Post-Bike Trail Notes: The Many Roads Not Chosen

One of my many paths not chosen was the path of classical music performance.

Riding a bike every day, all day, creates that beautiful space that dancers and other performers know well: the life right here now, in the physical body in time and place.

As the cinder of the Erie Canal Trail from Buffalo to Albany unspooled beneath my wheels the first two weeks in June, I could spin into a kind of trance state of cadence and motion. Being.

Yet at every juncture, choice and often action were required. Wayfaring signage was not always available or clear, maps not detailed enough, priorities of co-riders not the same. And at times, even with due consideration, initial choices to follow a certain route had to be remade. Sometimes a path just didn't "feel right," and a 360-degree turn was required.

Bicycling is, of course, a well-used metaphor for life. And the trip gave me time to reflect on several roads I did not take.

The first of these materialized in the first few days of the ride when we arrived in Rochester -- home to the Eastman Kodak company, inventors of the Brownie camera that popularized and democratized photography at the beginning of the 20th century; and its philanthropic offspring, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Kodak Hall, the largest performance venue at
he Eastman School of Music in downtown
Rochester, NY.

George Eastman, the inventor who founded Eastman Kodak (Kodak is not a collaborating partner but rather a name Eastman devised for his company), ascribed to the philosophy of "noblesse oblige." He stood alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie as one of the most philanthropic men of his era. He provided Kodak employees the first "stock bonus" in U.S. corporate history, and invested millions in education at MIT and in Rochester. He was the largest contributor to HBCU's in the 1920's, and a pioneer in dental and medical philanthropy.

A scientist, he also recognized the links between the creative and scientific processes, particularly through music. "There are no drawbacks to music: you can't have too much of it," he famously said.

This passion led him to establish one of the nation's most famous music conservatory programs, the Eastman School of Music, where my path nearly intersected with Eastman's vision and philanthropy for music.

I became a trumpet player at age 9 by accident: we were invited to begin in our school band program at that age, and this was the instrument found moldering in my grandmother's attic -- provenance still unknown. But I took to "blowing my own horn" like a fish to water: I love music, and I love the feeling it creates in my brain and body when I create it myself.

The trumpet is an utterly collaborative, ensemble instrument: yes, you can solo, but it is not really the instrument for living room confabs. As a wind player, I pursued first concert band, then orchestral playing, then brass quartets and quintets.

My love for it was so clear that my parents -- who had earlier told me a piano was beyond our financial reach -- broke down and sent me off to NYC with my junior high band instructor to purchase a decent instrument along the hallowed musical hall of 48th Street.

But most importantly, they hooked me up with private lessons and somehow I was charmed enough to wind up with one of the best trumpet instructors in New England: Irvin Bourque, who had previously taught at the Juillard School and who had himself studied with the famed NY Philharmonic trumpeter William Vacchiano and played for the larger-than-life conductor, Arturo Toscanini (bringing a type of "What would Toscanini do?" filter to my life!).

All more esoterica on trumpet legacy than you may need on a Monday morning.

Mr. Bourque, who dragged me willingly with him from town to town as part of the Norwich (CT) Civic Band and several brass quartet/quintet configurations, had me headed toward Eastman, at which one of my best friends, a French Horn player, matriculated the year before I was to go.

Through her, I began to understand what it meant to go to a music conservatory. Hours and hours of practice alone in a cement block practice room! What of softball, what of history, what of writing, what of lesbian bars?!

The world was too wide and enticing. It distracted me from the alluring tones of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and landed me instead -- again, almost by happenstance in the form of a high school U.S. history teacher whose sister worked in Bowdoin's Hawthorne-Longfellow Library

Ultimately, at Bowdoin, I DID spend hours and hours in that cement block practice room with my horn, as well as on stage with the college orchestra and pit bands, as well as on Bowdoin's fields and in its seminar rooms. Yet standing before the hallowed hall in Rochester fired my imagination: what a very different life mine would have been in choosing the Eastman path!

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