Interval Adventures: Am I a musician?

While waiting for Nick Phan's recital to begin last night (post on that soon!), an Old Opera Lady who was the only other person half an hour early addressed me.  I think we exchanged some bromides before she asked: "Are you a singer?"  "Only in church," I answered.   "Oh," she said, and the conversation was over.  Exchanges at the reception after the recital followed a similar, and familiar pattern.  No, this isn't one of my first times at an opera (is my enthusiasm that unusual? is open delight not socially acceptable?); no, I'm not a singer/musician.  When I say I'm a graduate student, the confused interlocutor perks up. "Oh, so you're doing a degree in music!" No.  Oh.

I am unclassified.  Unclassifiable?  If, in these situations, I were to answer that I am a singer, a musician, I would be seriously misleading these people.  I play the piano, but not very well.  I have sung in university choirs, but only those without strict auditions (I tried the latter, and failed.)  I am the cantor of the weekly psalm, but for a congregation whose musically literate members could be counted on one's fingers.  (Two months, and two traumatic debacles: a cracked note, and one terrible time of simply not finding the intervals in the first iteration of the refrain.  The vicar probably notices.  The organist, a deeply passionate and professionally active musician, certainly does, and is kind enough to console and advise.  Others compliment me.)   But even if/though I am "not a musician," does this disqualify me from being a serious audience member?  Interlocutors tend to be surprised if it is once established that yes, I can read a score, or yes, I am familiar with a selection of singers and recordings from the 1950s onward.

Me and my sister Two Girls at the Piano, Renoir

I admit, I'm on the defensive here.  Music is part of the fabric of my life.  I can't imagine not having Beethoven or Bach on the stereo, not humming fragments of Puccini around the apartment, not doing Schumann lieder with my younger sister when we're together, taking turns to play and sing.  (When we were growing up, our dolls waltzed to Strauss.)  Waltraud Meier, in Joshua Jampol's collection of interviews in Living Opera, spoke in sorrow and in anger of the growing conceptual divide between Musicians (professional) and Non-Musicians (everyone else.)  Can I blame that for these conversations?  Can I blame a particularly American tendency to classify "What One Does" as the determining fact of someone's personal and social identity?  It's true that this is not always the case, as other anecdotes on this blog reveal, and I am deeply grateful to all those passionate souls who have welcomed me by sharing their stories and listening to mine.

As long as I am launched and away, I'll be frank: I resent that my chatty group of three friends (one a first-time opera-goer) was coldly glared at before the start of Intermezzo by a gray-haired gentleman who snoozed through the first half of the opera and left before the second.  I resent that I am someone who doesn't "fit" in a classical music audience according to many of its other members; it's a painfully lonely feeling.  I am deeply grateful to all the philanthropic initiatives which make it possible for me to be a member of this audience.  But while arts organizations try to educate youngish audiences about classical music... how do we--the passionate, the penniless, the trying-to-be-well-informed--educate our fellow audience-members about us?  I'm not even sure if this is Petty Resentment or an Important Question to Ponder.  Sorry, Gentle Readers; reviews as usual soon, in which Petty Resentment will be kept at a minimum.