(AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, 3/23/06)

…at a visual and performing arts high school, [in] a concrete room with blue walls and bright fluorescent lights, a young girl was playing Bach’s Minuet in G on a Baldwin grand piano in the corner.  When she got up, another girl took her place and began Bach’s c minor prelude from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the same prelude I once used for my conservatory auditions.  Everyone else, almost all of them black and female, had headphones on, plugged into their own individual synthesizers.  I watched their fingers tapping away, their concentrating eyes, and couldn’t determine if I was impressed by the uniform display of discipline and focus in this room, or disturbed by the strange, utopian pointlessness of it all — everyone playing but no one listening.  

The teacher, a tall man with glasses, approached.  “This group isn’t the best of the bunch,” he announced — I scanned the lab to see if anyone besides the performer of the Bach had heard him — “but they’re okay.  Level two.  Next period you’ll play for the fours and fives.  They’re the best in the school.”

“But these are all first year students?” I asked, surveying the rows of girls and keyboards.  “That’s great!”

“Yeah…” he answered reluctantly.  “They’ve done well.  But like I said, they’re not our best.”  He stopped and looked at one of the girls.  “Ayeesha!”  She looked up.  “Go play our guest something.”  Like a machine, Ayeesha rose, made her way to the piano, and replaced the other girl, still playing her Bach, and began into a children’s piece I didn’t recognize.  “Okay, that’s good,” her teacher barked a minute or so into it.  ”Go back to your seat.”  Just as mechanically, Ayeesha stopped and returned to her seat, resuming her practice.  The click-clack of her classmates’ fingers continued; no one had noticed her performance. 

Then the bell rang and everyone stood at once, making way for the Level Fours and Fives.  I hadn’t touched the piano in two days, so my guess was that I was probably playing at a level one.  But I would not be intimidated; the teacher introduced me and I started talking a little about America 88x50, eventually readying myself to play my Ives.  “As I play this, I want you to think about what it means to you, what you think it’s about…”  And when I finished the Three-Page Sonata with crossed hands on the final C Major chord [per Ives’s directions,] a girl with long fake nails pointed at me and said to her neighbor, “I gotta’ do that!  Cross my hands like that!”