Musician’s Musings: Victoria Gunn

A lot has happened since I last wrote. My finger healed and I started playing again in late spring. My first foray into performing was Mozarts piano quartet in E flat, and my finger was still tender, but it held up well. Since then, I’ve done one more recording for Portland Baroque, and now I’m playing my second live set. When I started playing live again, I worried. Would my newly healed finger hold up? Would it develop a callous? Would it wear out, forcing me to change my fingerings to avoid using it? As it turns out, my finger has been fine. The real challenges have been more along the lines of “can I figure out the new street parking apps?”, “Can I handle Portland city traffic?”, and “ What will it be like to hold a face-to-face conversation with many people at once, when I’ve spend the last year and a half in the garden or writing blog posts and permaculture/sustainability curricula?”

sustaining

I have a confession to make. This past summer, music was pretty low on my list of worries. My town, Yamhill, nearly ran out of running water, and by mid August we were put on severe water restrictions, a stage four water emergency, at a time when our temperatures reached 106 F. When these restrictions went into effect, I sprang into action, doing my laundry in the outdoor sink and catching the water for garden use, toting grey water from the kitchen sink into the garden, and harvesting as much and as early as I could, to minimize the need for water. The emergency we had prepared for was here. We weren’t allowed to use outdoor water at all, for anything. For someone who grows a lot of their food, this was a potential disaster.

I learned a lot during that time. I learned that many plants need less water than I had assumed. I found some food preservation techniques that use very little water, and I explored fermentation beyond basic sauerkraut. More importantly, I learned that I could make it all work. While some of our harvest was a bit smaller than usual, I didn’t lose any plants. (I did lose a lot of ripening fruit during June, when temperatures reached 117F). And because I had to be so careful in my planning of where to pour my precious grey water, I got to know every inch of my garden better. I learned which plants needed more water, shade, mulch, or trimming. They revealed to me their quirks and needs, and we became better friends. For more information about how I navigated the dry months of August and September, you can read my blog at www.pollinatorsanctuary.wordpress.com. Look for The Drought Chronicles

Given the ecological disaster that landed in my own backyard, I’ve found myself more committed than ever to living in an ethical way on this planet. On the small scale, that means improving my soil, reducing my water use and waste, and rigorously examining all the ramifications of any purchases I make. On a larger scale, it means documenting what I see, teaching others (permaculture, sustainability), and doing whatever I can to heal the land.

And where does Baroque music fit into this? Some might say it is irrelevant. Others say that Classical and Baroque music, written for kings, bishops, and other nobility, represents colonialism and patriarchy, and that it should be tossed into the trash heap of history, along with slavery, racism, genocide, and colonialism. But I just can’t bear that thought. It’s too easy, when an entire culture or society is examining and re-educating itself, to throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water. Is everything that was created during colonial times bad? Is ballet bad? Paintings? Lace? Church icons? And what of the church buildings themselves? Does a great Gothic cathedral have a life that’s separate from the cruel king who ordered an army of downtrodden workmen to built it?

I remind myself that composers of the Baroque period needed to make a living like anyone else. They were not members of the ruling patriarchal class. They were passionate about their work, and they dedicated their lives to the pursuit of beauty and perfection. And we all need beauty, especially now, when there is so much ugliness and hate at large in the world.

As a music educator, I wrestle with these issues. Occasionally a student asks me why they should go to a concert, why they should bother with lessons, why they should try any harder than the minimum. These students have no intention of pursuing music as a profession, so why should they work hard at it? My first response to that is that I’ve never met an adult who said to me, “Boy, I wish my parents HADN’T made me learn violin or piano!” But many have told me they wish their parents HAD made them study, and hadn’t let them quit so easily.
 
But it’s more than that. There are studies that show that studying a musical instrument increases a child’s ability to learn other subjects, such as mathematic. And while that’s a worthy reason to study an instrument, music is worthy of pursuit for its own sake. I’m certain that the attention to detail and the focus required refine the senses and take our ability to perceive to a higher level. When we achieve some level of competence in something so difficult, we feel a certain pride in ourselves. Music transports us to another world, one which transcends words. And that is what brings me back to the stage.

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