, with whom he was living, came home and said: “There was a homeless man outside the market. I thought of inviting him to dinner sometime.” “You thought about it?” Suzuki asks her. Immediately, she realizes what he means, and they go back out together and invite the man in. I think the important thing with this is not just that intentions mean nothing without actions, but that also the more actions you put out into the world, the less personally you take it if they don’t all work out: the less invested you are in each individual effort, and the more perspective you have that more opportunity will arise. I hope this is true, anyway. To the viola!!!

I’d tried to keep the pictures on the “Journal” page and the words here, but I think I’ve maxed that page out! Anyway, new year, new continent. We landed this AM in Barcelona. I didn’t sleep on the plane, and neither did the boys, I think! But they were having fun together the whole time, so what can you do. I really should be writing lesson plans, since the goal is to start school tomorrow. But I feel like my eyes are spinning round in my face.

I watched Barbie on the flight- finally!!! How come nobody told me how good Simu Liu is in it??? He and Ryan Gosling have such chemistry, they should make a whole series of buddy pictures (or rom-coms!) together! So fun. Best quote, when Ken says: “To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I lost interest anyway.”

We fly out of Mexico tomorrow. I’m reading this page, and it sure is a lot of words, even though I felt pangs from time to time for not keeping it updated enough. It’s been almost four months! In that time, I led the music theory, music history, and half of the art classes for both boys, and Aryeh— who’s been my charge for math, English, science (for half of it; C did earth sciences with the boys until Mérida) and violin— has done… ok let’s do this by subject.

Math: multiples and factors, including lots of times-tables drilling; 3-digit addition and subtraction; area and perimeter; area model for multiplication; all sorts of stuff with fractions; and yesterday, as a bonus activity since we finished the Khan Academy fractions unit, we did a class on Roman Numerals, which he really enjoyed. This was the subject I feared the most heading out, so seeing this list is making me pretty damn proud!

English: he’s read a book of short stories by I.B. Singer, a giant manga about a cat we got in Mexico City (both of those books have been sent home already so I forget their titles), The Railway Children by E. Nesbit, and Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime,” (the YA version), which he’s doing his 4th grade “Bottle Buddy” project on. Griffin was in 4th grade when vivid started, and was obsessed with Trevor Noah, so we got the book on the iPad and on Audible. So it’s funny to revisit now, a different situation where non-paper books are very helpful! Aryeh struggles with spelling and writing, and I’m a grammar nerd who represented her school in the Hudson County Spelling Bee in 7th grade, so that’s been fun for us 🤯😵‍💫 I picked up a couple of paper workbooks and have been poring over every nook and cranny of education.com for materials. His writing is amazing, and it’s so cool to get to see these little daily activities the teacher would see but not necessarily share with the parents. I read to the boys almost every night from Huck Finn. We’re almost done!

We only did Life Science in Mérida and it was about Mexican biomes and animals, which he really enjoyed, and the water, carbon and nitrogen cycles, which he did not.

For violin: when we got here, Aryeh had performed Minuet 1, from Suzuki, earlier in the summer, and barely practiced since then, totally stalling out on Minuet 2. His teacher, and my friend, Emily, had suggested taking a sideways path around and then back to Minuet 2, so on my iPad, I made a whole folder of music for him. Useful pages from the Essential Elements books the kids use in school orchestra, the first half of the Fairfield Fiddle Book, the first pages of Don Krishnaswami’s 2 octave scales & arpeggios (his book’s for sale on another page here! 😇), and a Samuel Applebaum book of first etudes (Beautiful Sound for Technique Building or something like that). Aryeh did all four fiddle songs- including Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a song I sang at Farm&Wilderness, so I always get teary when he plays it!! Plus he now plays a scale and arpeggio whenever he takes his violin out of the case!! And just the other day, we got to the end of Minuet 2. Finally!! I grew up a Suzuki kid, and I love the tunes so, so much. But it’s hard without the community element of a group class, all the other kids inspiring you, getting to hear the later songs played by kids, not by the perfect example on Spotify. I’m hoping we can make it to a Suzuki camp this summer.

One note about teaching my kid violin: last summer at Point Counterpoint, I asked my friend Tina Lee Hadari, whose two daughters are absolutely lovely, motivated and talented musicians, and who both started with her (the younger still studies with her, I believe), how she kept the difference between practice and lesson clear, since when Aryeh started, he took with me, and I was terrible at that. Tina said, “Oh, we don’t do lessons! I just practice with her every day!” That was life-changing.

Note: the boys also did Spanish, units on Mexican History, feminism (a great online course on intersectionality taught by Bettina Aptheker), and Mayan Studies with Christopher. I’m not writing about what Griffin has done because he worked with C during those periods when I was with Yeh. But Griffin is such a voracious, insightful reader, it’s been cool to see what he does when he’s limited to the books we brought for him and ourselves. I’m sure I’ll leave books out, but on this trip he’s read: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, two Murakami novels, Dubliners, the History of Mexico, and he’s deep in Don Quixote now. AND he asks to read my Joan Didion essays when he’s bored at night!