I Had Nothing To Do With It

At the end of the summer two of my students, Burke Rivet and Lydia Dodd, played a duo recital.

I sat in the audience. That was the entirety of my contribution.

I didn’t pick the program. I didn’t coach it. I didn’t set up a single stand or move a single instrument, which anyone who has ever run a percussion studio will tell you is the actual labor. They booked the hall, chose the repertoire, worked out the logistics of two people covering a stage full of instruments, and played it.

At one point they put on stethoscopes.

Not as a gag — as equipment. There was a small folding table with a red plastic tub, a blue colander and a block of wood on it, and the two of them stood on either side of it wearing stethoscopes so they could hear what they were doing to objects that make almost no sound at all. Later they sat cross-legged on the floor around a low table with a metal bowl and a tin can.

Elsewhere in the program they stood at two keyboards with four mallets each and played the thing you’d expect a percussion duo to play.

Both halves were theirs.

I’ve written before that teaching is the part I’d defend hardest, and not because I’m especially good at it. It’s that it’s the only work where I get to watch the whole arc. Somebody arrives unable to do a thing. Some years later they can. And then — this is the part nobody warns you about — they go do something with it you would never have thought of, and they do it without asking you.

The stethoscopes were not my idea. I would not have had that idea.

Every teacher I respect has told me some version of this: the job is to become unnecessary, on a schedule, over and over, with a new group every four years. It sounds noble when you say it out loud and it feels strange when it actually happens, because what it feels like from the seat is being left behind slightly earlier than you expected.

Which is the correct outcome. It is, in fact, the only outcome worth working toward.

Best thing I did all summer was buy a ticket to something I had nothing to do with.