Our Ode to Joy by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

 

*For my dear friend Danni, with whom I have shared fifty-six years of friendship and a lifetime of music.

This is not an elegy. My dear friend Danni is still here. She is in hospice now, and after fifty-six years of friendship, I find myself thinking not only about how long we have known each other, but about how much of that knowing has had a soundtrack.

We were two little girls in West Philadelphia when we met, neighbors in Overbrook and third graders at Overbrook Elementary School. I played the violin. Danni found her way to the oboe and clarinet. We weren’t always assigned to the same classroom, but there was another room where we could count on finding each other: orchestra rehearsal.

There is something remarkable to me now about the faith Philadelphia’s public schools once placed in children. Someone put a violin beneath my chin. Someone put a woodwind into Danni’s hands and taught her how breath could become music. We were children, but we were being invited into something ancient and enormous.

We carried our instruments with us through high school where our paths overlapped. It was at the high school level that our music playing morphed into something else. There, music became something more than an activity. Much of that was because of Dimitri Kauriga.

To those of us fortunate enough to study under him, he seemed almost mythic. His brother Paul Kauriga, whom Danni knew more closely through percussion and woodwinds, belonged to that same musical firmament. The Kauriga brothers expected us to listen to the score, certainly, but also to one another. They taught us that music deserved discipline because beauty deserved discipline. We adored them for it. And somewhere along the way, Danni and I fell absolutely, permanently in love with classical music. The School District of Philadelphia helped open the door. The Philadelphia Orchestra flung it wide.

Danni and me at a winter holiday performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra, continuing a musical tradition that began when we were two little girls in West Philadelphia.

As high schoolers, Danni and I would meet at the Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsals that students were allowed to attend. Imagine that gift: two Black girls from West Philadelphia sitting within hearing and seeing distance of some of the greatest, classical musicians in the world. We heard the orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. Decades later, we would still be listening, now under our beloved Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The conductors changed. We grew older and the music kept finding us.

There were years when oceans separated us and careers became demanding. Children claimed most of our time. Life did what life does, it scattered us and summoned us elsewhere. Yet somehow Danni and I kept finding our way back to those burgundy velvet seats, first at the Academy of Music and later at the Kimmel Center.

Perhaps that is one definition of an old friendship: someone who has heard so many movements of your life that she can recognize the melody even after years of silence. This year, Danni could not join me and our friends for the opening performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s season and that absence sat beside me.

Earlier this week, when I visited her in the hospital, I played a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for her. I wanted somehow to carry a little of what had always belonged to us into that hospital room.

But a recording through a phone could never reproduce what happened when the Philadelphia Orchestra filled Marian Anderson Hall, this past Thursday, with Beethoven’s Symphony N. 9, joined by the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir and the magnificent voices of Leah Hawkins, J’Nai Bridges, Issachah Savage, and Ryan Speedo Green.

                          And yet, as I listened, Danni was there.

Opening night at the Philadelphia Orchestra: an audience on its feet applauding the orchestra, the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir, and that phenomenal quartet of opera singers after their performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Not physically in the seat beside me, but threaded through my listening. I could hear the little girl with the clarinet and the teenager rushing toward rehearsal. I could hear the woman who had traveled through more than half a century of life beside me. Music has a peculiar relationship with time that way. A few measures can collapse decades.

Now Danni is in hospice care. I will not write about her as though she has already left us. She hasn’t. She is here. And while she is here, I want to say her name in the present tense. I want to honor the girl she was and the woman she is. I want her to know that when I enter a concert hall, some part of me still listens with her.

Hospice has made me think differently about what it means to accompany someone. An orchestra taught us something about that long ago. You do not always carry the melody. Sometimes your task is to listen closely enough to know when another instrument needs room. Sometimes you enter softly. Sometimes you simply remain present while the music changes.

Danni and I could never have known, sitting in those student rehearsals, what the score ahead of us would contain. We only knew that we loved the music. During this difficult passage in my own life, with so much noise and discord beyond us, I find myself profoundly grateful that I still have an old friend in my city’s orchestra.

Opening night with dear friends, carrying on a tradition of gathering for the music and holding a place in our hearts for our friend who could not be with us this year.

And I am grateful to the Philadelphia public schools that once believed music belonged in the lives of ordinary children and not as decoration, but as education. That belief placed instruments in the hands of two little West Philadelphia girls and gave us a language we would still be speaking fifty-six years later.

The Philadelphia Orchestra became part of that language. It has sustained us through childhood and motherhood, distance and reunion, ordinary Tuesdays and magnificent opening nights.

And now, even here. So this is not goodbye. It is an offering to my friend while she can still receive it. Danni, for fifty-six years, somewhere beneath everything else our lives have asked of us, the orchestra has been playing.

We, her friends, are preparing to bring a local violinist to her bedside to play something whimsical; something that can touch her wherever she is. Perhaps that is what music has been doing all along and that is finding us wherever we are.

I hear it still. And because you are still here, my dear old friend, this is not an elegy.

It is our Ode to Joy.