A note about Crescendo

*not what I had planned

Dear Kula Diaries,

This past Friday, I had the absolute honor of performing at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle for the Crescendo Concert — a collaboration between the Washington Trails Association and the Northwest Symphony Orchestra. This concert was a benefit for WTA, an organization that performs an unfathomable amount of trail work here in Washington State.

Last year, I wrote a day-by-day diary of the days leading up to our Benaroya Hall concert, and I had planned to do the same this year, but… it just didn’t happen.

Instead, I decided to do something entirely different and film a video in our green room before the show. Rose had stepped out of the room to go visit with some friends, so I took the time to record how I was feeling. This was recorded a few hours before we went on stage:

Note, I didn’t check all of the auto-captions, so I apologize for any errors, they aren’t intentional.

When I was a kid, I had a really hard time admitting that I was nervous about something. I’m not sure why, but I always felt like being ‘nervous’ was a sign of weakness… something that I needed to hide. I’d never admit to being nervous, and I would suffer in silence as I sat in my violin recitals… anxiously waiting for the moment to play. The playing itself was never bad… it was the waiting that was the hardest part.

Yesterday, at our concert, I was nervous, but it didn’t feel bad — it felt like extra energy, and I realized that I could harness that energy to have fun… and to be more playful. Instead of waiting in an anxiety-induced state…. I practiced my violin in the green room… wandered backstage to talk to the stagehands… and allowed myself to enjoy the full experience of the night. By the time that we walked out on stage, I was still a little nervous (hello, staring into a spotlight and an audience of nearly 2,000 people)… but, very quickly, those nerves started to melt away — replaced my a deep sense of gratitude and excitement that we had the opportunity to stand on this stage to share our music with so many people.

As soon as we started performing, it was like nothing else in the world existed — everything blended together… the lights… the notes… the love that I felt pouring into us from the people in the crowd. It was such an overwhelmingly beautiful sensation, and it’s genuinely hard for me to capture it in words. As I played, I could hear the audience reacting to Mitch Pittman’s video — it was the most delightful thing to hear and feel their reaction to the combination of music and nature… something that Rose and I don’t get to experience much, when we perform our concerts for, ‘nobody’.

Photo by @brianwseaver

Rose and I performed 3 pieces last night — and I’m sure that I’ll share more once we have some videos available from the evening… and at the end of our last piece, Bella Ciao, we looked out into the audience and their thunderous applause, and I blinked once… then twice… then three times… and noticed that… everybody was standing up.

This is the point when I incorrectly want to say, “Violinists like me don’t get standing ovations at Benaroya Hall.” This is the part where I want to say that standing ovations are reserved for violinists like Itzhak Perlman and Joshua Bell and Jascha Heifetz… but, I can’t say that, because I saw it with my own eyes, and most importantly, I felt it. I felt such a tremendous amount of love… and excitement… and joy for the capsule of love that we had shared with everybody in that moment — and the reciprocity of receiving it all back was tremendous and overwhelming, and I don’t know if I will ever fully be able to say what it meant to me and Rose… except for Thank you. Thank you to the folks who showed up last night and cheered on two women who… nearly 8 years ago… started climbing mountains with a violin and a piano to bring a little bit more light into the world.

Before our second piece, I shared a bit about my time volunteering for the National Service and my time as a Park Ranger — and that the song we were about to play was a song that I had performed many times in both roles. In a prophetic move, I even played the song on stage last year during our soundcheck, ‘just for fun’. It’s always been a special piece to me, and having the opportunity to share it with the audience was tremendously special. As I finished my short intro, I shared our favorite lyric from the piece, which I’ll share with all of you now too:

"Since love prevails in heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”

While our Musical Mountaineers concerts in the wilderness are, indeed, unannounced events — to say that we perform for ‘nobody’ isn’t entirely accurate. True, there might be no audience in that moment — but our simple offering to the world has given more to other people and other organizations that I ever could have imagined. In the deepest places of our hearts, we play music for all of us — for a wish that all beings on this planet may be accepted as they are, may be loved, and may be free.

Photo by our dear friend Christina Looney.

Thanks for being here friends, I look forward to sharing more about this special day with all of you soon.