Becca's Return to Music, Music's Return to Becca

Musica. Music.

I have often heard math geeks say that theirs is the international language. But for me, it is not. For me, the international stabilizer is music.

For those of you who have known me only in the Peace Corps sense have no real idea how much the rest of my life has revolved around music. My mother is a music teacher. My grandmother was a professional organist and choir director. I have been singing since I could talk, and I learned how to read music along with reading words.

I have been good enough a musician to make it into some really good groups, but I am not good enough to be considered "good." I sang in four All-State choirs. I went to an extremely musical college and sang with the amazing choir there. I even got to sing in Carnegie Hall with the All-Eastern choir when I was 16. I've done church choir, church handbells, community choir, marching band, concert band, recitals, music fesitvals, mucial theater.

Some of my happiest memories revolve around music, and nothing in this world has ever been able to calm my sometimes-uncontrolable nerves like singing in a choir. (Singing solo, however, can set my uncontrollable nerves on fire.)

But for the first several months of my time here in Bulgaria, I neglected this part of my personality. Everything was so new, I almost didn't notice the lack of it. The first time I noticed I was lacking something in my soul was during our In-Service Training in November when one of my fellow volunteers played guitar and sang during a break. It was such a comfort to me, I realized I had to work making music back into my life.

About a month ago, my chance came. It had come up in conversation that I have something of a musical background, and the music teacher at school approached me about playing or singing something for the school holiday this Friday. I said I'd be glad to, and I met her after school one day to play through a flute-piano duet.

It was the first time, the FIRST TIME, that I knew the Bulgarian I was with was experiencing the exact same thing I was. We were reading off of one peice of music, and it was a native language to both of us. She doesn't know English, and sometimes I don't know Bulgarian, but when we were sitting at that piano, we were both reading a language that was native to us. And it made me feel very, very close to her...very, very close to someone native to this chunk of rock I live on.

Last week she gave me a CD made by a choir in Yambol. I haven't had time to listen to it until today, so I popped it in while I washed dishes. The third song made me drop my rag and run into my living room.

I had sung it before. I think it's John Rutter, though I am not certain (it is one of the billion choral peices I have committed to this brain over the last 23 years). It is a rendition of the Pie Jesu text, a Latin text as familiar to this protestant as her native tounge. (There are some Latin texts used so frequently in choral music that over time you think of them as English.) And here is this Bulgarian choir singing a song that enters my brain as a sentence of my naroden ezik (mother tounge).

BUT, it is also a naroden ezik for those Bulgarians as well. They have probably sung that Pie Jesu text so much that it enters their brains as Bulgarian. When they look at a sheet of music, they see a bunch of lines with dots and tails.

If you put an American, a Bulgarian, a Chilean, a Belgian, and an Ethiopian together in a room and handed them a sheet of music, the same sounds would eminate from each of them. And they would be making sounds as familiar to them as their mother's voices. It doesn't matter if in one head the note "B" is pronouced "Bee" and in another "Beh" and in another "Bay"...it means the same thing to each of them.

In short, I have found music again. And I think it will make my second year here much richer, as it has in the other 23 years of my life.