Before each piece is played, the concertmaster faces the orchestra. An oboe calls out a note, an A. A is the note because every string instrument has an A. Each member of the orchestra then adjusts his or her instrument to that note. To be certain, the process is repeated. And then repeated again, this time with nearly every section playing the note. Silence follows. All the tuning must end before the conductor will enter from the left.
Whenever the orchestra piece involves a piano soloist, the concertmaster goes to the piano to strike the A, foregoing the cue from the oboe. The process is the same, though. Everyone plays his or her version of the same note. Everybody in the orchestra thus begins the piece in tune with each other.
I like the metaphor. You and I benefit from adjusting the tone of our lives from time to time to a reliable tuning note.
Your note might be similar to mine but it is not necessarily the same. The important point would be that all of the “instruments” of our lives are in tune with one another. There is much to be said in favor of being in harmony with others, too.
Recently, a friend shared an article about a favorite teacher from his graduate school days. The teacher taught at the same small university for his entire 30-year career, preferring to work with students in a liberal arts college rather than at a research university.
The professor retired early, at age 63, saying that he had collected enough alumni students by that point. There was a more serious point to his early departure from full-time teaching. He envisioned, and now inhabits, a “spacious world of retirement.”
In his spacious world, he has pursued the learning of another language, playing a musical instrument new to him, and writing about new things he is learning. He speaks about his students and his teaching with great fondness. It is also clear that phase has ended. He is doing other things.
Without question, those of us blessed with the chance to enjoy a spacious world in our retirement gain the freedom to choose our daily activities in a way that is often unavailable for those still employed, or for those whose retirement circumstances are more pinched.
I wonder, though, about the oboe’s A and the note that helps us periodically to re-tune our lives. In moving from one phase to another, such as from the world of work to the privileges of retirement, does our tuning tone adjust as well? Do the present circumstances of our lives create some difference in our personal note, just as the location of a piano, its altitude or the relative humidity or whatever might require a re-tuning?
In the concert hall, it is significant that, without a piano, the oboe’s A is the standard. Once the larger, more formidable piano is involved, the orchestra adjusts to its interpretation of the A.
Do our lives require us to make similar adjustments? People of a Certain Age, what is the tuning note of your life? And who plays it, the oboe or the piano?
In your life as in mine, there might be varying ways of re-visiting your tone to center yourself, bringing the myriad activities and demands of your life into some harmony. Perhaps yours is a belief system or a spiritual practice like meditation or prayer. Perhaps it is a relationship that is so stable and dependable that reconnecting on a regular basis serves as the needed re-tuning. Maybe it is a place in which you can re-introduce yourself to yourself after a period during which the “performance” of life has somehow knocked something out of tune.
Harmony might seem a strange word to use in the context of the pace and demands of daily living. Yet when we are at our best in handling whatever stresses and challenges there might be, isn’t there a sense of harmony? And, what a great wish for each other; harmony.
The various instruments make different sounds. Another friend once observed that those who have found the right “instrument” to play in their lives were fortunate, indeed. It is under the hands of the composer and the conductor that those many sounds combine to create a symphony.
I suspect the professor might consider his professional life to have been successful, like the music of a symphony. Certainly he had a vision of his next phase, the spacious world of his retirement, which suggests the probability of a sense of harmony. He has become the conductor of this new phase of his life.
I know from the article that the professor spends much time in the woods of Vermont. So it is fair to speculate that the woods play a role in the A of his life. John Muir thought that the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
What is your metaphorical walk through a forest wilderness? Have you heard your oboe’s A recently?
Daniel E. White
May 15, 2017