Sitting here, watching the Stanley Cup Finals amidst 80 degree weather and nearly 100% humidity, I am a little nostalgic of the biting cold nights that my college roommate Sammy and I would spend skating around one of the many ice rinks of Moorhead, MN. It is a fond scene that I will be saying farewell to for some time now. I'll miss those miniature clouds forming as they leave my stinging lungs; I'll miss that brittle crunch of snow and ice beneath the blades of my skates as I hobble on solid ground to awaiting ice; I'll miss the smell that the sweat-touched leather of my gloves left on my hands; most of all, I'll miss that time spent with a great friend, caught in our imagination of NHL stars--actually, anything better than we were then.
While my hockey days are regrettably over for now, a new athletic indulgence is forming between my friend, Walter, and I. This morning, he and I met at the 168 St. subway station and made the 5 min. walk to the seemingly unknown--unknown by NYC standards--tennis courts in Riverside park. In the shadow of the George Washington bridge and alongside the Hudson river, he and I enjoyed a friendly match of tennis. With about as much dust to shake off as an astronaut's rug, I didn't play my best--although some of my returns would have had a memorable place on a baseball diamond. Needless to say, Walter won--although we are pretty well matched!
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Yesterday, I completed my second appearance in the NYC professional piano world. I was one of several adjudicators for the annual NYSSMA festival, held at NYU. I listened to 6 and a half hours worth of burgeoning piano students--some worthy of encouraging and others worthy of redirecting. Overall, their ages ranged from 6 or 7 to 18 and their skills allowed for a number of Fur Elises and innumerable Bach Gavottes. I was solely responsible for listening to, judging, and finally commenting on the performances--along with scales and a brief sight-reading excerpt--of a portion of these nervous students. During my adjudicating, I experienced one especially memorable student. A young Japanese student, with her mother listening closely in the back of the room, played Fur Elise. Her interpretation and presentation of it was, surprisingly, incredibly beautiful. Playing from some inner source, this young girl approached Beethoven's piece with incredible maturity, restraint, and control. Touches of rubato mixed with an impressive facility in the rapid passages created a satisfying result.
At first I was nervous about this opportunity of adjudicating, being a little self-conscious of my right to judge and affect the musical lives of these young children. After all, many of them were taught by local teachers whose experience outlives my entire life. However, after the first student finished playing her scales and piece, I was overwhelmed by the amount of relevant and helpful comments I could conjure from my vantage point across the room. So, for the entire day, I furiously wrote as much as I could: offering encouragement where it was due, suggestions when inaptitudes appeared, and some dissatisfied remarks where complacency or disinterest was clear. In the end, the day was memorable for the fun interaction with many of the cute children, the rare beauty in a piece, and the enormous cramp that still rests in my left hand from writing.
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I want to say again tonight that I love this city; I love it for its eccentricities, its containment of an entire spectrum of human culture, social positions, and temperaments, its opportunity to forge forward in your personal goals by finding the niche that inevitably exists somewhere on this island, its understanding of a human condition supplanted upon us by institution and non-biological survival necessities that drips with an unspoken compassion for one's fellow man and their persistence in life, and finally, its gorgeous girls.
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