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After a long day of traveling, I'm back in Evanston. Damaris and I were on the same flight to Miami, so she offered to give me a ride to the airport. Her brother drove us. He has his own show on Dominican television, and people recognize him wherever he goes. It was fun when the toll booth lady did a double-take when she saw him and got completely excited. His show includes a part where he looks into the future. Apparently, he's inherited clairvoyant capabilities from his and Damaris' grandmother.

Anyway, I wanted to post some more photos. Some of these are from a short concert the students gave for local school children. Afterwards, the kids got to come on stage and see the instruments up close.

I loved these students and I hope I can see them again someday.

Amazing people

We had our final concert tonight, and I fly home to Chicago tomorrow. The students did a wonderful job, and I think everyone learned a lot -- me, the musicians, and the audience. I feel particularly close to several students, including a brother and sister who play the oboe and flute. Their mother came to all of the rehearsals and watched as I coached them. He played in the quintet, and she was the flutist in the Mozart quartet. Both brother and sister (Ívan and Emily) were very good natured and quite talented, and their mom always greeted me with a hug and a kiss. They gave me a gift of coffee and cookies tonight. So sweet.

It seems like this is the beginning of what will hopefully be a long relationship between me and the students, the music teachers here, and Traveling Notes. It's likely that I might return to the country in the next year to work with students at the university. I really hope that this is the case.

This entire week was a lot of work, and I am exhausted. But it was good to get out of the U.S. again, to get more perspective on the world and on my own situation. I enjoyed practicing Spanish so much more on this trip than on the YOA tour, and I'm not exactly sure why. I didn't do my Spanish homework before going to Santo Domingo, so I wasn't particularly prepared to speak the language. I didn't even bring a dictionary or a phrase book. But I was surprised to find that I could pick out a lot of words while listening to people and understand the basic idea of what was going on. As the week progressed, I was able to comprehend phrases, and then whole sentences. Then I suddenly found myself speaking in whole sentences. I would think in my head how to begin a sentence, and what words I wanted to use, and then I would just start talking, and words would come to me, and they would be the right ones. It's amazing, and it makes me want to do more Spanish immersion in the future.

I've become very attached to the people I've been working with. Ellen Brager, the director and brain of the whole Traveling Notes operation, is one of a kind. She was born and grew up in Belgium, where she learned to speak Flemish, English, French, and German as a young girl. Since then, she's been traveling the world, living in many places and working to improve her language skills. Now she is also fluent in Spanish, after living in Peru and the D.R. She is an efficient, professional person who doesn't always gel with the laid-back culture here, but in that way she makes an excellent administrator and director for a program that needs a lot of pushing and constant vigilance.

As for Robin, Jorge, and Damaris, I love playing music with them and I respect them enormously as musicians and people. Robin is an adventurous, strong person with a deadpan sense of humor and an unwavering sense of self. Jorge, although he was sick for most of the trip, was indispensable in creating our schedule and providing translation, in addition to being a great teacher and violinist. Damaris, our pianist, was also critical to making the trip happen, as she was able to work her connections in Santo Domingo in order to get the project off the ground. She's also a great person to talk to, in any language.

Yay, colonialism.

We do so much stuff here, it's hard to believe it all happens in one day.

After having breakfast and answering email at Ellen's house (which is just around the corner from where I'm staying), Robin and I got dropped off at the Colonial District in Santo Domingo. It's the ancient part of the city that includes a stone fortress/mansion where Christopher Columbus and his brother lived, the oldest cathedral in the Americas, museums, and other touristy parts. I was expecting it to be kind of like the old part of the city in Salvador, Brazil, but it was much less crowded -- meaning Robin and I were much more conspicuous, which I didn't like. We took a lot of pictures, saw a lot of kids on school trips (they all wanted pictures with us, too), and walked around. We also shopped a little, and I got to bargain for some things, which is fun.


We found an old museum that we wanted to go into, but it was being renovated. They let us go in anyway and look at the crumbling parts of the exhibits. This museum was supposed to be about pirates, but it looked like the pirates got there first. Robin wanted to take some "booty," but the guard wanted a bribe and eventually we just left. You never refuse a guy a bribe when he has a gun. Our foray into urban exploration in the Caribbean was fairly successful, and we learned a lot about astrolabes in the process.

We got into a cab to go home and get lunch before going to do more stuff. It was 2 pm, the height of the lunch hour, on the hottest day since we've been here, and we're stuck in a cab with no air conditioning in heavy traffic. By the time we got home, we were completely soaked in sweat. The driver kept telling me how much he loves Obama.

After freshening up a little, Robin, Jorge and I went to do a little concert for a school for children with Down's syndrome. Most of them had never seen instruments like ours before, and they were totally excited and interested. We gave them some instruments so they could participate, too, and we vamped on some chords while they sang a favorite song. After we were done, they didn't want us to leave and kept hugging us and saying thank you.

We headed back to the Palacio des Belles Artes, which is where we've been teaching this week. We taught for four hours. I coached my wind quintet on Ravel and then moved on to help a Mozart flute quartet. After that...well, Ellen asked us if we wanted to go have dinner and then swim in the ocean. Um, yes. So it's now two in the morning and my hair is still wet from swimming in an ocean that feels like bath water. Robin and I looked at each other in the water and I said, "Aren't our lives strange?" We don't have money to replace our old shoes with holes in the bottoms, but we're hanging out with the super-rich on an island in the Caribbean.

Here's a picture of Christopher Colombus' house:

Rehearsals continue

As much as the Dominican Republic is a vacation destination, I am here almost exclusively to work. We may have a couple of hours on Friday to go to the beach (I still don't have a swimsuit, though) or go see the colonial district. But mostly, we are here to teach and play.

The quintet I'm coaching is made up of young people from the national youth orchestra. They are very passionate -- and they don't mince words with each other. They are also a little loathe to concentrate and would rather chat and joke around than get down to business, which is a little frustrating. But they are doing pretty well. I wish I knew more about how to play the bassoon, as our bassoonist is having the most trouble, particularly with intonation.

I asked someone today why baseball is so big in the Dominican Republic, while it seems that soccer is much more important in other Latin American countries. They told me that it's because the Dominicans don't want to run and chase after a ball for the entire game -- they'd rather conserve their energy for one big swing of the bat. This came from the country's director of musical activities (which is a government position, believe it or not), Carnex. Carnex is a suave guy, sophisticated, who studied with Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard and played with numerous orchestras, including the Rochester Philharmonic. He told me that he doesn't play anymore and has since sold his violin so he could buy a really nice house. He's into the electric violin now, but mostly he deals with the bureaucracy of the Dominican government as it relates to classical and traditional musical performance in the country -- how people get paid, how performances are organized, how the national conservatory is supported, etc. He wants to resign, but the Ministry of Culture won't accept his resignation. So for now, he stays. He also has a radio program on Sunday nights that plays classical music. He interviewed Damaris (our pianist) on his program earlier this week (they grew up together in Santo Domingo) and revealed that as an adolescent he was completely in love with her. He got into some trouble over that.

Tonight, half of my Mozart flute quartet didn't show up, so instead we shuttled the violist off to another quartet with a missing viola, and I gave the flutist a lesson for two hours. This seems pretty typical. Example: today, the wind quintet was supposed to rehearse from 3 to 5. I was dropped off at the rehearsal space at 3:15, at which point I only found two of the five members present and all the doors to the rooms locked. It took another twenty minutes to unlock the door to the rehearsal room, during which the bassoonist showed up. At that point, we began rehearsing with me playing the flute part and an imaginary oboist. Around four o'clock, the flutist arrived, and around 4:15 the oboe player came with a crappy reed that he had to soak for another ten minutes. So, 4:30, we were all present and ready to play...for half an hour of serious rehearsal. Hmmm.

The flute player I taught tonight, Emily, is wonderful. She is 16, very nice, very musical, with an involved mother, and a natural intelligence. With the right guidance and practice, she could easily go to a conservatory in the U.S. The problem is, of course, money and a visa. The way of life for a musician here is far more stark than the challenges we face in the U.S. The obstacles these musicians have to overcome in order to practice their art are overwhelming: cultural and familial acceptance, money or connections to buy or borrow an instrument, time away from a money-making job for practicing, study and rehearsals, and the simple fact that a lot of people here have no idea about classical music. It's a Eurocentric idea that really has very little to do with day to day life here. The heat is hard on the instruments....there are all these issues. So, all the young musicians I've talked to have to mention these caveats when they talk about a career in music. It's generally regarded as completely impossible, at best irresponsible.

More tomorrow.

La República Dominicana!

For the past two days, I have been working as a music teacher and chamber musician in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic through a program called Traveling Notes. My colleagues include a Dominican pianist who now teaches and plays in association with a university in Las Vegas, a Peruvian violinist who plays with the Virginia Symphony, and an American cellist who lives in Boston. We're here to further the cause of chamber music and classical music in the Dominican Republic, and in the Caribbean in general. In addition to playing concerts here, our group will mentor ten chamber music groups here in Santo Domingo.

Our group has rehearsals in the morning and early afternoon. We're preparing for three different concerts: one for a school that works with children with Down's syndrome, a benefit concert for Traveling Notes in the home of a patron, and the big concert at the end of the week, when our students will also perform.

We begin teaching at five in the afternoon, and continue through 9:30 pm. Each of us coaches two groups in the evening. Since I'm the only wind player, I have the pleasure of coaching a wind quintet consisting of some very good Dominican players in their late teens and early twenties. They have a lot of personality, and a couple speak some English, so we can get by with the little Spanish I know, the little English that they can translate, and musical terms. They seem to be arguing a lot with each other, and I'm not clear always about what. But they are generally very passionate. The clarinet player in the quintet is also a composer, speaks English pretty well, and is very knowledgeable of contemporary music. He knocked down some expectations for me right away: I didn't expect to be asked about the New Complexity or Finnish composers while I was in Santo Domingo.

Once I'm done with the quintet, I spend two hours with another group, and since we rotate around, it will be with a different group each night of the week. This is so much fun - different students, different instruments, different levels. I'm a little worried that by the end of the week we teachers will be telling these students four different things, but hopefully it will all be somewhat consistent. I particularly relish these chances to talk to string quartets about breathing together.

There is a kind of chaos that seems to accompany certain Latin American cities. Santo Domingo is one of those. You cannot come here and expect things to work normally. The corruption of this city permeates nearly every way of life -- electrical blackouts, the way buildings are built, the way people are paid. I learned the other day that there is 60% sales tax on certain things, like restaurant food -- but if you have diplomat status, as we do, you just show your diplomatic papers and you don't have to pay the tax. We musicians are supposed to have some money from the Ministry of Culture to pay for our meals and transportation while we are here, and we still don't have the money because the government is insisting that they take a 25% cut. Organizers through Traveling Notes are trying to get the full amount, and so we are in a perpetual "mañana" status. It's always going to happen tomorrow. We just go with the flow.

My Spanish is getting better, particularly my listening comprehension. Everyone is encouraging me to talk as much as I can. It's a surprise to realize that I already know how to say a lot of basic things. Strangely, trying to speak any language at all besides English is helping my French, too, since I generally try to say something in French first by accident, and then correct myself.

Tonight after the rehearsals and coachings, we went out to have Dominican sushi, which is awesome. Imagine sushi, with rice and nori, but topped with plantain slices and avocado, with sweet fruit sauces. Amazing.

Tomorrow, more rehearsals. We literally haven't had any time to ourselves to sight-see or to stick a toe in the clear Caribbean water. Maybe on Friday.