This past Sunday morning the skies shone a brilliant blue, the air was crisp and cold (winter, finally! For better or for worse…), and I headed over to the Paraclete Center with my quartet to play in a “Music Brunch” collaboration between the “Kids Can Cook” class and myself. Sister Ann and I had talked about such a concert in the early fall — on the second floor of the Center is a lovely chapel leftover from the convent days, with stained glass windows along one side and beautiful wood-paneled walls – the perfect venue for an intimate recital or an informal concert. And now it was happening! The Center had been decorated beautifully, dressed in pine garlands and holly, and the place was bustling with people when we arrived at 10:30am. Long tables had been set up in the main hallway downstairs with a buffet breakfast, and kids, parents, people from the South Boston neighborhood wandered about with plates of popovers and quiche. We rehearsed a bit and then had our breakfast with a boy who graduated from the Paraclete Center and now is a freshman at the Boston Latin School (one of the “exam” schools the Center prepares the middle-schoolers for) and is playing the viola there! Small world. Soon we invited everyone upstairs for a little morning music, and received a tremendously warm welcome for our presentation and performance.

We talked a bit about ourselves and the instruments – standard fare – and then transitioned into discussing the voicing of Bach chorales, which imitate the natural range of the human voice, and by playing a chorale we demonstrated how the violin-violin-viola-cello instrumentation of the string quartet evolved and became standardized. Next I talked a bit about the natural tendency to move to music, and how dance and music are organically interwoven together, and how dances often inspired composers to write (or required composers to write!). I told them a bit about the dance of the Minuet and Trio and next we played a pair from Beethoven to demonstrate. The performance ended with our presentation of the fugue finale of Beethoven’s third Op 59 quartet, which we compared to a conversation among many people. Of course, the lucky thing about music is that more than one person can talk at once, and yet everyone can understand each other! So we demonstrated how the subject of the fugue passes around the quartet and becomes inverted and elaborated upon throughout the movement, how we sometimes agree with each other and sometimes find ourselves in a heated argument, trying to outdo one another, and finally we performed the entire movement for the crowd.

The morning simply could not have gone better, and could not have been more satisfying, more fun, more exhilarating! The people who came to hear us were tremendously appreciative, and so many of them came up afterwards - thanking us for playing, and especially for talking about the music, for explaining the instruments and the pieces. I felt like we were being showered with gratitude and compliments – and yet I felt incredibly lucky to have such a beautiful place to play in, to perform for people who were excited, inspired, and curious to hear us – some of whom had never heard such music live before! I felt like it was such a treat for us to be reminded of why we are really doing this – to share something we love deeply with others, to use music to forge connections with people of all ages and backgrounds. We all left grinning.

Monday I arrived back at the Center for class, feeling rejuvenated and excited, with a sense of warmth for the place that my frustration from the few previous weeks had been slowly blotting out. I talked with Sister about making the “music-and-something” idea into a sort of informal series at the center – sometimes offering a brunch and sometimes coffee, perhaps occasionally collaborating with kids from another of the non-academic after-school classes, but certainly continuing to play and to talk about the music being performed. As I’ve been thinking about it more this week, I want to suggest a Valentine’s Day Musical Dessert – and perhaps have a few of my boys play as well – nothing like the motivation of a public performance to get them to concentrate! Performing at the Paraclete Center, for so many people I see and work with there, but also for so many new faces, was deeply important to me. The warm reception, the enthusiasm of the audience, the genuine appreciation from everyone I spoke with has certainly changed me this week – and I can only hope that it has done the same for the rest of my quartet (thanks guys!!!) and for the rest of the audience. This, after all, is why we are here.