[49] Faculty Concert at Chamber Music Conference of the East, Bennington, VT | #1Summer50Concerts #ConcertGetaway

WHO: Faculty of Chamber Music Conference of the East
WHAT: SCOTT WHEELER Piano Trio No. 2 "Camera Dances"; HINDEMITH Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24 No. 2; BRAHMS Piano Quintet, Op. 34
WHERE: Greenwall Auditorium, Bennington College, Bennington, VT
WHEN: August 3, 2019 at 8:00pm

An abridged list of things I did during my week at Bennington:

• Play the Beethoven "Ghost" trio
• Play Shostakovich's 7th string quartet
• Play a Beethoven quartet (Op. 18 No. 6, for those who are counting)
• Play a Mendelssohn quartet (Op. 12)
• Explain to my friends approximately 47 times that yes, I go to a music camp that requires me to learn four full pieces in one week, and yes, this is my idea of fun
• Get called a masochist approximately 47 times
• Have a conversation with the Bennington College music librarian that ended with, "I'm so glad that score of Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens (which was on sale for $2 at the annual music sale) is going to a good home." Why yes, I'll feed it and water it and turn it towards the sunlight, just like I do with the rest of my....scores?
• Read Shostakovich's second piano trio (read: really really hard) with one of those pianists who is like "oh yeah, I'm just sightreading" and then proceeds to nail 90% of the notes at full tempo. She may be reading this. She knows who she is.
• Eat lots of dining hall food, reminding me that yes, I am happy to have a kitchen this upcoming year
• Pitch the #1Summer50Concerts project approximately 47 times
• Explain approximately 47 times that yes, I went to 50 concerts and yes, I enjoyed myself
• Get called a masochist approximately 47 times
• Blog while sitting on a bench that overlooks miles and miles of open field (with a little path weed-whacked into it so people can go on walks through the waist-high grass) while listening to Alexandre Tharaud's recordings of the last three Beethoven piano sonatas (would recommend)
• Explore said open field, for shits and giggles
• Come across a mystical forest path that looked something like this:

• Enter the forest path
• Come out the other side to this view:

• Scare a mama deer a little further down the path
• Stargaze
• Obsess over shoes and Bruno Helstroffer (the world's sexiest lute player) with a group of snarky childless 40-somethings
• Sweat. A lot. The music building wasn't air conditioned.

An unabridged list of things I did not do during my week at Bennington:

• Sleep

[48] Faculty Concert at Chamber Music Conference of the East, Bennington, VT | #1Summer50Concerts #ConcertGetaway

WHO: Faculty of Chamber Music Conference of the East
WHAT: MENDELSSOHN String Quartet No. 6, Op. 80; MOZART String Quintet No. 3, K. 515
WHERE: Greenwall Auditorium, Bennington College, Bennington, VT
WHEN: July 31, 2019 at 8:00pm

Ultimately, I decided not to write a college essay on Kinhaven, my most formative music camp experience, for much the same reason I didn't wax poetic in my last post -- I didn't/don't think I can put words to paper that express how much that location means to me.

I also love Bennington, a weeklong summer chamber music camp for grownups in southern Vermont. But it's less emotional for me, mostly because I can keep going back summer after summer until I keel over. So I wrote a college essay about it -- nothing long, just one of the 300-word essays.

And as I was thinking about what to write for this post, I thought to myself: who better to tell you what Bennington means to me than 17-year-old me trying to pander to admissions officers? If I convinced them, then certainly I can convince you(?).

Here it is: my Bennington essay, unedited from the time I hit the "submit" button.

"It’s my first day at Bennington Chamber Music Conference in Vermont, where I’m the only teenager among several hundred amateur musicians. I take my cello out of my case and sit down. I start to leaf through the piece in front of me, the famously difficult Mendelssohn Octet. My stomach churns. I chat nervously with the other players for a while as we wait on our first violinist. We hear a knock on the door: it’s Shem Guibbory, a violinist from New York’s Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

"Oh, brother.

"My week at Bennington was a baptism by fire. I expected a relatively low-key experience; I had just come from six weeks at another intense music camp, and I assumed I’d have some time to relax.

"I was wrong. A friend explained the schedule: in addition to two professional coachings per day on pre-practiced pieces, there were four free periods per day to sight-read. The typical day started at 9am and didn’t end until midnight. And playing with seasoned professionals was the norm, not the exception.

"That first day, I sight-read 6 full pieces, in addition to the ones on which I was being coached. By bedtime I was catatonic. But I was learning. Reading Allen Shawn’s Dreamscape cemented my love for modern music. Shostakovich’s piano quintet reminded me that as the cellist, I was responsible for driving the music forward.

"Most of all, Bennington showed me how I want to live. The enthusiastic amateur musicians around me had demanding jobs (doctors, professors, and environmental scientists, just to name a few) but all had carved a week out of their busy schedules to play chamber music in the mountains. It was here that I realized that I want music to be a part of my life forever, but I don’t want to play for a living. I want my career to challenge me intellectually and support me and my family, and I want to spend my vacations making music with friends in the mountains."

FIN

I don't know why, but when I read that in my head, it's in a pre-pubescent 12-year-old Emery voice. Does that mean that in 20 years, when I look back on these posts, I'll read it like that, too?

I should take a moment to mention that the Mendelssohn on this concert was truly astounding. Bennington's faculty have just as much fun as the participants -- because Bennington is all adults, the coaches can be more relaxed and open with the students than they could be at a high school festival. But don't be fooled -- each faculty member is alarmingly accomplished.

The Mendelssohn quartet was headed by Diana Cohen, concertmaster of the Calgary Philharmonic. Personally, I think she should quit that job and become a full-time chamber musician, she played that well -- the amount of fiery soul she managed to impart in those 25 minutes is completely beyond words. Second violinist Alex Fortes (who, it turns out, was sitting not ten feet from me at ChamberQUEER earlier this summer) mirrored her affect perfectly, providing a support network for her to soar. Violist Korinne Fujiwara (of the Carpe Diem quartet -- also a fantastic coach) and cellist Maxine Neuman (a longtime festival mainstay and Bennington College faculty member) rounded out the jaw-dropping ensemble.

That's about all I have to say for now. More on Bennington in the next post!

[47] Final Faculty Concert at Kinhaven Music School, Weston, VT | #1Summer50Concerts #ConcertGetaway

Top: My first day of Kinhaven, 2010
Bottom: Home at last, 2019 (the one to my left used to be the scrawny 11-year-old described below)

WHO: Faculty of Kinhaven Music School
WHAT: SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 3; TURINA Piano Quartet in A minor; MILHAUD La création du monde
WHERE: Concert Hall, Kinhaven Music School, Weston, VT
WHEN: July 27, 2019 at 7:30pm

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

After seven summers, I left Kinhaven Music School for the last time in August 2017. But Kinhaven certainly hasn’t left me. In fact, it seems that Kinhaven follows me wherever I go.

I could write a few paragraphs of cliché about what Kinhaven means to me, but I'd rather not. Feel free to buy me a drink sometime and I'll tell you how Kinhaven changed my life and why it's a unique, formative environment that I believe makes every teenage musician who's lucky enough to spend the summer there a better human.

But for the time being, let me just share a few warm-and-fuzzy Kinhaven anecdotes with you, in no particular order.

• In 2016, I applied for the librarian position with the National Youth Orchestra of the United States. They were a day late releasing the results. After 24 hours of nerves, I finally got the email saying I hadn't gotten it. I cried tears of joy, because that meant I could go back to Kinhaven.
• The madrigals and Bach chorales we learn at the beginning of each summer are etched into my brain forever. You thought the St. Matthew Passion's recurring chorale was heart-wrenching? You ain't felt nothing, honey.
• If you pick a piece at random from the canon, chances are it reminds me of Kinhaven in one way or another. Not exaggerating -- seven years of marathon concerts will do that to you.
• I want my final assignment from Kinhaven played at my funeral. For the record, if I die tomorrow: that's the third movement of the third Brahms piano quartet.
• The hardest I've ever cried was after I finished playing that movement on my last night at Kinhaven. It was ugly. The snot stains never really came out of my concert-white shirt.
• I'm still in touch with BOTH of my Kinhaven cello teachers.
• At an amateur chamber music conference a few years ago, I was talking to a woman who was probably about 70. I mentioned Kinhaven and her eyes lit up: "I went to Kinhaven in 1970, before (late long-standing married directors of Kinhaven) were even dating!" Instant friendship.
• For me, the highlight of Yale Glee Club's tour to the UK was getting to see one of my best Kinhaven friends, who now goes to University of St. Andrew's, for approximately five minutes.
• My final year at Kinhaven, I organized a sunrise Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil listening party on the large hill that serves as the center of Kinhaven's campus ("The Sitting Hill"). People actually showed up. The tradition lives on even though I've aged out.
• In 2011, I walked into my cabin on the first day of Kinhaven and found a scrawny, awkward 11-year-old trumpet player sitting on the bunk across from mine. He's been one of my best friends ever since, through six summers together at Kinhaven.
• Vermont air has a special smell. Trust me.
• At the Yale Glee Club banquet, we go around in a circle toasting each other until we finish a *large* goblet of some unidentified fruity drink. One of my Kinhaven friends, who happened to end up in the Glee Club with me, made his first toast to me, "because you were there when it all started." He sang for the first time next to me at Kinhaven. Have I mentioned I'm really terrible at holding back tears?
• I learned my first Kinhaven folk dance on my first day of the 2010 session. Nine years later and all the steps are still second-nature.
• I still have Kinhaven dreams at least five times a month. My mother, who went to Kinhaven in the early '80s, does too.
• Whether you know it or not, this summer project has been peppered with Kinhaven people, from Caroline Shaw, to the umpteen people I randomly ran into, to all of the unnamed "friends" with whom I went to concerts.

"There is no such beauty as where you belong."

-- Stephen Paulus, The Road Home

PC: My former counselor Marty Jacobs