Tree Symphony

by Gina Marie Wylie

  He stopped, and it was still bad, so I told him. The boy made a rude gesture and told me to mind my own business. I shut my mouth and sat still, trying to understand. Why wouldn’t you want it to sound right?

  A few minutes later, another boy rose from the other side of the orchestra and listened to someone else blow a clear note on an instrument, an oboe I learned later. The boy standing set his violin to match the sound the oboe made. In a second the other strings were tuning to him, and I did as well. The boy next to me was still off. After a second, the young man in front turned to the boy next to me. “You’re way flat, Ron.”

  The boy next to me twisted knobs and came close. The young man in front grimaced, but didn’t say anything more, he just sat down again.

  Rachael came out a minute later and lifted her baton. “First, we’ll work on the Bach piece.”

  I found the right piece of music and had barely looked at it before she waved her baton and everyone was playing. I had no idea what to do, and simply sat still until everyone finished. “Okay,” she said, “we’re a little ragged on the downbeat. Again, the first three bars.”

  This time I knew when to start, but I could only play the first six notes, before it went off someplace I didn’t know. I followed along and played a few other notes I knew, before she waved her baton again and everyone stopped.

  The boy next to me leaned over. “Why don’t you play all the notes?”

  “I don’t know how to play all the notes!” I said quietly, upset he was disturbing me.

  He sniggered and looked away. The conductor looked daggers at him. “One more time. Cellos, not all of you were on the downbeat.” She waved her baton, and this time I really did get the downbeat right and played more of the notes.

  “That was adequate,” the conductor told the group. “Again, from the top.” This time I got even more of the notes. For the next hour, I played like I never played before. And I had thought trees were tough critics! Rachael, the conductor, would make everyone stop and play it again and again and again if she didn’t like it, and she didn’t seem to like much.

  At the break I made a hasty comfort stop and was back to my cello going over the music, trying to associate what I heard with what was written. Rachael came and sat next to me. “Jerry said you weren’t very good at sight reading.”

  I laughed nervously. “I don’t know how; I don’t even know what sight reading is.”

  She smiled. “Reading unfamiliar music and playing it.”

  I waved at the music in front of me. “I can hardly read any of this! There’s so many things I don’t understand!” I pointed to a bar with dots. “Does this mean repeat?” For a second I felt an incredible coldness, a hollowness like I’d never felt from anyone, coming from her.

  “You don’t know what a repeat is?” I shook my head. “But you figured it out?” I nodded. “Why don’t you play all the notes?” she asked. Unlike when the boy had asked, this time I thought I should answer with more of an explanation.

  “I don’t know how to make them. My teacher, Mrs. Walker, has shown me a lot, and I’ve found some on my own. It’s hard to equate the sound with the mark on the paper. I’m trying my best.” I know I sounded like I was whining, but I wanted very much for her to understand.

  “How long have you played the cello?”

  “Four weeks.” Her face was closed; I thought it was okay, but I couldn’t be sure. I so very much wanted it to be good.

  “And before, what did you play?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. I tried flute for a few days at school. I didn’t like it.”

  For a moment she continued to look at me. “Jerry says you’ll play for some of us, after.” I nodded. “I look forward to it.” She put her hand on my shoulder briefly, squeezed and smiled. “Do your best, Kira.”

  I did my best, but there was just too much I didn’t know. I was feeling very puny by the end of the rehearsal, and simply wanted to slink off home to lick my wounds. That and practice and practice and practice...

  III

  Afterwards I followed Rachael when she asked me to come with her. It took a few minutes, but I found myself in a smaller practice room. Mr. Gora was there, along with half a dozen others, mostly people who carried instruments.

  “Kira,” Mr. Gora said, smiling, “I’d like you to play the melody you played for me the other day. You won’t mind if I record it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t mind. It’s not a real important piece.” At least not to the trees; I liked it a lot, though.

  “You have anything else?” one of the other boys asked. Most of the people looked like high school kids.

  I nodded, without thinking. “All sorts of things.”

  “Please, Kira, if you would,” Mr. Gora said, not impatient, but wanting, I thought, to get down to business. It was a trait I was already beginning to associate with conductors.

  I played the piece, all ten minutes of it. There was a silence in the room that I could not fathom. Such things kept happening when I was around other people, playing my music. I didn’t understand it at all. Afterwards, Rachael came up and hugged me. It wasn’t the sort of hug I got from my mom, and less frequently, from my father. This was something else; like what I imagined a tree would do if it could, if I’d done particularly well.

  Mr. Gora nodded at me. “Thank you very much, Kira. You’ll be back next week?”

  I nodded. Not for anything would I miss it! “Yes, Mr. Gora.”

  Monday, at my regular lesson, Mrs. Walker took me to one side, instead of working on theory, like I usually did at the start of a lesson. “Kira, I’m getting so much direction about how to teach you!” She laughed. “It’s distracting!”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Walker,” I told her, apologetic.

  She just shook her head. “Kira, don’t be sorry! Just do what you’re doing! Rachael says the most important thing is to teach you fundamentals! Jerry says nothing is important, just let you learn in your own way.”

  I sighed. “I felt bad Saturday. I couldn’t read a lot of the music; I didn’t know what half the words and symbols mean. Not knowing the fingerings; I understand I haven’t learned them all. But words... I thought I was good with words.”

  “Just that there are a lot of new ones,” she said. “Nothing tricky, particularly if you already speak Italian.”

  She looked at me expectantly and I shook my head, “I don’t speak Italian,” I said nervously, not understanding it was a joke.

  Mrs. Walker patted my shoulder. “We’ll start teaching them to you.”

  I showed her the music we were playing, and we went over all of the little words in Italian italics and what they meant. Then Mrs. Walker had me look through the music, looking for things I didn’t understand; there were still a lot of those.

  All week long I practiced and practiced. By Saturday I wasn’t quite a nervous wreck, but I was well on my way. For the first part of the rehearsal, I thought I did well, although the boy to my left made a lot of mistakes, and his cello was still out of tune.

  After the break, Rachael told me to move into the empty seat where the boy had been. I did so, aware that a lot of the other kids were looking at me. Where had the boy gone? We played the first piece, and we’d been going just a few moments when the girl to my left hissed, “Turn the page.” I looked at her confused, then I realized she was talking about the music on the stand between us. She didn’t know it? I grimaced and turned the page, then went back to the music.

  A little later she hissed again, more angry. “Turn the page!”

  Rachael stopped us then, and I turned to the girl next to me. “Turn your own pages if you don’t know the music!” I was surprised at my temerity, but I was angry -- she was distracting me. I had enough troubles with the music as it was.

  “You’re the page turner!” the girl told me in a hissing whisper, angry. “Do your job!”

  When we started the next time I turned the pages, and for the first time since I’d sat with the orchestra, paid a
ttention to other things going on around me, other than the conductor. Before, I’d been odd person out; I’d had my own music stand, but mostly I didn’t need it, having memorized what I was supposed to play. Watching though, I could see that every other person turned music and I was in a page turner position. So I turned her pages, not sure why I had to do it.

  Again, by the end of the rehearsal, I was nearly limp and again, Mr. Gora asked if I would come and jam with them. It was different, this time. When I’d come in before, everyone had listened attentively while I’d played; this time I was handed music.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing what you played last week,” Mr. Gora said, “and I added a little orchestration. Shall we try it?” I shrugged, having only the barest idea what he was talking about.

  He handed me my part and I looked it over. I didn’t see any mistakes. There were some places, though, where I didn’t understand what he’d written, but I wanted to learn.

  At the top of the first page was something that stopped my eye. “Work in Progress” where a title would be, and then, “Composed by Kira Kinkaid,” and under that, “Orchestration by Kira Kinkaid and Jerry Gora.” Handwritten, but very neat.

  Mr. Gora lifted his baton, and on the downbeat everyone began to play. After a few bars, I sat in my seat, shivering, unable to continue. The music was magnificent! Parts of it.

  Mr. Gora stopped everyone and looked at me. “You need to play, Kira. Is there something wrong with the music?”

  Numbly, I shrugged, trying to get a grip on myself. He’d written it down the way he heard it, I thought. He was a symphony conductor, he wanted to play the music with an orchestra. I was simply a student cellist, trying to learn how to play all the notes. Obviously, there was more here than I understood. If I could hear the trees, right then, I’d have felt better, but my trees were far away. Thinking about them made me feel a little better anyway, and I decided to try something the trees were good at: criticizing. They were always telling me how to play it better. I would tell Mr. Gora what I thought. Politely.

  “Could we play the first part, just me and them?” I waved at the other string players, across from me. He nodded, and we played it again. It was better. I pointed at the violas, “They need to play louder.” I gestured at the violinists, “They, softer.”

  We did it again and I liked it. For the better part of an hour, we played one part after another. A lot of times, I didn’t know what sounded best. The trees and I, I realized, didn’t hear the music the way Mr. Gora did; his ideas were very different. Still, there was some match, and I tried to figure out what sounded good, even if I had no idea what I was doing.

  All I knew was that every time I pronounced myself satisfied, Rachael and Mr. Gora would trade glances and Rachael would scribble on music paper. At least I’d figured out that they were writing down the notes I was showing them, even if I didn’t entirely understand why they were concerned over a little tune the trees liked.

  At the end Mr. Gora smiled and I thought I’d done pretty good. “One thing we need, Kira,” he said, “is a title. Do you have something in mind?”

  “Snow Melting at My Feet,” I said without hesitation, using the name I knew it by.

  Rachael giggled and Mr. Gora blinked. “Pardon?” he asked.

  I repeated it.

  Mr. Gora was still blinking, then he smiled. “Oh, I see!” Then his smile turned beatific. “Oh, wonderful!” He clapped his hands and looked pleased.

  “Tell me about it,” he asked. I didn’t understand, and he could see the question in my face. “What are the images that the music evokes in your mind -- or maybe vice-versa?”

  That wasn’t hard! “An old tree, standing in the middle of the forest. Looking down, seeing that the snow is melting once again. Knowing that spring is coming, that the leaves will bloom soon. But still, it will be a while, and he has to wait.”

  “And the last section?” Rachael asked. “What’s that?”

  “Joy that spring is coming,” I answered in part. “Knowing that all you have to do is wait. And figuring that enjoying life during the wait is very important.”

  “What are all the skittery parts?” Rachael continued.

  “Watching the rivulets of water flow away, twisting and turning as they go downhill.” I told them. “Goodbye snow!” I said the last with feeling and everyone laughed.

  I saw Rachael and Mr. Gora exchange glances; I wasn’t sure what they were saying to each other. There was so much I’d found about so very many things that I needed to learn! And there was so very much I wanted to say with music!

  Rachael was there for my next lesson; she was talking to Mrs. Walker when I came in. Rachael smiled when she saw me and walked over to the desk at one end of the room and came back with a cello case. “Jerry had me looking for a cello for you. Try this one.”

  I opened the case. The case was nicer than the one from the music store. The cello looked old, and there were a lot of dark spots on the wood that the store cello didn’t have. Rachael picked up the bow, ran her finger over the bow strings and twisted the end a little and handed it to me.

  I ran the bow over the cello strings, thinking I had to tune. For a moment it was like I was floating a million miles high, looking down at the world; things turned wavy, and I stopped playing almost at once.

  I took a deep breath and tried again, intending to play the first few bars of the tree piece. I couldn’t stop; I kept on and on and on until the end.

  It took every ounce of will power I had to put the bow down when I finished. I wanted to play forever! The cello was so incredibly beautiful! I looked up at Rachael, meaning to thank her, but she was staring at me with an expression that made me tremble. My mom was crying and Mrs. Walker was standing beaming next to an older man I’d never seen before.

  “Kira,” Rachael said quietly, her voice dark and husky, very different from her usual. “My grandfather brought that cello out of Poland in the opening days of World War II. He was not much older than you, barely fourteen. The family had saved and scrimped enough to get him a boat ticket to the United States. My great-great-grandfather made that cello with his own hands, nearly a hundred years ago.”

  She held her left hand in front of her, looking at it, front and back. “My hand is too small; I am adequate on the cello, but I do far, far better on the violin. The cello was sitting in a closet in my father’s house gathering dust. So I asked him if you could use it and he told me quite certainly not.”

  Rachael looked at me and grinned. “I’m an only daughter of an only son. I’m prone to tears. I cried when he said no, then asked him again. He said okay, for a short time.”

  Rachael took a deep breath, “Please, as long as you play cello, play that one. Return it if, and only if, you decide to do something else.”

  IV

  The following week at rehearsal, Mr. Gora stood in front of the intermediate orchestra before they began. “As you know, we had a competition for the best student written piece, and if it was good enough, we’d add it to the program. I’d intended for the symphony to play the composition, but in this case, the composer is from the intermediate orchestra, and after consulting with Rachael, I’ve decided to add it to the orchestra program at the Christmas concert.

  “The concert is six weeks away, and we are still working with the composer on the orchestration.” I was stunned when he nodded to me. “Kira, please stand up.”

  I didn’t stand up, I shrank into my chair. He laughed, not at all nastily. “Yes. Since there is so little time, we’re going to work on it as a group to finish it. Kira isn’t entirely up to speed on the nuances of orchestration.” He and Rachael traded grins. I hardly had any idea of what they were talking about.

  Music was passed out and I looked at mine. It was pretty close to the previous week but with the changes I’d requested. Rachael led the orchestra through a sight reading of the first part, stopping before we reached where we’d ended the week before. Then she worked with the orchestra on
getting their parts right. Never once did she glance at me or ask my opinion. That was fine, because I was still getting used to the idea that the trees’ music was being played by so many people.

  And how wonderful it sounded!

  Eventually Rachael started on the last part and everyone played. After a few bars, I stopped. It was all wrong.

  Rachael waved the orchestra to a halt. “Kira?”

  For a second I felt mortal fear. This wasn’t ten strangers, all older than me. These were a hundred kids my own age, some of whom I’d talked to. At least one I recognized from my own school. I took a deep breath. “This part is for cello,” I told her. “And him.” I pointed at one of the flute players. I saw the startled look on the boy’s face. “He has to play louder. The other flutes, softer.”

  We tried it again and it was close. “How was that?” Rachael asked, seeing, I thought, the look on my face.

  I pointed at the three girls who sat in the front flute seats. “They shouldn’t play. Him,” I pointed to the boy I’d pointed out before, “and him.” Another boy, two rows and three seats further back. “This part is just cellos and two flutes,” I added. Trees and soft wind.

  We played again and it sounded much better. Rachael continued on, and the next part did sound much better with more instruments. I found myself almost as interested in listening to their different sounds as they played, and once I stopped to listen. After a short bit, Rachael stopped everyone and looked at me again.

  “They need to play louder at first,” I pointed to the horns, “then fade away.” For another few minutes we worked on the Tree song, then Rachael told us to play the Bach piece, and I went back to being a common member of the orchestra, who didn’t understand all that we were doing.

  After the rehearsal, as I was putting up the cello, the second boy I’d pointed to in the flute section came up and stood in front of me. “Why me?” he asked quietly.