Notes left in the Wilderness
Six years of music in the mountains.
Dear Kula Diaries,
On September 1st, 2017 at 2:00 am, pianist Rose Freeman and I hoisted ludicrously heavy packs onto our backs… and started hiking. By the light of our headlamps, we navigated a scramble route to an off trail location. We changed out of our hiking attire — and slipped into formal gowns. Barefoot on a granite slab, just before sunrise, we removed a keyboard and a violin from our awkwardly-stuffed backpacks. Just as the sun began to exhale its golden beams across the world below us… I placed my bow on the strings of my violin, and Rose touched the keys of her piano. There was a moment before we started playing — and then there was the moment after we started playing… and in the space between, our lives were forever changed.
My violin was out of tune from the alpine air - but the offering was no less special. It was a gift to a new day that included us. We didn’t bring our music into the wilderness for it to ‘become’ anything other than what it was. And yet, that first simple song found its way into the homes of the many people who watched a short video that we posted on Facebook that day with the simple caption, ‘Good Morning.’
This past Friday, September 1st, was the 6th anniversary of The Musical Mountaineers — and yes, Rose and I still play music together, although we don’t spend as much time high on alpine summits. It’s a funny thing about discovering a sense of peace and presence — in the beginning, our sunrise serenades needed to be in the mountains in order to get that feeling of serenity. But over time, we discovered that same feeling can exist anywhere — because we are the creators of that feeling.
Prelude
When I first moved to Seattle in 2004, I had the opportunity to go to Benaroya Hall in Downtown Seattle to watch Joshua Bell perform. Joshua Bell is one of my all time favorite violinists, and to see him perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was otherworldly. As a college senior, I had the opportunity to perform Vivaldi’s Spring in Italy as a soloist. My mom has told me that when she was pregnant with me, she used to listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons over and over again — perhaps why I feel an indescribable connection to the piece.
I remember sitting high in the nosebleed section at Benaroya Hall watching Joshua Bell on stage. I wondered to myself, “What would it be like to perform on that stage?” I couldn’t possibly fathom it. While I had played violin for decades, I had always believed that I wasn’t good enough to be a soloist. I had taught lessons to some students for a few years, but knew that I didn’t want to teach full time. And, I had no desire to be a full time orchestra member. Everything I had ever heard about being a violinist included some version of the story, “I’m not good enough,” or, “It’s too hard.”
According to my mom, I told my parents that I wanted to start playing violin when I was 2 years old. My grandmother, an eccentric Italian woman with a flair for art and music, was also a violinist and I wanted to play violin just like she did. My mom found a local teacher near our home in North Carolina (where we lived when I was a kid), but the teacher wasn’t accepting anymore students. One day, we saw the teacher, and my mom brought me over to introduce me. The teacher looked down at me and said, “I hear that you want to play violin!”. Apparently, I looked right back at her and said (with gumption), “I already play violin.” For the record, I did not. The teacher was apparently so delighted at my over-confidence, that she took me as a student when I was four years old.
I can’t remember not playing violin. I don’t remember learning how to play. There is simply no time in my life that I can remember not having a violin. Music has always been a second language for me - for better or for worse. I do remember throwing the music for the Bach Double Concerto across the room when I couldn’t play it properly. And I do remember dropping one of my first violins and breaking the scroll (the curly part at the end of the neck) - the feeling of devastation was too much for my 7 year old heart to bear. At family reunions, I always knew when my dad was giving me the look — which meant, “Go get your violin and perform for the family.” Begrudgingly, I would storm away and grab my violin and huff and puff while I was voluntold to play a few of my latest pieces. I still remember one of my relatives, who clearly knew that I would have rather been playing with my cousins, slipping me a $5 bill while my dad wasn’t looking. “It sounded beautiful,” she said.
I performed for my first wedding when I was 12 years old, and I was paid $250. I was genuinely convinced that I was the richest 12 year old in the history of the world. My second paying gig was less than a year later — an 80th Birthday Party where I was hired to play, ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess. As the years progressed, I was hired for more and more events, and my soul was permanently damaged by playing Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’ more than the allotted limit than any musician is allowed to perform in a lifetime (sorry, musician’s joke… it’s a great song, so no judgement if you love it - ha!).
Most importantly, my violin protected me. As a kid, I always had a hard time expressing myself, and I found a way to channel my feelings in my violin, even when I wasn’t able to put words to them. Violin was the one thing that I was good at — it was a way that I could hide from the kids who bullied me and tortured me in school. In my violin group, I felt normal… even if there was that one time when I accidentally wore a matching pajama set to a group lesson, thinking that it was just a matching top and pair of pants (note to self: if an oversized orange and pink shirt has the word diamond on it with a bedazzled jewel motif… it’s probably pajamas).
As a volunteer for the National Park Service, I started playing my violin at Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. I learned how to play the dulcimer, and I became the violinist for a small historical music group called, A Step Back in Time. Together, we performed at historic sites in Pennsylvania. Some of the happiest performances of my life were outside in an apple orchard… or at the Ironmaster’s Mansion for the Christmas Celebration at Hopewell Furnace. Dressed in 1830’s attire, I’d play carols and watch as the park visitors would peer curiously at me behind the gated access to the living room in the ‘big house’. I felt secretly important because the park rangers had given me the key to the padlock and trusted me not to destroy the building and its historic artifacts.
Where I go, the violin goes.
When I moved to Washington in 2004 to attend the Park Ranger Academy for a few months, I brought my violin with me, because my violin is basically an appendage and I couldn’t imagine not having it nearby. I boarded the plane on December 19th, to fly to WA and at 30,000’, a flight attendant approached me and asked if I would be interested in playing some holiday songs for the passengers. I retrieved my violin from the overhead compartment and performed the highest impromptu concert of my life.
Upon taking up my post as a Park Ranger at Twanoh State Park in Union, WA, I quickly implemented an unconventional ‘patrol technique’ for quiet hours. As a park ranger, quieting drunk campers is an almost nightly activity during the summer — but I found that if I approached folks and simply told them to be quiet, that they’d quickly become rowdy again. So, I started patrolling with my violin, and I was shocked at the result. I’d play some beautiful music for my campers… illicit a special, unexpected family moment and maybe a few tears… and the entire group would self-monitor themselves for the rest of the night. I still remember tiptoeing by some of the campsites later and hearing people in hushed voices saying, “Ssssh!! We need to quiet down … that ranger was so nice, I don’t want to make her job any more difficult.” Music was, apparently, the magical elixir for drunk and noisy campers.
I’ve been playing violin for over 36 nears now, but I haven’t always kept up with it. In the years prior to leaving my job as a railroad police officer, I had all but abandoned my violin in its case. Work and stress had taken over my life, and I was too busy complaining about things to think about pulling out my violin. There were so many days when I thought to myself, “I really should play my violin”… but I didn’t. I was so distant from the happiness that I had once felt that I didn’t even remember the things that had once brought me the most joy. And so, my violin waited… and waited.
Ironically, it was after I nearly died that I decided to start playing my violin again. Isn’t it funny what really matters when we have a moment that puts things into perspective? Complaining about ‘my job’ and ‘my life’ seemed so trivial after that, and I knew that it was my responsibility and my choice to seize and do things that mattered to me. Shortly after my near death incident, I had the idea to start doing ‘violin grams’ on my personal Facebook page. People would message me and ‘nominate’ somebody to receive a violin gram — and I’d perform an impromptu piece for them. These violin grams brought such a sense of love and abundance into my heart — and we even used one of them to raise money to donate a violin to young man who wanted to learn how to play a song for his mom (p.s. I reactivated my de-activated FB account so that I could make that video visible… so if the link doesn’t work, it probably means I’ve deactivated FB again - ha!). As I reconnected with my violin, I began to reconnect with myself — and things started to change. Ultimately, the Musical Mountaineers was born — the music of my violin had led me back home.
After I started Musical Mountaineering with Rose, something came alive in me again that had been dormant for a long time. For the first time, I was playing the things that I wanted to play — the music that had brought me such joy to share. I didn’t need to play the Saint-Saens Violin Concerto to be ‘good enough’ — I could do what felt best to me, and that was always enough.
Coming full circle.
In 2018, Rose and I were asked to perform our music on a boat in Diablo Lake in the North Cascades. We were standing in the parking lot in Newhalem, WA when we received an unexpected phone call from Laurie, one of the employees at the Washington’s National Parks Fund nonprofit. “We’re doing a concert with the NW Symphony Orchestra at Benaroya Hall in October, and we want you to perform.” With the phone on speaker, Rose and I attempted to ‘play it cool’ while we were simultaneously jumping around and flailing with excitement. The Musical Mountaineers… on stage at Benaroya Hall? How was this even possible?
I thought back to that first concert with Joshua Bell, watching him perform on stage and wondering what that might be like. Just a few months later, when Rose and I would walk into the blinding spotlight of the main performance hall at Benaroya in Seattle, we would also know that feeling. We would close our eyes, just like we had at the summit of many mountains, and we would send our notes out again. But this time, there was no wind… there were no mosquitoes… and my violin didn’t develop a layer of frost in a 5 degrees windchill. Instead, we were met with a wall of applause and cheering from the hundreds of people who showed up that night to celebrate the wild places that we all love so much. It felt like a dream then, and it feels like a dream now to remember that moment.
Musical Mountaineering has taken Rose and I to mountain summits and to the rugged Lost Coast… and to frozen alpine lakes… and concert halls, but it has been so much more than just making YouTube Videos. Musical Mountaineering was never about just the music. Musical Mountaineering was about all of it… the planning, the packing our stupidly ridiculous looking packs, the 11pm wake up alarms so that we could chase a 5am sunrise… and the conversations and the moments that we shared together on those trails. Those are moments that can’t possibly be duplicated and can’t possibly be captured in a video. What you see in our videos is a moment in time — a simple capture of notes that were left in the wilderness that day, but what you can’t see is what made those notes possible: the infinitely impossible ‘everything’s of life that had to be overcome or navigated in order to make those moments happen. In each note, we released our fears and our dreams and our love. We sent them out into the universe and then, in the silence, we listened.
Our notes are still out there, for everybody to hear. When you put your love and unique music (whatever that is to you) out into the world, it does not simply fade away. A ripple is sent through every atom, into the furthest reaches of the cosmos… places we’ve only seen through the lens of a telescope, or maybe only in our imagination. I don’t have scientific evidence for this, but I can feel it. I can close my eyes and I can see and feel and hear our music drifting up into mountains and swirling around in the most distant stars. Each time we played, the world hummed along. The trees swayed, the pikas chirped, and the alpenglow at dawn danced along as the world woke up around us and told us the greatest secret of all: This is a new day, and it includes you.
I’ll end with a poem that I wrote after Rose and I had been Musical Mountaineering - a poem about what it is like to be reunited with an old friend, who had never given up hope that I would return:
I have loved you from the moment we first met, But I did not always remember you There were times when I threw my music across the room And cried Because the Bach Double Concerto was so frustrating. There were times when I didn’t want to practice. Actually, there were a lot of times I didn’t want to practice. There was a time when I didn’t play you because I was always so sad. But you never left me. You were my voice at my grandfather’s funeral. You were my friend when I felt unloved. You were with me through the lowest points in my life. Even when I forgot you, you waited. You waited for me to open the case And remember… What it felt like to pull a bow across the string What it felt like to hear the beating of my heart transposed into notes. You are the soundtrack of my life. Every memory, every tear, every laugh, every sadness, every love I have ever felt is woven into your wooden fabric. The secrets we have shared give life to our music You always knew I would come back. You always knew we would climb mountains.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you all so much for being here. I am so truly grateful for your kindness and support. In new and exciting Musical Mountaineers ‘news’ - Rose has worked very hard to create an album of some of our sunrise serenades that is available now (to pre-save) on Spotify (click that hyperlink!)… and will be officially released on September 22nd! The album is called ‘Sunrise Serenades: Notes Left in the Wilderness”. All of the tracks on the album are original improvisations performed by The Musical Mountaineers in concert with the sounds of nature.
I’ll leave you with one last video featuring cinematography by the amazing Mitch Pittman:
Thank you all for reading the Kula Diaries - I am so grateful for all of you and for your support. I hope you have a beautiful day, wherever and however you are. You are loved, friends.
Love,
Anastasia
P.S. Can you believe that this is my 14th weekly post?! What a fun 3.5 months it has been writing The Kula Diaries. If you have a question, comment, or want to share an idea or a topic, please use this Google Form to submit it anonymously. If you’d like a specific response, make sure to include your e-mail address. Thank you for all of your kind words - I read all of them!
Music is “THE BRIDGE” for all life!
Keep passing it on.
That final video, with the waterfalls of clouds and your gorgeous serenade, so moving. Thank you for sharing.