Christmas Letters
I love them, and read every word, finding that they are the best way to keep up with people I don't see for years at a time. So I welcomed a note from a former Melodious Accord intern, with news of her two little girls and busy life teaching piano, directing children's choir and keeping up with community responsibilities. Her note said: "I always think of you when I lament over the state of my career right now -- I remember you telling me about teaching Sunday School Music with five little ones. It's not very prestigious or lucrative, but what I do now as a volunteer is making a bigger difference in children's lives than anything I've done professionally. Hmmm..."
Why is there this huge dichotomy between what our musical studies prepare us for, and what we end up doing? The advice to shun marriage and motherhood and be faithful to the career is useful only to a very small group of women: most of us want much more out of life. It seems to me that we get a man's preparation, and then have to figure out for ourselves - often painfully - how to use that training in a woman's world. If we are thoughtful and optimistic, we learn to accept and affirm all our experience, and build our lives out of what we know and are becoming, rather than striving for some traditional pattern which was never designed for 20th century women.
Let me give a quick narrative view of my 'career'. In college I majored in organ and composition: by graduation time I disliked what I was writing (self-consciously 'modern') and had no wish to be a keyboard soloist. So I did graduate work in choral conducting, and the only job I could get was in a private school where I taught general music to everyone in grades 7-12 (with absolutely no training for this!) It was clear I didn't want to spend my life this way, so I stuck it out for two years, and went back to NY and private piano study. In the meantime, I had started the arranging work with Robert Shaw, and for the next eighteen years this was my sole contact with the professional music world. To support myself, I got a part-time job teaching piano under the direction of a wonderfully talented teacher -- so now I had been professionally educated in three fields, all of which felt totally closed to me. At age 30, I married Tom Pyle, and we produced five children in eight years -- and for the next fifteen years, I was principally a mother, also teaching piano at home, private music classes for small children, music for pre-schoolers at Riverside Church Sunday School, and (for three years) being a Cub Scout den mother. None of my professional training had helped me with these responsibilities, and I had to learn what all parents go through: to enjoy my children for themselves. In addition, I had to make each day contain as much music as I could. I was fascinated with the way my children learned from the beginning: speech, song, movement. My zeal for teaching music reading was supplanted by teaching by ear. My priorities had shifted drastically from my college years, into a much more human view of music-making, and the wish to open up musical experience to most of the people with whom I came in contact.
My compositional skills began to function again when I was in my forties, and was commissioned by Mennonite friends to write for their performance. I found myself back in the easy relationship with writing that had existed before my formal study, generously enriched by the work with Shaw, and all the teaching I'd been doing. Music flowed out, and, thank God, has continued to flow. I continue to be a mother (and grandmother); to travel, conduct and teach, to lead SINGS with odd groups of people with no qualifications --- and to compose, arrange and edit. The enabling thing that happened about age forty-five was that I realized that my aborted careers as composer, conductor and teacher had given me a wonderfully comprehensive view of the field: one rarely open to people who follow just one career track.
So all of you mothers of various ages and backgrounds and fields of endeavor -- welcome all those life experiences that come your way, even those seemingly in direct opposition to your goal. Fate works in mysterious ways to provide a unique life curve for each one of us. Perhaps the best education we can get is life itself, taken with enthusiasm, flexibility and large doses of a sense of humor.
Alice Parker
