Writer Adam Baer writes of Tanglewood for NPR Music, discussing the summer home for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and how his family of concert pianists was formed there, from listening to Leonard Bernstein and learning how to play the best of the classical music canon.

1. 6/10/2016 Tanglewood, My Family's Transcendental Homeland : Deceptive Cadence : NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/07/05/156288431/tanglewood-my-familys-transcendental-homeland 1/7
MŲȘİČ ǺŘŤİČĿĚȘ
The barn reeked of mildew, wet wood in 90 degrees, an odious perfume with which I
was familiar from a childhood in a Long Island canal town peppered with planked
houses. I opened my instrument's case to see the hygrometer's needle stuck on the
highest humidity level: assurance that my first professional-grade violin would not
crack, or, to the great aural pleasure of Katja, my radiant Austrian stand partner with
superb pitch, remain in tune.
đěčěpțįvě čǻđěňčě
Țǻňģŀěẅǿǿđ, Mỳ Fǻmįŀỳ'ș Țřǻňșčěňđěňțǻŀ
Ħǿměŀǻňđ
Jųŀỳ 5, 2012 · 11:42 ǺM ĚȚ
ǺĐǺM BǺĚŘ
Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood.
Steve Rosenthal/courtesy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
ǾŇ ǺİŘ ŇǾẄ
ǺĿĿ ȘǾŇĢȘ 24/7 ŘǺĐİǾ

2. 6/10/2016 Tanglewood, My Family's Transcendental Homeland : Deceptive Cadence : NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/07/05/156288431/tanglewood-my-familys-transcendental-homeland 2/7
It was raining, and our orchestra was warming up to play with a celebrated conductor
in Massachusetts' Berkshire mountains, steps from the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
who if he were alive would have almost certainly been frightened by the modern
sonorities of our music, perhaps the way my octogenarian neighbor twitches upon
hearing a beat of electronic dance music.
I felt a transcendental whoosh of history and emotional connection with my
surroundings, and as I drew purposefully scratchy sounds from my instrument—I
liked to test Katja's patience as much as she teased me in public, calling me only
"stahnd-pahtnahhh"—I kept my eyes locked on our guest maestro, a man of my
parents' generation who had likely shared colleagues with them.
I was at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home, and I had been
here before—almost every summer of my childhood. To our perpetual horror and
terribly rational opposition, my younger brother and I, both early childhood pianists,
were begrudgingly carted to this great, leafy epicenter of summer orchestra and
chamber music concerts, sometimes more than twice a season. "Tanglewood" was a
depressing word to us. It meant weekends on a knotty blanket with the delicious
opportunity to eat stinky cheese while sitting on the ground as my parents listened to
live performances of what I was certain, at age six, Tears for Fears did not consider
"music": the conductor Leonard Bernstein, or what seemed like a wacky modern
dancer in a suit playing a giant upside-down violin called "Yo-Yo."
But by 1994, at age 17, I found myself at Tanglewood by choice. I had been picked to
participate in the festival's summer program for high school students run by Boston
University. It wasn't the Tanglewood Music Center, the program meant for older,
developing professionals that had offered fellowships in 1971 to my courting, pre-
marital parents, both award-winning pianists at The Juilliard School.
But it was close enough, I thought, as the conductor raised his baton and Katja and I
synced in syncopation (a sign of harmony off the stage?). I was still learning (by which
I mean failing at) the art of teenage seduction, but I knew my place here. The spot

3. 6/10/2016 Tanglewood, My Family's Transcendental Homeland : Deceptive Cadence : NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/07/05/156288431/tanglewood-my-familys-transcendental-homeland 3/7
must have seemed as foreign to my dirty-blonde partner from Graz as it felt for the
scraggly Southern guy some called the "Kentucky Fried Cellist." But we could have
been in my parents' den, so sensitive to the rhythms of this rustic, woodsy musical
node was my daily life, family.
Tanglewood is a music festival, but at its heart, it's about story. Named for Hawthorne
and his charitable revision of Greek myths for children, Tanglewood was not only the
music retreat where, in the 1940s and beyond, a young Bernstein, soon to lead the
New York Philharmonic and write West Side Story, came of age, learning from
heralded musicians like conductor Serge Koussevitsky and composer Aaron Copland.
Now celebrating its 75 anniversary, Tanglewood also served as the singular hotspot
where my parents fell in love and my family was forged. One year after their pivotal
Tanglewood summer, during which my parents reportedly slept in "separate quarters"
down the road from the Hawthorne house, they were married.
They would go on to have children, move from Manhattan to Queens, and eventually,
bayside suburgatory, but Tanglewood became our family's homeland even if I despised
our trips there. Whether I was expressing annoyance at another creatively named
"vacation" or live broadcasts from Tanglewood's open-air music shed regularly
blasting on the house stereo, our hearts and minds were literally entangled in the
place. Tanglewood was tension and love, flight and rootedness. Growing up, my
brother and I didn't know what, if any, purpose it would serve us as adults. But before
we could articulate the concept we knew that Tanglewood was as much a part of us as
we were a part of it.
In 1940, Bernstein wrote to Serge Koussevitsky of his Tanglewood experience: "This
summer to me was beauty—beauty in work, and strength of purpose, and cooperation.
I am full of humility and gratitude for having shared so richly in it." My phone calls
from our dorm were hardly as poetic but they didn't communicate a different message.
What I left out, especially from dialogues with my parents, was that spending a
summer at Tanglewood was downloading into my mind a fuller picture of who they
were as individuals and a couple. My summer at Tanglewood introduced me to my
th

4. 6/10/2016 Tanglewood, My Family's Transcendental Homeland : Deceptive Cadence : NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/07/05/156288431/tanglewood-my-familys-transcendental-homeland 4/7
parents as young, hopeful and happily childless people at 21: maturing kids with
whom I could identify. I was fully fusing the place and my family, sans the interference
that comes with resisting everything as a contrarian teenager.
I made a pretty wise personal branding decision as a young adult male who played
contact sports when I chose the rugged violin as my primary instrument. Strangely, I
wasn't proud to perform solo showpieces at graduation ceremonies, or to announce to
my soccer team that an All County orchestra rehearsal would keep me from attending
practice. (Using such an excuse was like speaking a feminine version of Martian to my
coach, a neighborhood firefighter.)
I came around when I started to piece together that my parents and Tanglewood both
weren't stuffy. Their shockingly rebellious stories of students "possibly" breaking into
a pastry truck in the middle of the night or those who experimented in ways that
others did at, say, Woodstock, rendered the concert-music life more human. So at 16, I
tried a few weeks at a small festival modeled on Tanglewood near my home, met a few
cool musician friends of my own. Later that year, I applied to the big leagues.
Luckily, Tanglewood already lived in my house. A remote stage existed in my living
room below the 1938 Steinway grand on which my mother and father would
accompany me in private performances of Brahms, Vivaldi, or Gershwin preludes
arranged by Jascha Heifetz. It was Cesar Franck's emotionally explosive violin sonata
—an expression of devotion and angst between parent and child, preserved on
audiotape via boombox—that functioned as my passport as well as entree to a racy life
in music schools based in Manhattan, Aspen and Baltimore. My relationship with my
parents and music-making fused in a perversely elegant way. It's still something that
transcends language, and I like it that way. It's our glue, always there when
conversation fails.
Due in no small part to my senior musical collaborators, I won a scholarship to the
Tanglewood high-school program, enjoying a transformative summer there. It was on
those lawns where I met some of my best friends and simultaneously recorded my

5. 6/10/2016 Tanglewood, My Family's Transcendental Homeland : Deceptive Cadence : NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/07/05/156288431/tanglewood-my-familys-transcendental-homeland 5/7
most intense performance memories. In 1994, our orchestra was one of the first to
play in the new Seiji Ozawa Hall, an architectural marvel, the back of which opened up
to a descending hill. Tanglewood inspired me and three radical friends, as adept at
playing Jane's Addiction on electric guitars as they were at playing Beethoven, to band
together and give the festival's true, if extraordinarily indie and popular-among-our-
peers, debut of a hard-rocking string quartet: Gorecki's Quasi una fantasia, a piece
immortalized by our alternative chamber-music idols, the Kronos Quartet.
Tanglewood offered me my first summer away from home after living in a town where
the (less-)privileged had already spent seven or so years in overpriced sleep-away
camps. I missed that express route to sex and partying (if my peers' tales were true).
But I grew up in a more natural tempo on Tanglewood's grounds. I comically fell for
Katja, even winning a few kisses, most likely out of the fair lady's sympathy for an
admiring guy who rarely hit all the notes. I explored the relationship between vodka
and Shostakovich (better together). I performed my first Mahler symphony (the First,
called the "Titan"), which I would listen to as a daily anthem in later years as I fought
illness. At Tanglewood, the kids were mature, not fast. We spent late nights arguing
about the links between Bach and the Beatles. The rosters of the great orchestras
became a substitute for the rosters of our favorite sports teams, even if we got drunk
watching the World Cup in a bar. We traded CDs of Stravinsky the way peers back
home traded drugs and gambling debts. We were still kids: We just infused our
childhoods with different stuff, and today, many of my fellow alumni are members of
great orchestras, notable composers and actors (so much for the writer).
At the end of my Tanglewood summer, when my parents drove up to collect me, the
first thing I said was that I had come to understand what those endless-seeming
weekends on the grass were about. Hearing Bernstein conduct Beethoven in nature
does something wondrous for a kid; I was now proud to have had that experience as a
child. When I returned to high school for one last year I felt like a graduate. Not
superior—just newly comfortable with not quite fitting in, which was genuine
preparation for the social isolation of cancer, recovery, and life in the arts. Six months
after my return, I fell ill with lymphoma, but it was my Tanglewood friends who were

6. 6/10/2016 Tanglewood, My Family's Transcendental Homeland : Deceptive Cadence : NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/07/05/156288431/tanglewood-my-familys-transcendental-homeland 6/7
there for me when most of my old friends at school had better things to do.
I went on to a traditional college and music conservatory, to playing concerts in
Manhattan and sneaking into Lincoln Center concerts with my Tanglewood posse
(hardcore). But I also felt more deeply bonded to my parents. I finally celebrated what
made them so different from the other parents in my town, the ones who made more
money and generously took me along on expensive jet ski excursions. My parents
weren't freaks or elitists, espousing highbrow culture or judging those who licked their
lips for the low or more visceral pleasures. They just wanted to give my brother and I
multimedia memories of profound meaning, to connect music with a familial bond.
Later, I started to write about music for publication. But I knew that nothing could
take the place of playing with others: forging relationships through practice and
performance.
Today I live in California and play more rock guitar than violin concertos. I can't visit
Tanglewood for this summer's celebratory season. But that's OK. Tanglewood is a part
of me. And that's something about myself that I hope will never change—as long as
those who love the festival continue to honor Hawthorne's passion for myth and
narrative, the musical raconteurs who brought and continue to bring the festival to
life. The people who tell its stories.
Adam Baer, a former NPR producer, is a writer in Los Angeles. He has also written
essays for The New York Times, Harper's, and many other publications and
anthologies. You can follow him on Twitter @glassshallot.
Fřǿm 'Ģŀěě' Țǿ Ģěțțỳșbųřģ: Břįǻň Șțǿķěș Mįțčħěŀŀ Șpěǻķș Fǿř Ŀįňčǿŀň
Jųŀỳ 4, 2012
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