A Series of In-Between Moments
Image courtesy of Buzzards Bay Coalition
My left arm stood poised above the murky water, considering the soggy discomfort which would come once I plunged it into the tidal pool. My right hand remained dry and safe in its allocated pocket, turning over the pebbles I’d already collected like pros and cons. Though situated disappointingly at the very bottom of the pool amongst the periwinkles, sea lettuce, and deceased fish stench, this stone’s brilliant purple color and deliciously round corners were simply too enticing to pass up. A moment later my chosen pebble joined its companions in my pocket. I smiled as I imagined a kind of rock family reunion that I had possibly just facilitated. My spirits dropped when I heard the sound of tires in the dirt parking lot adjacent to me.
I knew that every Monday I only had twenty minutes after school to play outside. I had a weekly violin lesson scheduled out of state and the drive took up a good part of the afternoon. Even though I knew my time was limited, it didn’t make the 3:00 arrival of the family minivan any easier. I would run to the wharf from school on these “twenty minutes to play” days to scramble over slippery rocks by the water's edge, keeping an eye out for the Harbor Master who was known to call parents if any kids decided to disobey the ominous posting: “DANGER - No Climbing on the Rocks.” My parents had suggested that next year I might be able to bike to school. I knew I would need to practice more to be granted this privilege. I still had not mastered the art of biking in a straight line, instead weaving back and forth with each pump of the pedal. I eagerly awaited the day that I could bike to the wharf, though, imagining how this would shave a few minutes off of my after-school commute.
On this particular Monday, I ran towards my dad with a wet patch blossoming from my right pocket and my recently acquired treasures clicking and clacking together jovially with each stride. I knew from experience that I should enter the car quietly, careful not to interrupt the business call being held over the Bluetooth speaker. I didn’t quite understand what deal my dad had struck with his employer. However, there seemed to be no issue with him taking a half day each Monday to drive me 45 minutes to violin lessons as long as he spent around a quarter of the drive splitting his attention between the road and a phone meeting. I pushed down the middle console next to my car seat, shifting my small violin case aside to accommodate what would become my rock collection staging area. One by one, I lined up the pebbles in an artistic manner, placing the prized purple rock in the center like a crown jewel.
Lost in my rock arranging and rearranging, I found myself rudely interrupted once more. This interruption took the form of a book landing in the wet, circular patch on my jeans that had only just begun to dry around the edges. The book my dad had thrown so unceremoniously behind his shoulder was “The King's Singers Book of Rounds, Canons, and Partsongs.” The small paperback lived permanently in the glove compartment of the family minivan, making its appearance at that inevitable part of any long drive when conversation begins to lull and the radio fills with static. My older sister never humored my dad when he asked for a singing partner, and he had discovered my mom’s tone deafness long ago. Thus, his 7-year-old daughter was the only logical outlet to channel his Von Trapp family dreams. I didn’t usually mind singing rounds with Dad, except for when it conflicted with rock-related activities. I had grown to appreciate the sound of our voices mingling together - my thin and squeaky soprano ornamenting his robust baritone. As he drove, I would flip through the pages of the book. I know now that it is organized by time period and topic: pre-1700 secular tunes appearing first, followed by pre-1700 sacred music, and ending with post-1700 songs from “Around the World” (meaning non-European). As a first grader, I was unable to read these large words, let alone understand them conceptually. As an aid, I had come to simplistically differentiate the categories of songs as “Hallelujah and Amen songs,” and “fun songs.”
Dad and I often argued about the artistic value of the “Hallelujah and Amen” music. I simply did not understand what these strange proclamations meant (understandable seeing as I was not raised with religion). My dad, on the other hand, found intense sentimentality in sacred music. Despite leaving the church at seventeen, he liked to tell me that the sacred rounds reminded him of Sunday mornings spent as an altar boy in Charlotte, North Carolina. For years to come, I comically believed that religion was only a style of music sung in fancy buildings and nothing more. That afternoon, as we crossed the state line between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, we spent a few minutes with our age-old debate about whether to sing a “fun song” or a “Hallelujah and Amen” song before coming to the usual realization: we had enough time to sing some of each.
“The King's Singers Book of Rounds, Canons, and Partsongs” was by no means a book meant for children. Each song was written in traditional choral notation, the musical notes printed neatly with lyrics directly underneath the corresponding pitch. Having taken piano and violin lessons since the start of kindergarten, I was fairly comfortable with reading music as a first grader. Even before formal musical training, my dad had made sure that I memorized my “Do-Re-Mi’s” before my “ABC’s.” Some of my earliest memories involve sharing the piano bench with him, writing letters on sticky notes to label each key. This visual solidified the idea that a letter corresponded with a note, which corresponded with a pitch. To me, letters were tones and therefore music (at least up until the letter “G” - all letters past that remained a puzzling mystery).
My old babysitter once asked my parents if they should maybe devote more time to teaching me some simple arithmetic and how to read and write before I started kindergarten. Their response was something along the lines of: “It’s not our job, that’s what we’re going to send her to school for.” I admire the faith they had in my teachers, a kind of unwavering trust which my dad especially did not seem to extend to my elementary school music teacher (poor Mrs. Dowling). Mom and Dad were right though, we did do a lot of reading, writing, and arithmetic in school with very little music in between. However, it seemed like I was one of the few students who didn’t already know how to write their full name on the first day of kindergarten. A year later, I was growing increasingly frustrated by my apparent lack of “school smarts.” That very morning, I’d watched with jealousy as some of my friends graduated from picture books to the Junie B. Jones series while I remained stuck on the word flashcards which hung tauntingly around the perimeter of my classroom.
Long story short, I could barely read any of the lyrics in “The King's Singers Book of Rounds, Canons, and Partsongs” that day. My illiteracy didn’t serve as too much of a barrier for the weekly singing ritual, though. Eyes focused on the highway, my dad would clearly sing the entire tune by himself as I intently traced the notes in front of me with my finger. I recognized the notes ascending and descending with his voice, knowingly holding my finger a few beats longer on the whole and half notes and moving on quickly from the quarter, eighth, and occasional sixteenth notes. This was the kind of confidence I had yet to find in my classroom’s quiet reading time. Instead of reading the lyrics, I memorized them. This activity wasn’t too hard considering the brevity and repetition of each tune, but I swelled with quiet pride on the rare occasion that I was able to associate the shape of a word with the lyric I knew was coming next. I failed to realize that many of the songs I was singing were in Hebrew and Latin. Much to my chagrin, these new words that I’d learned to read seemed to help me very little in first grade literary exercises. Sometimes, Dad would deviate from the book, teaching me simpler campfire tunes like “Five Little Speckled Frogs” and “Black Socks.” I would quickly redirect him back to our sight reading exercise, however. I felt so adult holding the fancy music book, and I didn’t like being treated like a little kid who could only digest silly songs about speckled frogs and stinky socks.
The funny thing about rounds is that they can go on forever and ever. It’s up to the first musician to decide how many times to repeat the first phrase, forcing the voices that joined second or third to keep on singing with them until the initial voice is satisfied with how long the tune has gone on. My favorite songs were the ones I insisted on taking the role of “first voice” in. This way, my dad wouldn’t be able to end the song prematurely. I knew the more times I repeated the song, the more fanciful grace notes and harmonies my dad would add just to make it all a bit more interesting. I never told him how much I loved his little ornamentations, but I found it so fascinating how the same words and the same tune could sound so different with each repetition. I learned very quickly that being the first voice (though you held the responsibility of indicating how many repeats to take) was the easiest job. If you joined in with the melody later as the second voice, you had to make sure you came in at just the right time. You had to find your pitch and melody underneath the voice of another who had the luxury of singing alone for a good while. If the second voice loses their melody or comes in at the wrong time, the harmonies are thrown off and the product is aural dissonance.
I wasn’t scared to make mistakes, though. All that meant was that we started again. If we started again, I got another chance to look at the words on the page and relate them to the words I was hearing. I would eventually observe with satisfaction the rise and fall of our voices in congruence with the notes on the staff. Repetition did not mean monotony, it meant spontaneity. Would the song end while I was still in the middle of my second verse just because my dad decided it should be so, or vice versa? Would this repeat inspire my dad to harmonize in intervals of thirds rather than fifths? Staring at the same words over and over eventually brought comfort and familiarity rather than frustration.
That particular Monday we started with “Havana Shira” (Let Us Sing Together), and ended with “Dona Nobis Pacem” (Give Us Peace). At the time I had no idea what these words translated to, but now I find them to be quite fitting. Feeling feisty - and a little annoyed - that I was neglecting my rock family for a songbook, I set up an ultimatum that day: no learning new songs, we were going to stick to my favorites or I wouldn’t sing at all. Pulling into the parking lot of the music school, I began to execute a ritardando throughout my last utterance of “Dona Nobis Pacem'' and I performed a nod to my dad via the rear view mirror (our unspoken musical cue indicating the end of the tune).
Running from school, to the wharf, to the minivan, to violin lessons each Monday was exhilarating and tiring, yet also stabilizing. I learned to find excitement in the mundanity of repetition. This Monday was a bit different, however: half of my attention was focused on my brand new rock family. The collection remained on the center console in its proud display as I grabbed my violin and Suzuki books that day. I stopped for a second to examine my findings once more (Dad accusing me of dilly-dallying in the meantime). Though still beautifully round, my purple rock had dried over the course of the drive. Its color had shockingly morphed into the bland gray of its siblings. I was disappointed by my discovery, but I was at peace with this minor setback. The very next Monday I would be back at the wharf where I would maybe find a real purple rock. Next Monday, I would be back where I started, though with a little bit more insight as to where I was going.