Story time! Chamber music camp!

When I was a teenager, I went to chamber music camp. No, seriously. At that point in my life, I was taking violin performance very seriously. Like “I want to go to music school and be a conductor someday” seriously. I eventually abandoned this dream for something that was seemingly more lucrative (cue narrator: reader, it was not more lucrative). 

But that is not this story!

I went to chamber music camp (hereafter referred to as CMC for the sake of brevity) when I was 15 years old. It was run through a university in the middle of nowhere. I was simultaneously excited and nervous; I had received my sheet music ahead of time and practiced it, but I hadn’t ever been part of an actual chamber group. 

When I eventually got there and settled in, I met my roommate T. They had jammed us all together in a large house on campus, like a frat house but for a bunch of weird kids playing instruments. T and I were set up in a room with bunkbeds. I was top bunk, as I always am, because when I was a child, I had an irrational fear that if the top bunk fell down for some reason, that I would be squished. Anyways, I had laid claim to the top bunk, but T and I soon discovered that we had the MOST MAGICAL ROOM in the house, and not for some dumb reason. A very special reason.

There was a sink.

I cannot describe to you how important this sink was to us. At first, when we both arrived, we were like “why is there a sink in our room?” But after some time, we came to understand that it was a GIFT. Had Mozart and Debussy looked down on us in favor and bestowed upon us this miraculous piece of plumbing? Who could say, really? 

The reason this sink came in so clutch is because we only had one bathroom. All the girls upstairs had to share one bathroom. This would have been totally fine… had we not been teenage girls with the proclivity to take long showers. 

Now, I would like to say, for the record, that I was not the main offender! Yes, I did take a little too long in the bathroom most mornings, but that is because I was uncomfortable changing/doing various hygiene activities in front of other people. I couldn’t have my roommate seeing me putting on my deodorant!! I swear, teenage angst and hardcore religiosity does weird things to a girl’s brain. So I took a little too much time. However, there was a pair of girls, sisters in fact, who would take upwards of an hour in the shower. 

A WHOLE HOUR! 

It was absolutely nuts. First of all, I was offended because we live in a world where water is a precious resource, and these two wackos were just flagrantly standing under that damn shower head for an hour! Like… why? Second, I felt like it was pretty disrespectful to the rest of us that they would take up so much valuable time and real estate in the bathroom. They had a sneaky way of getting around this one though…. They would take “short” showers during the week (read: 45-ish minutes), and then TWO-HOUR-LONG SHOWERS on the weekends. You read that correctly, dear reader. And, they threw in for good measure, we could always knock on the door and let them know if they were taking too long. How noble of them. 

This is where the sink came in handy. If these two stinkers were in the shower for hours at a time, we could just keep a toothbrush in our room and brush our teeth at the sink. Problem solved. I actually felt kind of bad for the rest of the girls who did not possess our sink-having privileges. In fact, the next year when I came back to CMC, I requested the exact same room so I could be with my beloved sink once more. 

We developed a lot of lovable but strange habits and traditions at CMC. T and I were two peas in a pod; same weird sense of humor, same weird idolization of our younger Russian and Romanian instructors, and so on. We were pretty much inseparable. We got into a habit of watching scary episodes of Doctor Who in the evenings with our housemates, although we had a much bigger passion for Fantasia and its sequel, Fantasia 2000. We all studied and performed in the main music building on campus, and soon we discovered that it was possible to stop the elevator. Subsequent shenanigans ensued, including opening the door while the elevator was stopped and writing our names or funny phrases on the cement between two floors. 

However, one of the activities we became most infamous for was Sardines. Now, for those of you who may be scratching your heads at this moment, Sardines is basically a reverse Uno card on the game Hide and Seek. Instead of one person looking for all the participants, one person hides and everyone goes looking for that person. When you find them, you must hide with them. Soon enough, one person is left bamboozled as to where everyone is – ha ha, very fun stuff. 

At night, we would sneak into the music school and play Sardines. No room was off limits, except for those that were locked, obviously. It was truly a wild time. Roaming about the four floors of the building looking for my housemates was a blast. My teenage brain wondered if this is what true freedom felt like…. Racing across carpeted halls, maneuvering around equipment backstage of the main performance hall, each pace I took felt like a total thrill and overwhelmed me with chaotic energy. 

Eventually the faculty caught on, and Sardines was subsequently banned in the music school, for that year, and all subsequent years. The counselors tried to reassure us that we could still play in the house, but that was it. It was over. One cannot go from playing a game that relied on one’s powers of exploration in a mystical music hall to… a house. It was done. 

Despite the disappointing loss of our beloved game and its venue, I loved CMC. It taught me so much. It exposed me to a fantastic new way to listen to and play classical music, and I got to meet people who were not only professional musicians, but wonderful artists and kind people. It confirmed my hatred for Mozart (well, his chamber music – I’ll admit his requiem is dynamite). It introduced me to Shostakovich, and as I heard his piano quintet for the first time, I was overcome with awe and adoration. And although I never pursued violin performance professionally, it instilled in me an element of artistic expression that would never be snuffed out. 

Thanks chamber music camp. You were awesome. I hope you continue to teach and inspire students for years to come.