Picking the winners

Songs, scorpions, and ‘ssimilation.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Huntsville after seven hours of Best Western oblivion, I still feel underslept. The next three days will have a lot to enjoy. I‘ll see some friends I haven‘t seen in a year, hug necks, go to presentations about singing geekery, listen to music. And throughout, these old bones will stack themselves up on some piano benches and play about three dozen songs for singers in a regional competition.

There‘s literally nothing Texans like better than a contest. Separating people by scores! expressing our opinion through evaluation comments! picking winners! Also: designating losers. Meritocracy, baby. Even our communal music, band and choir, is organized around competition, better better better best.

We like competition more than we like actual music.

Ugh, I take it back. Sort of.

Don‘t get me wrong, if you read this newsletter you know that I like competition too, but this morning the word leaves a numb, metallic taste in my mouth, like after a scorpion bite. It‘s not going to kill me, but honestly I‘d feel better if I laid down and elevated the affected area.

Texas has a pretty robust relationship with what is usually still called “art song,” a term referring to a very specific lil kind of composition for voice and piano with its roots in 19th century Germany. People have sung songs forever, but this was a niche kind of song, with fancier poetry (sometimes) and tending toward the complex in terms of the technique and musicianship needed to perform it (sometimes), but mostly distinguishing itself through its audience (rich). I like art song, and I’m glad it’s grown harder to say exactly what it is over time. Anyway, there’s a longish tradish of the stuff in Texas because so many Germans emigrated here from about 1840 to 1870. Germans lacked economic opportunity, and the new white leaders of Texas were giving away land like they owned the place. The Teutons came by the boatload, complete with pianos ready for Ein fester Burg (which they knew) and accordions ready for tejano (which they didn’t).

Europe in the nineteeth C was, how you say, kompliziert. While the new Texas Germans were isolated in the Hill Country pre-interstate, not hurrying to blend in but starting to say things like der Ranch, Germans back in the new unified fatherland were “germanising” the country. They outlawed school instruction in languages other than Deutsch and for a time even went so far as to remove children from francophone families in the Alsace, sending them to Prussia for a few years of sufficient lederhosening. Austria swiped right on Hungary, and Hungary expressed its joy at being crowned Best Little Ausländer by cracking down on all the other foreigners, closing schools and printing presses, sequestering job opportunities. Hungary had been one of only three European nations to support multilingual education, but it hung a U-ey for Franzl and Sisi; it took just about twenty years for half a million Slovaks to move to the mines and factories of the new American steel magnates.

Of course, not all of the Slovaks and Alsatians left Europe. Most of them learned the new languages, changed their names, and assimilated. They wrote art songs and operetta showpieces about their Roma and Bohemian grandmothers and sang them on stage in Vienna, dressed in rustic costumes. Songs my mother taught me.

Most of my family came to this country in the 1880s. Same with my husband’s people. His Slovaks and Alsatians fled their nations’ respective ethnic cleansings. One great-grandmother was just a girl then, and her family had enough money for a comfortable journey. One great-grandfather was a 17-year-old kid who traveled with an older neighbor; they would both give their lungs and their children to the man who built the Frick museum. One grandmother joined a group of church ladies who never learned English and carried an icon through the streets of their Pennsylvania town to comfort shut-in parishioners. My Germans, in the meantime, moved to Minnesota, like the Texaners blessedly not fleeing erasure but simply seeking financial transformation. Like my Swedes and my Irish, they followed well-established networks of friends and arrived in communities already built for them, speaking their native tongue every day while they learned new vocabularies.

All of them leaned into community, relied on it, used it to stay alive.

Here am I because of them, married to him because of them, spending the day at a profession of beauty and play because of them. Because of them, I play old songs in European languages in a land of assimilated foreigners who braved the new tongue and the taunts and the closed doors so that their great-grandchildren could join the shouts of America for the real Americans.

Spicy I may be this November morning, but in all honesty I’ve never been so grateful to have to get ready for this annual event. A friend said this morning “we’re lucky to have this work,” and she’s so right. A musician’s work is never done; you can always hit the practice room and do a little more. Having to hone this music in the last week has been balm for my anxious brain. Wondering what to brace for, my body finds its center again on the bench, arms extended toward the keys like a dance partner, seeing where the music will lead.

And the competition itself is a picture of my profession at its best. We go into the arena with our partners and wherever they are that day and in each moment of their performance, that’s where we’ll be too. Leaning into community, relying on it, using it to stay alive.

Time to walk through the door and see what happens.

Thanks to Jamie and to Twyla, and to all the singers and pianists at the 2024 Texoma NATS conference.