Dear Jacob,

I’ve got ten minutes here as I wait for the second half of our dress rehearsal in Auer Hall. I love this space. Some of my moments of deepest emotion over the last few years have begun here–times when I’ve wished I might’ve been on the stage instead of in the audience.

As I watched the viola da gamba player a moment ago I could picture your fingers. In that moment I remembered my friend Kevin practicing cello on a Saturday morning as a young college student boarding with my family when I was a kid. He was so inspiring to me. Twenty years later you’re inspiring to me, too. You sit at the piano generating fierce improvisations that are painful to listen to but pregnant with understanding. You practice every morning, working through your scale and your exercise and your songs before eagerly degenerating into the chaos of a six year old’s experiments. I realized just now that it won’t be long before my kids develop skills I don’t have–how I’ll be inspired and delighted just to get to be the one who sees your fingers on the strings, or your feet on the court, or your head bent over a drafting board, fluent like a native language.

Not being a student or even an active professional these days, the opportunity to sing Bach’s St. John Passion with the Historical Performance Institute here at the Jacobs School was not one I ever would’ve seen coming. But one day a couple months ago Dad got word that they were looking for extra voices for a performance led by the incomparable John Butt. When word like that comes, there’s only one response that makes sense to people like me and Daddy, so here we are. It’s been a season of wonder and joy for me. I feel like myself.

I feel like the self I’ve never been; the self I’ll never be. But today, unlikely as it is, I am that self. I think how glamorous I consider the lives pictured in the videos we’ve watched together of Alison Balsom working on a new album: professionals at the top of their field. I could be that. I wish I could be that. My next thought is always reluctant: I will never be quite that. For me, that ship has sailed. But then I realize that’s the view I have today from the risers in the chorus. Sure, I’m only in the chorus, but nevermind that for now.

Just now what I watched was the incredible rehearsal of the Erwäge aria. What caught my imagination was the two graduate students who were performing alongside John Butt at the harpischord, Bojan Cicic on the violin, and a tenor brought in from New York for this performance. Just the five of them.

What must this moment be for that young woman dancing a duet with Bojan Cicik looking right at her across his bow!? It must be one of the most significant moments of her life. Their music was exquisite. Immaculate. Incredible.

I can’t begin to guess whether you’ll be a musician or an engineer, a historian or a writer or an architect or a fireman. But whatever you become, I hope you have a moment like this someday, and I hope you know that, if you show up with wonder and passion, it’s a win whether you’re in the chorus, or you’re playing with Bojan Cicic, or you’re Bojan Cicic himself.

And I hope I’ll be there to see it, whatever it is.

I love you.

Love,

Mommy