There is a robin singing very intently outside my dorm room. Unusually loud and unusually long, the song slips up and down a major third. The carillon bells are also playing in the background, and I can’t help but think the bird is singing along its own accompaniment. It’s a nice, peaceful ending to an otherwise jam-packed week.
Since my train stopped at Wellesley Square last Sunday, I’ve gone through:
- An Orgo midterm on stereochemistry and nucleophilic substitution
- Accidentally adding the wrong buffer to this week’s DNA extraction (my head was still in the orgo-exam clouds, argh!)
- Writing the outline of a Bio lab paper on two secretory pathway mutants
- Cell culture, aka getting a little germophobic trying to keep Chinese hamster ovary cells that have been growing for 56 years outside an organism
- Being (with a friend) the last two people to leave the cell bio problem set session, because sometimes you do have to start assignments the night before
- Meeting with my advisor in an attempt to figure out next semester’s schedule, my summer, and low-key my life
All of this occurred in the first three days back at Wellesley. So you can only imagine why I was compelled to turn up off campus on a Thursday night. That’s right guys, I brought my friends to their first time at the symphony.
I wasn’t going to take them to any old concert. For starters, my love for the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been growing ever since my first visit for Shostakovich last semester. Sometimes when I hear a concert, I wish they’d made different musical decisions, but I never get that vibe when I hear the BSO. Rather, they make musical decisions I’d never have expected, and that makes the live performance infinitely more exciting. Since it was my friends first time at the symphony I wanted to pick a program where they would enjoy the entire thing, not just one piece. When I saw the Beethoven Piano Concerto No.4 and Mahler 1 program, I knew instantly that it was going to be a performance worth seeing. Not just because I love Mahler 1 more than jellybeans, not just because I happen to have played it myself (I practiced, practiced, practiced and it worked) but because I knew it would show a dramatic side of classical music that most people don’t know exists. When I mentioned I was the one to choose this concert at the end of the night to an older gentleman we asked to take our photo (he couldn’t work the iPhone; it was adorable), he said “you should thank her for this one. It’s not a performance you’re going to forget.”
And it was. I won’t bother trying to recreate the details, because you have to be there in the moment to understand. But it was nice to have the world stop for two hours on a Thursday. And it was so nice to be able to share my, for lack of a better word, sacred place, with my closest Wellesley friends, who were overwhelmingly good sports about the whole thing. I couldn’t stop smiling the whole way home.
So you can see the beauty that is symphony hall as well.