Unraveling

I wrote this last week and never posted it, because it seemed to be a little too self-absorbed (although hell, it’s a blog, right? Isn’t the unwritten title of every blog “All About Me?”) Ever since I wrote it, I have dreamed every night of several of the characters involved, and have decided that I need to post it. Maybe it will help someone; I don’t know. Here it is, for what it’s worth.

I love modal music. For the non-musicians reading this, “modal” music that is not based on our “do-re-mi” scale, but rather on certain scales that have been around since antiquity, and can be heard by our modern ears as major or minor scales with a note altered here and there. The use of modal scales is the element that makes both folk music and Gregorian chant sound “olde” with an “e.” It’s the reason why, when we medieval music nerds say that we “play medieval music,” an occasional person will reply “Oh, I love that Celtic stuff.” They aren’t crazy – most of it is modal. So are a Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin songs. As a kid, after repeatedly playing my Bach and Bartok piano pieces until my family nearly lost their minds, my modal journey wandered through Beatles, British Invasion, Folk Revival, Tull, Zeppelin, Pentangle, assorted Renaissance dances and madrigals, the odd Dufay Mass in undergraduate Collegium, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Irish, Scottish and English traditional music…and then I hit the modal motherlode: western medieval music.

Now, the term “medieval music” covers a lot of ground. Sacred chant; song settings of gorgeous Latin and vernacular poetry; complex pieces in multiple meters crafted with all kind of number symbolism; energetic dances, some of which take some serious chops to play; and polyphonic part-music full of quartal harmonies and crunchy dissonances that trick undergrads into thinking they were composed last week. It is beautiful, and it is every bit as worthy of study as any other aspect of our music history. It’s ridiculous that music history classes sometimes treat it like the frozen peas you have to choke down so that you can eat your chocolate cake – “Here, dear, listen to this Gregorian chant and then you can hear some Mozart / Stravinsky, I promise.” Ridiculous – I don’t see literature professors apologizing for Dante. Medieval music shows us that western music grew from a process that involved mode and memory and improvisation and making text seem even more alive by skillfully setting it to notes – sounds like a lot of traditional and popular musics, doesn’t it? And in that regard, ironically, it’s closer to what we do now than a large chunk of the music that was created in the intervening centuries. Relevant? I’d say. Even the texts are relevant. (We haven’t changed that much, alas.)

It was not a particularly easy decision to pursue medieval music, but it felt “right,” and then one night after sobbing through an entire performance by Sequentia at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge I was convinced I was making the right choice. A year later, when I auditioned for the Early Music Institute at IU, they asked me why, after 10 years as a working musician, I wanted to go back to school. I told them I wanted to study medieval music, and that I wanted to teach at the college level and direct early music ensembles, and that I wasn’t harboring any illusions that I would become a famous super-chops early music singer at my then-age of 32. Fortunately, that made sense to them; and leave it to Tom Binkley to take a chance on a rock singer.

It was hard. I had to catch up with the others. I had to fight with my debilitating performance anxiety. I had to deal with a crazy and stressful music school with 1600 music majors. I had to learn how to be a scholar and not just a decent student, and be a performer on top of everything else.

Right after the second year, after not passing my masters’ recital hearing (long story), I took myself to Vancouver BC and enrolled myself in Sequentia’s Medieval Programme. The first day, everyone sits in a kind of informal circle and sings or plays for each other. I didn’t know this, and wasn’t prepared. Now, “Not prepared” at IU meant a large trap door would open and send you screaming into the Cracks of Doom, and these were two of my all-time musical heroes. (I refer you back to the sobbing in Sanders Theater story.) I was shaking in my boots. My turn came, and I opened my mouth and very little sound came out. It probably wasn’t as bad as I remember it, but I remember something that sounded like a cross between a squeak and a croak with some semblance of pitch added. I did eventually recover, but I had done it: my first impression was made.

I had two options. I could go hide behind the potted palms for two weeks, or I could suck it up and go talk to Barbara Thornton, tell her about my recent horrific experience and talk to her about the performance anxiety problem that was getting worse. What did I have to lose? What could get worse? Thus began my relationship with two of the most influential, dear, and profound teachers I ever was blessed to learn from.

Some of you who are reading this have heard this story: I told Barbara my tale of woe, and she listened; really listened intently to my whole story. (Barbara was a fairly intense person.) When I was finished she said she understood that I was already a professional musician, but how long had I been doing early music? I told her, just a couple of years. She said, “I hope you understand that that’s really not much time at all.” After a brief encouraging conversation, she said “Here’s the problem. Imagine you’re a sweater. You’ve decide to completely unravel yourself and knit yourself back up into a totally different sweater.” I nodded, trying not to cry. “Right now,” she said, “You are a pile of yarn on the floor.” This was simultaneously so accurate, so sad, so damned funny, and said with so much kindness that I actually laughed. “You have to be patient while you knit yourself back up.”

Several years later, at the same workshop, after several of us had acted as sort of teaching assistants for a program that ended up as a public performance, she gave each of us a little card and a small gift, which was a totem from the Native American museum there. Her card to me said “To She Who Knit Herself Back Up.”

Many years have passed since then. Ironically, I have become exactly what I described to my IU interrogators on that day back in March of 1987, teaching early music history and directing an ensemble, trying to convey to students that medieval music is actually pretty cool, and you can learn how to tell a trope from a prosula without being so bored to oblivion that you pass out in your coffee. But, here’s the rub: in those intervening 20+ years, something else happened to me, which is that I actually had the great privilege of being able to immerse myself in this music that I loved. I got to make CDs, and write and narrate nationally-syndicated radio programs. I studied with amazing performers, and I got to take the music all over creation, from Vancouver to Boston to Galway to Utrecht to Regensberg, got to hear the music ringing out in the spaces it was written for, got to play with and hang with people who love it as much as I do. I knit the sweater back up only to find that it fit damned well.

But as so often happens in life happens, I have had to make some choices. Perhaps I have not always made the right ones, but I like to think that I did the best I could with the situations and the resources with which I was presented. And now I live out on the prairie, in a place so isolated the meteorologists on the freaking Weather Channel stand in front of that part of the map. I can host a radio show, but I have no time to write a radio show any more because I’m too busy trying to juggle teaching full-time with finishing a doctorate because the administrators at a University these days are not willing to give you tenure on the basis of the concerts you played or the CDs you’ve made, the work you’ve done, your 500 radio scripts, the fact that you were inducted into the University’s Teaching Academy, or your three tracks on the freaking Norton Anthology of Recorded Music; they only want to see a certain Piece of Paper, and they want you to get that piece of paper while you’re teaching classes of 95 students, 40 of whom sort of want to be there are 55 of whom are trying to Facebook on their iPhones while you are attempting to teach them. I can’t seem to finish the book on medieval improvisation that I’m writing, necessary to finish DM and keep job on prairie, because I have to spend hours making my way through boxes of misspelled assignments, or reading and grading graduate papers so that I can help those students get the very degree that I can’t finish because my job requires me to spend hours doing things like reading and grading graduate papers, going to meetings, writing recommendations, and all the other things that a conscientious and decent professor does. And people want to know if I’ve toured much with our medieval ensemble lately?

Please don’t misunderstand me: I love teaching, and I know that I have a good life. I’m grateful that I’m employed. I love my students very much, and I’m happy that they want to learn from me. I’m glad to have been given the opportunity to come to somewhere only slightly less remote than the steppes of Mongolia and actually get some people excited about the same music that means so much to me. But sometimes I look at my early music colleagues who made the choice to live in other kinds of places, to concentrate on performing and teach “on the side” rather than the opposite way around, to create concert programs and bring joy to people who come to hear them play, and to participate in the sheer joy of making music at that level of quality and chops and integrity, and I see that sweater of mine, the one that I worked so hard to knit up, and it’s back on the floor, and in such terrible danger of becoming unraveled again…and I can’t let it unravel, I just can’t.