brief memoir of a musician

Nancy begged her mother for viola lessons, after developing her first crush, on Pinchas Zukerman, at age 5. At age 6 1/2, after her mother had persuaded Pinky's friend, Patinka Kopec, to dispense with the prerequisite year of piano lessons, Nancy began taking lessons...but on the violin, rather than the viola.

Teacher and student grew very close, so much so that when Patty became pregnant with her first child, she was afraid to break the news to 9 year old Nancy, who, in fact, cried herself to sleep the night she heard. When Nancy was 11 or 12, and serving as the concertmaster of the Junior Orchestra of Long Island, her mother, feeling concerned about what she considered the overly close relationship between her eldest daughter and her violin teacher, decided to separate them for a while.

Nancy auditioned for Margaret Pardee (of blessed memory), who agreed to accept her as a private student, providing she agreed to attend Juilliard pre-college classes weekly and practice four hours each day. Nancy was flattered and thrilled, but her mother refused, insisting that Nancy needed that time in order to perform at the highest possible academic level. So, Nancy began studying instead with one-hour-of practice-a-day Marilyn Smith and joined first, the Long Island Youth Orchestra and soon after, the Nassau Symphony Orchestra, where she startled her standpartner, Eugene Kahn, who had conducted her in JOLI when she was much smaller, just a few years before.

After falling ion love with Wagner and chamber music during a summer at Kinhaven (age 13, 5'10 1/2") and serving the New England Music camp as its concertmaster (age 14, 5'11"), Nancy was accepted into the Manhattan Downeast Chamber Orchestra (predominantly undergraduates at the conservatory) and began playing in a string quartet under the tutelage of Carroll Glenn at the Manhattan School of Music. Glenn invited 15-year-old (5' 11 1/2") Nancy to play chamber music and orchestral music at the Southern Vermont Arts Festival, (now Manchester) where she was joyfully reunited with Patty, who was also a member of the faculty.

That summer, Nancy not only served as babysitter to Patty's 5 year old son, Jeremy, but also resumed private lessons with Patty, which continued when they both returned to New York in the fall. While in Vermont, Nancy stepped up her practicing and, encouraged by the progress she could make practicing 4 hours a day, began to hatch a plan for a serious career in music. She befriended professional musicians for the first time that summer, and also developed another big crush - during the first two minutes of his performance of the Wieniaski violin concerto, standing about four feet away from her right knee - on someone much closer to her own age: the tall, dark and terribly sarcastic 16-year-old recent Russian immigrant Sergei Galperin, a more accomplished violinist than she (hence the crush; Nancy is fairly consistent, if not predictable).

At the end of the summer, Leonard Rose, who was also on faculty, sat Nancy down for some impromptu career counseling.

Rose told Nancy that she was not quite as talented as Sergei or Sarn, (a 17 year old star of the program), that she did not have enough talent to have an international solo performance career, that she would never be the kind of star he thought either one of these young men might possibly become. He could only imagine Nancy going so far as working in a major symphony orchestra, and performing as a soloist with minor regional and civic orchestras, but not beyond that, and he did not believe that would be a very satisfying career for her. He spoke of having been a poor young immigrant in New York, with no other way to survive but by his musical ability, and pointed out the disparity in the circumstances of their youth. He urged Nancy to take her parents' advice and enroll in Harvard or preferably, Yale, to continue with music, but to focus on exploring what alternative paths the elite world of privilege had to offer her.

Senior year brought Nancy several solo opportunities, from Vivaldi to Vitali, Beethoven and Bach. She enjoyed touring the Northeast region on the orchestra bus with Downeast, and also visited the several colleges into which she had been accepted, including a brand new, 5-year-long, double degree program at Tufts and New England Conservatory. To Nancy, it seemed like a perfect solution for a sixteen year old in her predicament - a very young freshman with strong musical and academic abilities - but the option was vetoed by her parents on account of her weak organizational skills (now known as ADD), and the fact that only 3 people had actually managed to juggle their way through the two campus program and ultimately receive both degrees. Nancy accepted the offer to matriculate at Harvard, and received two significant invitations: to study with Roman Totenberg in Blue Hill, Maine, for the summer, and continue to study with him at the Longy School in Cambridge, Mass, after she moved there to begin college. While in Maine, she developed a combo crush/rivalry on/with Nick Rhinelander (of blessed memory) who was exactly her age, when she heard him play the Tchaikowsky violin concerto, and also worked with violinist and Harvard graduate, James Buswell, who also gave her some free advice.

Buswell told Nancy that she would be severely limiting her prospects of a professional musical career if she did not take at least another year, perhaps more, to work on her music before going off to Harvard. "I had already established my solo performance career before I went," he explained sternly. "And concentrating in art history was great, because I would fly off and miss classes to perform in Europe, but while I was in a European city, I would go and see the art and write about it, and I'd get academic credit for that. But you are not quite there. You need more time."

But Nancy soon discovered that she didn't have that option. She asked for permission to stay home through her seventeenth birthday and continue to attend Manhattan School and learn more violin repertoire, but her parents wouldn't hear of their little girl "wasting a year hanging around with a bunch of musicians all day long." They were set on her sending her off "on schedule" and so they did.

Fortunately, Nancy loved studying with Roman Totenberg, and she also loved the Bach Society Orchestra, which she joined immediately upon arriving, and the various pit orchestras that recruited her throughout the year. Nancy was surrounded by more interesting, diverse and multi-talented people, (and also more obnoxious, insecure, backstabbing and double-crossing people) than she had ever met in her life, and this, along with the entire campus atmosphere, affected her profoundly in many ways. During Spring Break of her freshman year, Nancy practiced hard all week and then gave a recital at Club One North in St Croix, bringing her roommate, Yoon-Sun Lee, a pianist, along to accompany her. Back at school though, Nancy found herself needing to cancel quite a few violin lessons because she felt inadequately prepared, having devoted too little time to the etudes and concerto Mr. T. had assigned, and too much time playing with Bach Society and Gilbert & Sullivan, reading books, studying, writing papers, drinking at the Hasty Pudding Club, and looking for her next big crush. She hated to take up Mr. T.'s time when she was less than completely prepared, and felt guilty knowing that so many other talented, ambitious musicians were pining for her spot on his roster of students.

Nancy was honored to sit fourth seat in the first violin section freshman year, and she became the assistant manager for Bach Society, designing their first ever tee- shirts and sweatshirts to wear and sell at concerts. Later that same year, Lynn Chang and Yo-Yo Ma returned to their Alma Mater to perform and record with their former orchestra. The conductor, Sam Wong, befriended Nancy and coached her for an audition with the Pitches, the women's a cappella ensemble that she dreamed of joining. Sadly, her voice didn't fit the part that was open at the time, but when various dorms (called houses) hired the chamber orchestra to play waltz music for their formal dances, Nancy sang jazz at the breaks along with a three piece band, and had a great time doing so. It was all very glamorous and absorbing, and Nancy gradually forgot about her ambitions to be a professional musician, or rather, resigned herself to the fact that she would have to find something else to do with her life.

Much internal drama ensued, and during sophomore year, deep insecurity and poor time management led Nancy to plagiarize a short paper for Shakespeare and get kicked out of the college. At age 18, she rapidly gained the 50 or so pounds required to get her mother to grant her permission to enter psychotherapy. She did not play the violin all year long.

After returning to Harvard, Nancy resumed lessons with Mr. Totenberg, and was on track to become concertmaster of Bach Society her senior year, until fate intervened. The same year that Alan Gilbert would take up the Bach Soc baton, setting him on a course that would lead him to take the helm of the New York Philharmonic, Nancy was persuaded to quit the orchestra to spend more time with her future (ex)husband. Tragic. After dating a Catholic at 17, it had been made quite clear to her she would be disowned and otherwise cut off from her family if she married outside the Jewish faith. So, Nancy gave up her greatest loves on campus (both the Catholic and the orchestra) for the love she thought she was supposed to choose instead. The first tall, Jewish guy she liked who didn't idolize her (she couldn't really respect those guys that did) and didn't turn out to be gay (so tiresome) and didn't run away....

That is when and where Nancy's life, arguably off course for a while, REALLY got off track. After holding two awful jobs in New York, Nancy surrendered to marriage at 22, played the violin a bit around New York City in various ensembles and at various occasions, until severe problems in the marriage, combined with a lack of clear direction in her life (her parents also strongly disapproved of her second career choice, painting) inspired Nancy to apply to law school. Harvard would happily take her back, but her husband needed her to stay in New York City and be a wife. So, while her Bach Soc friend Rick commuted between his marriage to a NYC medical resident and Yale Law School, Nancy enrolled in Fordham, which, thanks to its Jesuit leadership, was the only local law school which would, in spite of her perfect LSAT score and honors degree, take a chance on a girl with the phrase "required to withdraw for academic dishonesty" on her transcript. During law school, Nancy had the opportunity to perform in Carnegie Hall, as part of her summer day camp (USDAN) alumni orchestra, (5th chair, thus a photo op!) thereby fulfilling both a childhood dream and the prophetic inscriptions in her high scool yearbook, but very differently than she had once imagined.

When, halfway through law school, Nancy became pregnant, she was whisked away to Cincinnati, where, one year later, her friend from Bach Society and then New York City, Gillian Benet, popped up as the new principal harpist in the Cincinnati Symphony. Some months later, with little local support or friendship other than Gillian's and her son's nanny, Nancy filed papers to separate from her husband. Prevented from relocating outside Hamilton County, much less back to her beloved NYC, at least until 2012, she settled in to endure what she considered the wreckage of her once promising life, primarily determined to live with dignity, and in a way that would earn her infant son's respect as he grew up. When Max was not with her, whenever she was alone for any extended period of time, Nancy would take her violin and travel to the Caribbean, where she assumed an alternate identity.

She slipped out of the lonely midwestern mom costume in which she sometimes concealed herself, and donned the vibrant, thigh-skimming shift of the sexy, single, roaming musician, ready to sing with any restaurant pianist, sit in with any club band, to accept drinks and even poems from fans, free meals from restaurants, and to flirt with any man who caught her fancy. She sang and played her way around the tiny town of Christianstead, St. Croix, until she became something of a local celebrity. Then, Nancy would return again to her domestic existence of a devoted and loving single parent, running her own business painting murals and faux finishes, working hard to provide for her son, to make it on her own, taking nothing from her wealthy ex-husband but her pride and dignity, determined to survive her time in the Midwest with her spirit unbroken.

Then she met another guy, a Jewish guy, no less, a kind, cute, smart Jewish guy, even, who loved her with all her faults but didn't idolize her, wasn't gay, knew from the get go that she was crazy but didn't run away. She took him to St. Croix and he sat and enjoyed free meals and drinks each night while she sang and played the violin with middle aged jazz pianists, leathery old blues musicians, and young, traveling alernative rockers. When they married the following year, and moved to Detroit, he told her he knew she would be in an orchestra some day, and she wanted to believe him. But the next year, a new baby arrived, followed by another. Time marched on. Life was busy, and she didn't have the chance to get down to St Croix anymore. She cut off her long, flowing hair and gave away her short, sexy dresses in anticipation of turning 40.

And then, just when she least expected it, she ran into a guy named Dan Nichols. He played guitar and sang from his soul...and as she listened to him sing a song he had written about being restored to health, a violin part took shape in her head. She ran home, said "hey" to the babysitter, dug her fiddle out from under the bed, and raced back to play with Dan. As she added her harmony to what he had created, Dan smiled his very special beatific smile. Nancy knew then that what she had once had was still inside her, that what she could do was good, and that it was time to start sharing her gift again. And bit by bit, person by person, the path has opened up for her to do just that. And Nancy is very, very happy about it.

2012 looks quite different to Nancy now than it once did, as does tomorrow. Because life in the Midwest, Nancy's life, as it turns out, is very, very good, and only seems to keep getting better. Nancy's musical life is blossoming again at an age she used to think of, back when she catered college reunions, as rather old, but she doesn't feel old at all. Her son has grown not only to respect her, but joyfully to make music with her, with an exceptionally beautiful singing voice, which she has helped him cultivate from toddlerhood. She has discovered for herself new spiritual dimensions in music that inform her own expression of it. She has learned that she can pray through music better than she can with words, and that her musical prayers are uplifting, moving and inspiring to others. She has found an orchestra of passionate people who are not bored, burnt out, dissatisfied with music making, or frustated with playing someone else's choice in music. They have a leader who loves working with them, and whose love they return by giving their best possible performance. And she has found, almost by accident, a chamber ensemble of new girlfriends, like a dream come true, who love to make music together and do it well, in harmony and equality, leading them to choose the name Samadhi, which means just that, in Sanskrit.

Namaste...