On Being a Community Musician

I recently paid a long-overdue visit to Brattleboro, Vermont where I lived for about three years after graduating from Bennington College. I came to Brattleboro a clarinetist and left a singer. While I was there I had countless opportunities to perform as both, often on the same program, as well as to try my luck at a wide range of musical genres.

Vermont's oldest town, Brattleboro sits in the southeast corner of the state, neighboring the Marlboro Music Festival and home to a robust arts community all its own. Among the population of 8000 are hippies who moved to Vermont in the 70s, including founding members of some eight communes that thrived in the area for many years.

It's an incomparably progressive and eclectic place to live and make music.

When you move to a city like New York, for the first couple of years it's all you can manage to just keep your passion alive and avoid being chewed up and spat out. But an experienced, enthusiastic artist meets a very different kind of welcome in a community the size of Brattleboro.

You're needed there. You have a role to play.

Everyone knows who you are and where to find you. You end up doing a lot of different kinds of things with different people and wearing various hats. The lines blur regarding who's a pro and who's an amateur, because many of the "amateurs" are highly skilled and many of the "pros" are still so passionate about what they're doing that they'll often still play simply for the pleasure of it, with little or no pay, if it's the right project and they have the time.

You keep busy. During my brief stay in Brattleboro I taught clarinet at the Brattleboro Music Center, performed with the Windham Orchestra, Friends of Music at Guilford, the Consortium of Vermont Composers and the New England Bach Festival, subbed with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, in addition to organizing dozens of chamber music and art song performances primarily as excuses to play music with people I found attractive and fascinating.

I also sat in on performances by The Tiny Monsters and the Ill Wind Ensemble , notorious local free improvisation groups. I got to record and perform with songwriter Philip Price of The Winterpills under the pseudonym Smoki Thoreau (!) back when his band was still called Feet Wet.

And for some reason Nick Branch let me tag along for several gigs with his band The Prime Rib, possibly because my classical bass clarinet chops and polished sound mitigated the number of wrong notes I hit. I did my best to keep up with saxophone virtuoso Scott Shetler, who kindly tried to teach me to improvise. It was pretty much an exercise in futility, but giving it my best shot greatly expanded my musical spontaneity and willingness to take risks in classical performances.

Scott maintains strong ties to the Brattleboro area. During my visit I got to see him perform with The Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band at a party to celebrate the release of their new CD, Come Over*, and to support efforts to close the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.

Great music for a great cause, held on the stunning grounds of the Guilford Organ Barn. Community musicians know they have the power and responsibility to take care of their community.

 Obviously, you don't have to live in a small town to build a career that spans musical genres, organize concerts around the music and people who inspire you, or use your talents to further a political agenda. But I am so grateful that I was able to immerse myself for several years in an environment where I could focus on passion and politics without having to obsess about impeccable technique, audition skills, and command of the standard repertoire.

These things of course did eventually become obsessions for me.

The end of the Vermont chapter of my life became inevitable from the moment that voice teachers Nan Nall and Lise Messier, then my colleagues at the BMC, hired me to play clarinet for a run of Die Fledermaus they produced in an effort to found an opera company in Brattleboro.**

I had never been around an opera production before. I was instantly enchanted. I could hardly bear to leave the theatre after rehearsals. I remember walking out of the historic Latchis Theatre into the blinding winter sunlight and preferring the dark magical world inside to the beautiful rustic outdoors of my beloved town.

If this had just been a routine production of Fledermaus, maybe I would have escaped seduction. But our music director was the late, deeply beloved conductor and coach Glenn Parker. I know I am far from the only one who found Glenn's passion for singing infectious, and I think he would gladly take the blame for making me fall in love with opera. Fledermaus is such a silly show, but the music and characters bloomed under his affectionate and skilled leadership to create a great night of theatre that was both hilarious and very touching.

I needed a great deal of intense training. I couldn't get it in Vermont.

I would not be the artist and person I am today if I had leapt straight into conservatory education without my too-short tenure in the land where three-pronged outlets are still a rarity. I learned the joy of playing whatever, and with whomever, I wished. I had the nerve to experiment with all styles of music whether or not I was any good at them. I know that the distinction between professional and amateur musicians isn't what you might expect.

While part of me will always regret having left, I don't want to idealize musical life in Brattleboro. There are certainly steep lows as well as highs. Many of the friends and colleagues I knew in the early 90s continue to live and perform there, and I was able to appreciate the challenges as well as the payoff of their choice to stay.

I am immeasurably grateful to all of them for maintaining the lively artistic community from which I benefited so greatly. I hope to spend more time with them in the future – and that they'll still let me come play music with them occasionally!

*Come Over features music by Patty Carpenter and poetry by Verandah Porche. Verandah gives frequent readings and performances of her own work. I'm looking forward to interviewing her about her particular brand of vocal performance, so check back in a few days to hear what she has to say. 

**While the company that produced this Fledermaus survived for only a couple of seasons, Nan and Lise now run the highly successful Opera Theatre of Weston.