Tanglewood is not, despite its name, either a lost Washington Irving short story or a sleepaway camp. Tucked into the quaint and artsy middle of the pine-furred Berkshires, it is an historic estate (two adjacent ones, actually; the hedgerow that once separated them is now gone) that serves as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the much-vaunted destination of thousands of picnicking concertgoers every year. Not coincidentally, it is also one of the classical music world’s best known incubators for young professional classical musicians, an all-expenses paid residential summer camp for the wildly talented and excruciatingly driven.
And, once upon a time, also for me.
Tanglewood’s Fellows are chosen by audition; the competition is stiff. There aren’t many spots: an orchestra’s worth of instrumentalists, a handful of composers and conductors and pianists, plus a dozen and a half or so singers. All are cherrypicked by an exacting faculty whose names may not all be household-familiar—though some certainly are—but who are known as some of the best in the business, true musicians’ musicians. The Fellows are housed, wonderfully and awkwardly, on the premises of one of New England’s oldest girls’ boarding schools, with damask and chintz upholstery in the formal lounge and teen-angst graffiti painted in pink nail polish inside the worn wooden bureau drawers. There are no campfires, crafts, canoes, or counselors; only rigorous training, extensive rehearsals, and, particularly during times like the yearly Contemporary Music Week, an intense and exhausting performance schedule in which Fellows are expected, in every way, to be fully, exactingly professional. All Tanglewood Fellows share the exciting uneasy awareness that they’ve been singled out, the best of the best, their talents and reputations rendering them worthy of such an investment of money, resources, and opportunity.
This makes for a strange blend of vicious competition and trench-warfare camaraderie. Even now, more than a decade and a half since my last Tanglewood summer and as someone who is no longer even trying to be a professional musician, when I see a former Tanglewood classmate performing somewhere really good—as I did last November, when I walked into a Metropolitan Opera production of The Marriage of Figaro to find someone I’d gone to Tanglewood with (hi, Maggie!) singing as Marcellina—I was simultaneously excited for her success and suffused with a sensation I can describe only as damn it, she won the audition.
This, of course, is the whole point. For those who have come through the highbrow vocational schools that are conservatories of music, summer programs at the Tanglewood level are part of one’s pedigree, the most exclusive of finishing schools.
There is, consequently, an intense sense of insider and outsider at Tanglewood. I imagine it also happens at Santa Fe Opera, at Glimmerglass, at Banff. None of these places could function for long without its audiences. But the audience is just an anonymous stream of listeners, clutching their program books like maps or passports, visitors in a mostly unfamiliar land. The audience comes and goes, bringing its picnics and its candy wrappers, its wide-eyed wonder at both the expected and the unexpected beauties, its puffed-up pride in attending Highbrow Cultural Events. The audience comes to visit, and then they go home.
Those who make the music, who dart between the wings and the stages and the houses and the backstages like clownfish in a reef all summer long, are not the audience. They have their own entrances and exits, their own hidey-holes, hours, and habits. They attend dress rehearsals, sometimes by preference to performances. Having little need of the program books offered by the ushers, they usually don’t take them. The musicians are there to have their particular experience, too. But it is a different one, not least because they are at home already—or as close to it as makes no difference—and because it is not an event one attends, but rather the air one breathes.
They are two worlds, one superimposed upon the other. Both somehow occupy the same physical space, often simultaneously, but their denizens walk right through one another, ghosts walking through ghosts. The audience has no idea that this is happening. Musicians look like everyone else unless they’re in concert dress (as so often the top hat is what makes the magician).
Musicians know their own kind regardless. There is no distinctive athletic lope or balletic glide among musicians, as in some similarly competitive tribes, but there is a very similar ease and casualness in arenas others enter only as strangers on special occasions. Once you know it, it is unmistakable.
To see both worlds at once, and clearly, is a strange and lonely thing. When I went back to Tanglewood last summer, for the first time since my last summer there as a musician, the sense of double vision was acute. Sitting on the whispering bench, a well-known landmark on the grounds, sharing a pre-concert picnic with my lover, I could not help seeing all the afternoons I’d spent there with a journal or a book or pacing back and forth along its inner curve memorizing texts I was to sing. Nor, as I showed my lover the hall where I’d sat and sung in countless master classes, the wall of sliding barn doors that opened those master classes out into the grounds for anyone and everyone to hear—nor could I help seeing the Fellows, moving in small groups along the grounds, clearing out on a Sunday afternoon before the matinee.
Instinctively I watched for faculty members I had known, wondering whether I would be recognized, or for that matter taken to task for my failure to succeed in the venture for which the Tanglewood experience of my younger days had been so singularly designed to prepare me. It was not until well after the concert, during which the retirement of a trombonist who had taught some of my conservatory friends had been celebrated, that I realized they would have aged as much as I. I had been looking for their twenty-years-younger doppelgangers; perhaps we had seen one another and not known it. Perhaps we had not seen one another at all. Perhaps, as is the Tanglewood way, it could hardly matter, since now we could be nothing to one another but ghosts walking through ghosts, mutually unseen and unfelt save for a sudden chilly shiver of recognition, a sensation immediately disavowed thereafter.
The second time I went back to Tanglewood, a few weeks later, cut still closer to the bone. Contemporary Music Week was one of the primary reasons I had been a Fellow at all, and watching those who were now what I had been performing Oliver Knussen’s opera version of Maurice Sendak’s Higgledy Piggledy Pop! left me aching, wandering the grassy hill behind the Ozawa Recital Hall beneath the gentle northern stars at intermission, struggling not to cry.
Damn it, she won the audition, I thought as I sat in the gleaming wooden stalls of the hall’s first balcony and watched a beautiful, blonde, sweetly zaftig young mezzo-soprano sing the part of Jennie the Sealyham Terrier. My musician’s sixth sense could tell where the other musicians were sitting in the hall, where the other singers were sitting and watching her, what they thought of her performance. I could spot the ones who urged her on and those who bitterly resented every minute she spent in the spotlight they craved for themselves. In a split second I spotted the composer sitting to stage right, no matter that it had been nearly twenty years since I had first encountered him and wished he would write something for me to sing. The dirty old lady in me tried to ogle the mezzo, then the leonine baritone, but objectification stood no chance against damn it, that used to be me.
I was there with a friend that night. She watched me walk along the rise behind the hall at intermission, watched me look out over the lake at the bottom of the hill, a lake in which I’d gone skinny-dipping more than once—one of the rare secret pleasures of the Tanglewood Fellow—and when I returned, she asked how I was doing.
“Strange,” I said. “This used to be my world, you know.”
“Very rarefied world,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Not at all. Not when you’re in it.”
When you are in it, it is not rarefied at all. It is blood and guts, dawn and dusk, breath and sound, competition and failure and sometimes success, but mostly desire always just this side of fulfilled. It is glory and magic and hard, hard work. Perhaps more than anything it is the breathing-together that musicians and dancers recognize as the shared delight that makes their unified action, as Dylan Thomas would have put it, “Adam and maiden.”
There is nothing I have experienced that is so physical, nothing that resonates in the bones and meat of a person like it does to make music with other people at that sort of level. When I jokingly say that chamber music is the most fun you can have with your clothes on, I am not really joking. It is sensual in ways that most sex cannot approach, its erotics of rhythm and momentum and performance and power arousing more deeply than words can. There is no panting sharp short climax, either, only the surge that lasts as long as the music will, and then the low rough sigh of separation.
No, it was not rareified. Not a bit. It was—it is—merely lost to me, now that I am trapped between the worlds. I walked Tanglewood’s grounds as a resident ghost, the taste of the living musician-world still bright on my lips; I walked them as a visiting ghost peering in with wonder at the art and the sweat and the magic. Most of all I walked them unseen as one by the other and the other by the one.
“There must be more to life than having everything,” sang Jennie the Sealyham Terrier on that lambent August night. “There must be more to life than having nothing.” Did I weep at that, there in my seat to stage left, above the stage, above the lion and the moon and Jennie the Sealyham Terrier, above the composer and the conductor and the orchestra, safely tucked up and away from the stage?
Perhaps I did. Who can say? Ghosts trapped between worlds may weep for the want of a simple yes or no, in or out, this or that. But we are where we are. It is inescapable. No one to one side or the other can see our tears, nor have they any reason to look.
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Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
