—Le Chant des Oiseaux
Soundtrack #5: Folie à Deux
“OFF THE BUS,” shouts the living effigy of a dictator, my orchestra director, as I’m listening to one of my favorites, Le Chant des Oiseaux. No, I don’t really think of her as a despot or tyrant. After all, the profession calls for a sharp voice. As ordered, I take out my earbuds and my fellow comrades and I file out of the stagnant-air-filled bus to the refreshing, invigorating Northern air of Boston, MA. It’s not like this in the South. Stepping down from the bus onto the black pavement, I look up at the hotel in which I would be living for the next five days. It resembles a castle. No ordinary castle, but one of those picturesque, impervious fortresses in the lush fields of rural Scotland. Over the entrance to the main lobby hang a decorative coat of arms; a symbol, I like to think, for the dedication I and my fellow musicians put into preparing the music for competition. The heavy, stony blocks of the “castle” round off at the corners of the building into fashionable turrets that loom over the adjacent highway, keeping guard.
Entering the lobby, I feel a sense of intense nostalgia. I do not live or ever have lived in a castle; I have never even toured one. Somehow, though, the massive, wooden support beams arched over the gleaming coats of armor and mottled, intricate carpet, well, take me back. I am no longer in the twenty-first century but Tudor England. An England of which the haughty Oliver Cromwell might even approve. Vivaldi’s Cantabile or Handel’s Larghetto sound from the corner by a tight, pleasant chamber orchestra. I expect to see Catherine of Aragon float in over the reflective marble all in a fuss over “royal matters.” Hold on a minute. “I’m not insane,” I reassure myself. “Stop this nonsensical day dreaming so I can play well in the competition!” And with the solid, gentle closing of the elevator doors, the royal court of England remains entombed in the lobby.
I kid, of course. Why would I let something so marvelous simply vanish? There remains, though, a balance of this English illusion and the reality of the competition. Life, I feel, must harbor a similar, delicate dichotomy: not of Tudor England and a band competition, naturally, but of enjoying the complexities and pleasure of imagination while still realizing sometimes that that mountain of schoolwork over there isn’t going to do itself.
