GRAND PRIZE CREATIVE WRITING

Jacqueline Burkholder

Response to the prompt: How has music served as a healing force in your life?

Sprouting on a sprawling Mennonite farm surrounded by fields of alfalfa and vegetables had its advantages. It was like growing up in the 19th century, quaint, resourceful, almost idyllic. Our clothes were homemade, sewn by my mother and older sisters. Food was homegrown, cooked with more love and less skill from vegetables and animals that grew around us. Music was homemade. We sang as a family, eleven voices in four-part harmony singing hymns nearly everyday in the mini-service we called family worship. My siblings and I learned to play harmonica, riding dirt roads in a Buick Century on the way to a three-room church school where students would begin the day with devotional songs in four parts. Nighttime prayers were sung by our beds, our childish voices asking God to wake us with the morning light.

But endless repetitions of Amazing Grace and Great Is Thy Faithfulness eventually wore thin and I wanted more. I spent free time in school reading decades-old World Book Encyclopedia articles on Bach and Schoenberg, trying desperately to imagine how Schubert’s songs, purportedly the most beautiful in the world, must sound. Later, having found a dusty copy of Handel’s Messiah in the corner of my dad’s restricted bookshelf, I risked my dad’s wrath, secreting the score to church and into the office, locking the door so that I could photocopy a few dozen pages to pore over later. The section I happened to copy included the chorus All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray and I painstakingly applied my then minimal sightreading skills to sounding out the wandering melismas. My musical interest led me into a lot of trouble with the church during my teens and lower twenties. Often I had to stand in front of the church to make a public confession, repenting for hiding CD’s of Haydn’s concertos or Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite

But no public humiliation could possibly outweigh the utter bliss of hearing Schubert’s Die Forelle for the first time. Schubert’s florid lines of otherworldly melody were intoxicating and I still feel that there is some merit in a 1970s World Book’s claim that his was the most beautiful music of all time. I will never forget the life-changing experience of hearing Bellini’s superb aria Casta Diva while listening to a Barnes & Noble recorded lecture series on music which I had furtively checked out from the local library.

On my next trip to town I checked out a copy of Casta Diva’s opera of origin, Norma, with Joan Sutherland as Norma, Montserrat Caballé as Adalgisa, and Luciano Pavarotti as Pollione. Driving the half hour to and from work daily, safe from surveillance by my parents and siblings, I followed along with the libretto, steering the car with one hand, holding the album booklet with the other. I knew then that I would never be the