Last Love Note, For Now (No. 3)

To: Evelyn Glennie
From: Rachel Harkai
Re: my musical education

Dear Evelyn,

So I might be breaking the rules of writing to people I don’t know with this note. Though we don’t really know each other, we’ve met before. Do you remember? I was that little girl, nine or ten years old, who took the wrong door out of the women’s bathroom in Stetson Chapel, a building on the campus of Kalamazoo College, and stumbled unknowingly into your dressing room. I recognized you immediately from the cover of Rhythm Song, your first album, which was given to me by my father, a percussionist himself. I remember how, even at that young age, I was awestruck by your recorded performances - by the beauty of the folk-Hungarian song Czardas when given to the marimba, by the amazing swiftness of your rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee - and more profoundly by the musical talent you displayed in spite of your deafness.

I was an incredibly superstitious child, always ordering my life into patterns, stepping over cracks to avoid curses, believing that the things that happened to me - both good and bad - had occurred for some special and unique reason. But little did I realize at the time, how fateful our meeting would later seem when looking back on the path of my musical education. Not more than a year later I began studying percussion performance seriously, and though you had no knowledge of your teaching, recordings of your performances taught me so much of what I learned - the sound of precision, strong attack, a pure tone. I figured out Stout’s Mexican Dances mostly from hearing you play them through my stereo speakers, again and again. But most importantly, Evelyn, you showed me that a female could not only make a name for herself, but that she could become the most dominant figure in the male-dominated world of percussion.

Maybe you remember the second time we met, early winter 2003? In a public masterclass on the campus of Grand Valley State University, I played a fugue - the second movement from Bach’s Sonata for Solo Violin No. 2 in A-minor - on the marimba for you, in front a hundred or so other people. In what was probably the pinnacle of my musical career, you came on stage that evening and gave me a real live lesson. Strangely enough, the only advice I still remember you giving was on those same topics whose importance I had learned simply from the sound of your recordings - authority, accuracy, confidence.

I got to see you again recently - from more of a distance this time - during your performance with the Greenville Symphony last weekend. Though I used to play Drumming and Shadow Behind the Iron Sun regularly during my slots deejaying at the college radio station, I haven’t been listening to your albums much recently. Its been almost two years since I left the percussion section of U of M’s orchestra and, since I couldn’t afford to move my marimba south with me, I haven’t played the now-stored instrument since I came to Spartanburg. Even so, the familiarity of your playing rushed back at me with intensity and with nostalgia. I realize now that, though my appreciation of your musicianship still remains, this appreciation is different from what it once was. After finally abandoning regular musical practice - having forgotten those old concerns of form and technique - the opportunity to hear you play was no longer a kind of scrutinizing study, but now only an overwhelming wash of gratitude, indebtedness, appreciation.

A few days ago I put the concert’s program into my file cabinet, stashing it in a folder that holds the last vestiges of my musical career - a few newspaper articles, acceptance letters to some music conservatories, the autographed liner notes to your Greatest Hits album. At the very bottom, I found the yellowed ticket stub from that concert over a decade ago when I unknowingly stumbled into you, a woman I would later come to idolize. So I guess that more than a love note, I mean this to be a sincere thank you. Though I may have never had courage enough to tackle the reality of a career in classical music, the lessons you taught extended well beyond the musical realm of my life, encouraging me not only to move through my every endeavor with attempts at grace and confidence, but to always remember how much can be learned when we simply listen.

Sincerely,
Rachel