Lovely, Magnificent, Wonderful

I've been serving my country with AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.  It's a wonderful experience, but sometimes music—and internet—is difficult to come by.  So even though this performance happened way back in November, I'm putting this memory out there.  It was one of those nuggets of civilian life that reminds me of where I was before I joined NCCC, and what I'm looking forward to returning to this fall.

November 11, 2011

The venue is Raw Space, a coffee shop with a beer and wine license and a nice little stage behind the storefront that looks like it should be next door, but isn't. The town is Ellensburg, Washington, home of Central Washington University and its cello studio.

There's four of them, opening for Ashia Grzesik.  I can tell they are unseasoned, still students by their general inability to hear how their individual parts fit with the other individual parts, how the chords are structured and balanced—but after all this time, it's so lovely, magnificent, wonderful to hear music that isn't pop, music that is live and tangible—the different voices of each cello so distinct, each player's fingers moving over the fingerboard—music that isn't overplayed or disagreed upon or disliked, dismissed by one or another team member when the eleven of us are crammed in the van.

And then the stage clears, and an accordion player begins a tango-esque duet with a violinist—they are the only bodies on stage: this long, skinnylegged girl and this happy accordion-playing man, alone, until Ashia comes on, stepping carefully—artfully—from the back of the stage, black-gloved hands moving so the walk becomes a dance, a flourish, a visual invitation.  She sits down, pulls off her gloved fingers one by one—the first hand her left, the bow hand—helped by the right hand, the right hand fingers, one by one, with her teeth because her bow is already in her left hand—she imagines her glove as a violin, stretched from her hand to her mouth, bow moving back and forth over it—she flings it down—the music—the music!

I can hear the gaps in her voice, the river-like flow of her (in)articulation—the steadiness of her cello in her hands as she plays, head tipped back in song.  Cello, accordion, and violin, rushing onwards through love songs and Poland songs and blame songs. In between Ashia is gesturing, telling stories with her hands. She speaks of farmers and bison and a square window in a square house holding a grandmama with World War II cars, stories, and the the best pirogies, the best pirogies...

The songs run together, beautiful and sure—but the stories—she tells them with her hands and face, ribcage and toes, everything expanding from that tiny, lipsticked mouth to us, her audience.  We are giving and she is giving. In this polite venue, I can smile in gleeful silence, wrapped up in the music, the concept of performance and vibrations and time over space.  The things I have missed so much since coming to AmeriCorps NCCC, the things that kind people like the biologist on this project, Scott, bring to our lives because making the world better happens in so many, many ways.