Our next guest blogger, Sara Sitzer, is one of the cellists with the Elgin Symphony Orchestra. She and her husband recently bought a house in Elgin and are experiencing the joys of fixing it up. She is excited about becoming more involved with the Jewish community in Elgin and the wider community. And she understands community from playing in a orchestra and in chamber groups. She was inspired after Erev Rosh Hashanah services talking about Community and sent in this entry:
When people see me on the Metra with my cello, they ask, “do you play with the Chicago Symphony?” (these people being the ones who realize it’s not a guitar, that is) And when I kindly tell them, “alas, no,” their next question is, “oh, then what do you do for a living?”
Well, I make music for a living. I play in the Elgin Symphony Orchestra, I play with various other orchestras and small chamber ensembles in and around Chicago, I perform every July at a festival in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I founded a chamber music festival in St. Louis (my hometown), I founded a chamber music series right here in Elgin (chambermusiconthefox.org–check it out!), I write for music blogs, I coach chamber music–in short, I freelance, and yes, I make a living by it. So it might not surprise you to know that I am colleagues and likely friends with every classical musician who lives or plays in Elgin, as well as the majority of the musicians in the Chicagoland area. But in addition, there are probably only a couple of degrees of separation between me and any other professional classical musician in the country.
An example of this: after CKI’s Erev Rosh Hashanah services, I had a lovely conversation with a congregant who, upon hearing I was a cellist, proceeded to tell me about an old friend of hers who had passed away whose daughter is a violinist in the St. Louis Symphony. “Oh!” I said, “Debbie Bloom?” I was right.
The music world is tiny, and the sense of community within it is what inspired me to pursue it professionally. I first got a sense of this when I was 16 years old and was accepted to attend a small music camp in the hills of Vermont. It was an utterly magical summer: we were barefoot all day, we held hands singing madrigals every night before bed, we baked homemade bread in our free time, but we mostly soaked up the incredible experience of playing music together. Now, 16 years after that summer, I am still in touch with most of the musicians I met there, and I run into them constantly at gigs, at conferences, and online. We only become more interconnected as the years go by.
To play music together–particularly chamber music–is an intensely intimate experience, so it’s no surprise that musicians are a close-knit family. When you rehearse a piece of Beethoven or Schubert with colleagues, you experience an extreme range of human emotions together. And when you rehearse those pieces for hours upon hours at a time, you get a chance to learn more about your colleagues’ personalities than you ever thought you might. As they say, playing chamber music is more intimate than a marriage–just without the sex.
Because the music world at large is the community that I feel absolutely closest to, some of my best friends live thousands of miles away, yet we still feel utterly close. Because this community is the one I have always felt most at home with, I ended up marrying another cellist. And because this is the community that I know the best and feel the most comfortable in, it is my means of connection to other communities: I started the chamber music series in Elgin as a way of connecting to the Elgin community, I reached out to Rabbi Frisch Klein about Kol Nidrei music as a way of connecting to the Jewish community, and I use every performance I play as a way of connecting to anyone who is there to listen.