I've participated in the Northampton music scene as a public school music teacher, a shape-note singer, fronting my own band when feeling bold enough to play my own tunes, a brief member of the Holyoke Civic Symphony (on clarinet), most recently, dressed in a red sequined dress and singing "Love Shack" at the Northampton Art Council's Transperformance. All the musicians I've met along the way have filled my life with abundant joy and "coolness," the kind of cool that you can't buy or measure but only feel the lack of when it is not there.
The music scene I am most involved with on a day-to-day to basis is teaching my seven-year-old daughter violin. We are studying Suzuki violin with Emily Greene at the Northampton Music Center and as any "parent-teacher" knows, it can be the most alternately frustrating and rewarding activity that you engage in with your child. What a gift it has been to find such a fun, spot-on, teacher as Emily whose teaching style is gentle, playful yet with an underlying seriousness. And to see all those small bows moving in unison is as beautiful as it gets.
