by Julie Scolnik
I have been a musician for all of my life. Ballet was my first love, but I realized at the tender age of 13 that it was my emotional response to music that made me crave a physical outlet for the deep stirrings it evoked.
So off I went to spend three idyllic summers at a music camp in Maine, where Beethoven and Brahms symphonies were broadcast through loud speakers to awaken us in our woodland cabins, as if the trees had burst into song.
I connected deeply with these young peers of mine, each day listening to friends rehearse Schubert’s cello quintet in the woods before lunch. When I played the recording at home when camp was over, my eyes filled with tears. And then I knew: Music would become my life.
My career as a professional flutist over the past forty years has brought me to far-ranging jobs, both highbrow and low, (from weddings and funerals as a student, to pit orchestras of broadway shows, and finally to high-caliber freelancing as principal flute with opera and ballet orchestras, and as a regular sub with the Boston Symphony. Finally, at the age of forty, I founded my own chamber music series, Mistral Music, my dream job, what would become “my magnificent obsession,” for which I continue to serve as the artistic director.
I discovered that connecting with my community through an intimate concert experience was not only tremendously gratifying, but also the perfect outlet for me to share what meant most to me in life— not just music, but childhood, memories, and the mysteries of the heart. And this is precisely where the intersection of my life as a writer and a musician now takes place.
Besides what people have called our imaginative programming and virtuosic artists, I think that the success of my music series is due in large part to the rapport I have developed with my audience members through the personal stories I tell and the messages I write in the program booklets.
I often program music that has in some way altered my own sensibilities with the hope it will do the same for my audience members. I regularly introduce a piece by recounting a story about where I first heard and fell in love with it, and explain how hearing it every time conjures the memories and emotions of that moment in time. Like Proust’s madeleine. And my desire to share an experience I have had with a piece of music is very much like a writer’s desire to tell a story.
But beyond the role of artistic director, there are other analogies to be drawn between being an instrumentalist and a writer.
As musicians, we’re taught to be vehicles for the composers’ music. The message we try to convey with our own playing should essentially be devoid of ego, as we strive to deliver the message of the composer. (Even if musicians imbue each work with their own artistic interpretation.) It’s a different story for writers, who tell stories which are uniquely their own.
But because music is innately abstract, the inner worlds that the same piece of music may conjure is different for every person. Although in some ways writing is the opposite, as it is telling one very specific story, it, too, will resonate with each reader a little differently.
Other obvious comparisons between writing and playing music that come to mind have to do with communicating. Whether it is with words or notes, both writers and musicians use their medium to share a vision and paint a picture.
As a musician, one is constantly paying attention to beginnings and endings and the fundamental importance of beautiful phrasing. In the same way, rhythm and cadence matter on the written page, as well as the spaces between the phrases, the musical flow of a good sentence. I noticed recently that deciding how to end a chapter on a cliff hanger is very similar to how I might choose to end a movement, one that necessarily leads to and implies what is to come next in a new section of music.
I think that the (slightly urgent) desire to tell a story in writing probably comes from the same place as the desire to share a piece of music in a live performance. I recently discovered a beautiful quote from Maya Angelou, and I feel it encapsulates this same urgency to share art, whether it is a writer’s story or a piece that a musician yearns to perform: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
As for my own odyssey that took me over forty years to bring this memoir, Paris Blue, into world, I am beyond moved that the time has finally come to share it.
Julie Scolnik is a concert flutist and the founding artistic director of Mistral Music (www.MistralMusic.org), a chamber music series that since1997 has been known for its virtuosic performances, imaginative programming, and the personal rapport Scolnik establishes with her audiences. She lives in Boston with her husband, physicist Michael Brower, and their two cats, Daphne and Chloë. They have two adult children, Sophie and Sasha Scolnik-Brower, also musicians. All info about "Paris Blue" (trailer, endorsements, story, music in the book) can be found at www.JulieScolnik.com.