It's been a couple of years since I've made use of this medium, but I make no apologies for life lived or intentions diverted. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about, rather that writing and reflection tend to be a bit emotionally fatiguing for me. The novelty of being an expat has lost some of its sheen as well, so what once fascinated a wide-eyed, slightly uncomfortable, cheek-kiss-hating 25-year-old doesn't tend to still phase me as a (still cheek-kiss-hating) 30-year-old. Bref, I finished my master's degree in musicology in Lyon in 2017, taught as an English assistant for two years, Ben and I got married (admit it, you just whispered finally), and we moved down south to Aix-en-Provence. I'm teaching English as a lecturer at the university here, and I somehow got myself involved with yet another master's degree. Something something something about loving pain.
I thought I wanted to be a secondary school teacher, but it turns out, I can't stand kids! But I love to teach, I really think it's my calling. I love standing up in front of a class, giving a lesson, answering questions, imparting wisdom (or whatever other nonsense I can come up with), and connecting with that rather small minority of students whose eyes light up in class, who ask me non-stop questions because their yen to learn is so strong. I love those kids. I want to continue to teach those kids.
Two things. I never was that kid in college. I'm that kid now in grad school (second time over). I was painfully shy in college, I didn't know my worth, and being a music major — a singer — is really bad for your confidence. Musicians can be a real rotten bunch to impressionable young people. I had professors bully me, snicker at me while I was performing in juries, discount me because I dared study abroad, and I've basically been forgotten about by my alma mater because I didn't go on to have a career as an opera singer. Funny thing is, I learned more from that degree in music performance about teaching than I seem to be learning in my pedagogy classes in grad school now. Can you really teach how to connect with an audience? How to engage 60+ kids who would prefer to be on Insta right now, thank you very much.
This brings me to the heart of my sudden surge of writer's inspiration. Teaching and music. I'm a musician and a teacher. I don't teach music. Hah. When I finished my master's degree in musicology, my director urged me to apply to do a doctoral thesis. I grimaced politely and said no thank you. For one thing, it would have meant writing 400-something pages in FRENCH, but also I just simply didn't think I was good enough, bright enough, enough. Music is just a hobby, I said, it's too personal to try to make a career out of. To be very honest, I rarely listen to music. I really hate being asked what my favorite music is. The frank answer is Beethoven, but damn that just sounds so cliché. But I can't listen to the third movement of Beethoven's string quartet no. 15 without crawling into a little hole inside myself and weeping. Something to do with my childhood. My parents, who instilled in me my love of music. The many, many hours a week spent practicing my violin, piano, and voice. The Strauss song Morgen that reminded me of that crystallized moment I spent at dawn at the water's edge on a lake in the Adirondack Mountains, while visiting a boy I'd end up marrying, eight months after a painful breakup, and a week before I left the US to live abroad the first time. The Chopin Prélude Op. 28 No. 15 that I learned in high school, and banged away at for hours in the very real teenage pain brought on by incessant bullying. The hour I spent on the bus home in middle school, hiding from the bullies with my CD player, playing the Sibelius or Mendelssohn Violin Concertos on a loop. Listening to records of Mahler symphonies on the sound system my Dad built. At five or so, hearing a Vivaldi violin piece play in the background of a fictionalized story about Vivaldi's school for orphan girls, and getting out of bed to weep to my Dad about my newly gained knowledge that some kids don't have parents to call their own. From the very beginning, music has been my constant companion, and my memories are all inextricably linked to melody, rhythm, song, the spectres of instruments buzzing sans cesse in my head.
Now though. Now I can't listen to music unless I make a conscious choice to. I must isolate myself from all other people, all other tasks (which is pretty hard to do living in a studio apartment). The memories flood me, and I become a certain kind of homesick that spans both space and time. Heartsick. Timesick.
Here's why. Every moment, I am out of place. This is not my land. This is not my language. These are not my people. I made a choice to come live in France, to become vulnerable to that particular brand of ironic acerbity, forever sighing and smoking. We all like to pat ourselves on the back, we expats, for how worldly, how knowing we are, but at a certain point, I yearn for the brand of my people. For America. When I listen to music, I'm whipped from time and place and shoved face-down into the swirling mess of memory, memories all made in America. When I listen to music, I have to confront that part of myself that I've shut down in the name of sanity and self-preservation. If I were to regularly open that door, I'd be a puddle on the floor, too bereft for the sake of my homeland to get anything done. And I really like to get stuff done.
So what's with the teaching and the music? And that image you now have of my bawling on the floor? Here's the convergence. I mentioned I want to keep teaching college kids, and to do that, I need to do a PhD. Hah! Damn, should have listened to my director in Lyon in 2017. Thanks to my current grad program, I've been able to put certain pieces in place that hopefully will help me gain entry to an école doctorale. I want to teach English, but I did my research master's degree on music, so my professor suggested I try to blend the two for a proposed thesis topic. Revelatory. Thing is, the subject needs to be related to the anglophone world, so continuing my research into Lili Boulanger is out.
You probably didn't notice in my aforementioned list, but to me, all my life, it's been glaring: I do not listen to American music. My feeling has always been, why would I? There's so much German and French and Austrian and Italian and Russian and even English music to be absorbed, consumed, pored over, obsessed with. My music was born in Europe, even if I wasn't. Besides, American music is beyond cliché and stupid. Like, ok Bernstein, we get it, you're the voice of a nation. Or Copland, bringing Americana to the concert hall. But that's just it. It's America, writ large in symphonic form.
I don't intend to get technical here, I'm saving that for a thesis proposal. But for the past few years in France, I've been struggling with that space-time-homesickness, and I never thought to turn to American music to soothe that twisted little soul deep inside, crying out for some unironic, bald-faced openness. I'm embarrassed to admit, but I know so little about Bernstein and Copland (for example) compared to all the European greats I studied in college. West Side Story and Appalachian Spring, and that's about it. I've been dipping into that well, for the first time really, and discovering myself in there. Discovering the mirror image of open, embracing, compassion I've so missed about the America I grew up in. Wide chords, vividly chattered out in springing strings, melodic turns of phrase that speak to the experience of being an American. Quiet introspection and simplistic sophistication.
This is the America I want, but the America I fear has always been the just-out-of-reach idealized version of guileless romantics. This realization has been sponsored by living as an expat. For context, I lived in Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2014, right before moving to France. The heyday of the Obama presidency, when all the liberals could crawl out from under their collective shame and earnestly be proud of being an American again. This was the golden age for millennials. We get a lot of flak, but I lost my innocence at age 11 when 9/11 occurred. Then I was halfway through college during the Great Recession. That three-year period in DC was sacred, and I could scream that I was proud to be American without even the tiniest wisp of irony, or without any of the accompanying racism that currently gets read into it. That brief golden age obviously came to an abrupt and shocking end in 2016, and once again, we crept back under our shame. The view from Europe has been clarifying. When Trump was elected, my classmates wished me condolences as though a dear friend had just died. The longer I've been away, the more America looks like a shell of itself, an over-priced, litigation-happy joke. When I go back, I cringe at the pompous boastfulness. The French are obsessed with poking fun at the American Dream by calling it the American Nightmare. Haha.
I feel sorrow for the humiliation and death of something that I so fleetingly enjoyed. But it's so much more personal than that. As we're all sitting with our thoughts in week seven of confinement, some of us bereft from the loss of loved ones, the loss of income, and so many more, the loss of motivation, I've had the time to think about my homeland and the utter mismanagement instigating an avoidable tragedy. Maybe America was a joke to Europe, but that joke has been strangled into a very dark humor. I'm no longer rolling my eyes and poking accusatorially at the inequality of healthcare and education. I'm in mourning for the people, the place, the culture that cradled the creation of music as wide, open, and accepting as Bernstein and Copland.
I wish I had a pithy ending to this post, but I'll leave it open. No irony, no tongue-in-cheek, secret grunt of sarcasm. I don't think any of us is even capable of writing a good ending right now. We're still in the middle of it.
Stay safe, stay healthy.
