Recitals

Tomorrow is a big day. I'm going to the Bills-Panthers game at Ralph Wilson Stadium after church with my Dad, Pax, and Bill. This trip was planned several months ago, but when J and I did our September calendar, we discovered a problem--her recital was the same day.

Calendar planning is an important part of our family life. J has a great combination of jobs that allow her to stay at home with James during the day, but also to contribute substantially to the family income and to get an investment on all the time and money she poured into her degrees. We sit down at the kitchen table every month and pull out our iDevices. We erase the previous month from the dry erase board, and then J writes in our regular commitments. (I'm not allowed to write on the white board, because my handwriting is too messy.)  We mark up my school days, regular private lessons, Hochstein evenings, and church services. Then we go day by day to mark in which extra rehearsals and gigs we've taken, starring the evenings for which we're going to need childcare. It's a good system, and we usually know well in advance when we're going to need a sitter. One of the sacred rules of the system is that you must always mark entries into the calendar of your iDevice onto the master kitchen calendar as soon as you're aware of them lest there be unintended conflicts. Most of the serious quarrels in our marriage have arisen from one or the other of us (by which I mean, me) forgetting to mark new gigs onto the master calendar.

So anyway, as we were preparing our September calendar a few weeks ago we discovered that there was a conflict on Sunday the 15th. J is doing a recital with one of her college friends and a prominent area professional. They sound amazing (I listened to one of their rehearsals) and they're going to perform it at our alma mater and a local church in October. (I have a concert that afternoon in Syracuse.) J was a great sport about it. She encouraged me to go to the game when I offered to give up my ticket, and I've done my best to give her encouragement and childcare as she's rehearsed and prepared.

It's a real bummer to miss it, though. Recitals are integral to our story. In 2004, when I was a senior in college and J was a sophomore, I was about to begin my long-dreaded semester of student teaching. My senior recital was scheduled for the spring, and I felt I needed some sort of big performance project to get me through the slog of actually working five days a week.

At that point I was feeling rather snobby about the quality of trumpet solo music, and having at the age of 18 already performed all the trumpet repertoire worth playing (so I thought) I decided to do a "transcription" of a Beethoven cello sonata. I also put a baroque suite on the program and the Halsey Stevens sonata. Now all I needed was an accompanist crazy enough to put together the Halsey Stevens and a Beethoven sonata on the same program. Really, the Beethoven was a piano sonata with cello (trumpet) accompaniment. I knew that almost from the beginning, and I knew it would have to be J almost from the beginning. It was the beginning of the semester, and she wasn't yet over-committed to a dozen vocal recitals. She was in the last few months of considering herself a pianist first and a flutist second. We were pretty good friends, and had gotten along quite nicely putting together a few pieces on my junior recital. And she was very friendly and very pretty--and I was newly single. It would not be difficult at all to spend at least two evenings a week rehearsing together.

I pitched the recital to her more as a chamber music opportunity than as "accompanying" a trumpet recital. I think she asked to look at the music first, and then agreed. We had moved in all the same circles the previous year, but it was the evenings together in Cox Auditorium putting together the Stevens bar by bar that changed friendship into something more. I still can't hear the first four notes of the Beethoven without feeling a deep chill. This was the music over which we fell in love.

Not that the recital was easy on either of us. We scrambled to get it together in time, and never once looked at the opener or encore until the night before. J was in the lowest ebb of her crisis between flute and piano during our rehearsals. (I'd like to think that I didn't drive her away from piano by the program.) A few days before the performance I was taken to task and there were several upset phone calls made to RWC administration by a supervising teacher (though, not my master teacher) at my student teaching placement who was incensed that I dare distract myself with a recital when I ought to be lesson planning how to teach trumpet fingerings.

We played the recital, and more than one friend gave one or the other of us a knowing smile as we stood next to each other in the reception line, both dressed in our finest and smiling with relief. My Smith grandparents even took me aside and told me how nice we looked onstage together. I attempted to brush off the comment, but then my grandfather took my arm and said "If you get a chance to marry that one, do it!"

There were a few intervening weeks of missing the evenings together, and then some dates to RPO, and by the new year we were known for a fact to be together.

The Smith grandparents were quite happy, of course, and they provided the next recital and our first public performance as a couple. We dusted off one or two easy numbers, threw in some simple sacred songs, and went to their little rural church in Waterport to play for their congregation. It was our first official performance as a couple. It also occasioned the first official picture of us as a couple, so that we could hang some posters in the music building. The crusty patriarch of the music department laughed when he saw them and told me that we looked like siblings.

It was a recital in December of 2005 that brought me home for a surprise visit from Chicago. J was now a confirmed flutist, and I came back a week earlier than expected to see her perform. I hid in the back of the recital hall behind some stacks of chairs, and listened to her play an extraordinary program while only able to see her feet. After she left the hall from her last encore I made my way backstage--followed by a crowd of peering friends who had learned what was afoot--and occasioned one of the loudest shrieks I've ever heard. I'm still not sure whether it would have been better to let her know I would be coming, but certainly neither of us will forget that recital.

Another long year and a half of graduate school followed, and we were engaged to be married once I graduated from Northwestern. Only my final master's recital remained, and J flew out to Chicago to accompany me at an old church in Evanston. I was exhausted, emaciated, and burned out. I only wanted to go home and get married, and then maybe think about playing the trumpet again once I'd done some very serious sleeping and healthy eating. She came in a few days early to rehearse and stayed with some friends of mine while I packed up my little studio for the last time and made ready to leave. I don't remember much about the recital--I do remember that it was unbearably hot in the church, and I'd stripped off my jacket and tie before we were two movements into the second piece--but I do remember walking along Lake Michigan on an afternoon threatening of rain, and sitting together having soup and coffee and a bread shop. Being together made us both a little more human again.

We played, I said good-byes to my teachers and studio mates, and we loaded up the few boxes of books, clothes, and music that had been my life in Chicago. J took a train to O'Hare to fly to Pennsylvania, and I was to ride back to New York through the night with my Mom and siblings. J's flight was cancelled, and she ended up coming back with us. We drove east through the night, almost too excited to sleep. With that recital finished, my life in the Central Time Zone was over, and we were to start our life together back east.

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