Independence Day: An Essay on First Love

I'm sure that Independence Day has personal, metaphorical connotations for many people. Who can help but equate some private liberation with the patriotic kind, especially since the latter happens to fall-for kids, anyway-during summer vacation, when liberations flourish? For me, the day resonates with the splendidly helpless plummet into first serious love.

I was in the Young Artists Piano Program of the Tanglewood Institute, the famed summer music school in the Berkshires. There were less than a dozen of us studying with a clever and somewhat eccentric teacher, Gyorgi, and his considerably younger, soft-spoken, muscle-bound assistant Chris, a dancer-turned-pianist whom we all assumed was Gyorgi's lover. (No, not their real names. None here are, except for Mike Udwin's and Mayer Fishman's, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) Gyorgi and Chris were wonderfully innovative-though at the time we were more likely to use the word "nuts." They had us learn, among other assignments, pieces from an album called The Waltz Project, made up of new waltzes by contemporary composers like John Cage and Robert Moran and Joan Tower.

The YAPP pianists shared a campus-an old mansion and a bunch of teepee-shaped cabins-with some orchestral students, mostly wind and brass players, and miscellaneous other instrumentalists, like Lou, a college-age classical guitarist who bunked with me. Indian Hill, as it was called, was a short walk from Stockbridge and a bus ride away from the concert campus where the Boston Symphony, chamber groups, and other fabulous musicians-professional or would-be-rehearsed in the hot days and performed in the cool nights. The other instrumentalists were housed at another former school, near Lenox and the concert halls.