Past in Present.
Finally. :)
So tonight I went to hear the Pittsburgh Symphony perform, and one of the pieces they performed was Aaron Copland’s Four Dances from Rodeo, a piece which I performed with my youth orchestra my senior year in high school. I loved playing it and was excited to hear it performed by the PSO tonight, my very own clarinet teacher being one of the performers :)
I wasn’t expecting my reaction though. The piece started, and instantly, so many memories were brought back. I remembered how our crazy conductor would yell at the brass pretty much every week for how they played the opening lines, and laughed to myself. I remembered certain parts that I had to play, and rehearsing them and trying to get myself to match octaves with the first clarinetist.
And when various solos were played, I remembered so and so who played such and such solo. I remembered how hard it was to tongue some of the parts in “Hoe-Down”, which we also played spring of my junior year in school symphony for Kaleidoscope, and how I had that silly crush on that boy that almost went to prom with me….
I remembered the last notes of my last ever SSYO concert, and standing onstage when they announced that I was graduating and where I was going to college, and how my parents and clarinet teacher and flute teacher/school clarinet teacher all came to EVERY concert that year.
And much more.
All this, just from hearing a piece I played again.
Often, when I’m here in Pittsburgh and revisit those memories, they seem so distant, so far off, so long ago. Almost as if they were a distant dream or someone else’s life, just because so much is different now. I’m in a different place surrounded by different faces. My past and present feel so separated, so like two different worlds that I wish would mesh together.
But at that moment, those memories didn’t feel very far away at all. They felt recent, they felt like they belonged; they did not feel out of place at all. They were right there in front of me again, right there in Heinz Hall, roughly 6 hours southwest of where they originated.
My life finally felt like one piece, one world; not two separate ones.
