Playing Out

A former Cambridge Friends School graduate, now a middle-school teacher for the Boston Public Schools, fondly remembers how, each year, CFS marked the end of the school calendar with a variety of eagerly-looked-forward-to traditions. (That alum had been a little wistful to remember such mindful occasions; much as he loves his job, his school offers no such events.)

On the last day of school at CFS, for example, there’s the annual, all-school picnic at Raymond Park. CFS also boosts several special venues which highlight its students’ growth and achievement over the past year; one perennial favorite is the middle school’s music recital. This year, the recital was held on June 6^th. Cellists, pianists, clarinetists; all variety of musicians who’d either taken music classes at the school or studied elsewhere had been invited to perform.

As many alums, parents, and current students can also attest, the Music Department at CFS is extraordinary; second to none. Its performance audiences are pretty special, too. At the June 6^th music recital, though proud parents numbered among the most enthusiastic of the whoopers and hearty clappers, the adults were seriously out-performed by the musicians’ classmates.

Playing out; playing before a live audience can often be nerve-racking, tense. Yet much like that controversial proverbial tree falling, to experience how your breathed or bowed or fingered notes are being heard by actual listeners is such a critically important element of music-making. And when you hear your audience whoop and heartily clap, when they shut out, “I love you,” when you sense how they’re breathing in rhythm to what you’re playing? Something quite unexpectedly wonderful (similar to what can take place when CFS students experience their weekly meeting for worship) can happen. For both in collective silence and while performing before peers and family there is a sense of shared community, of the present moment, and of connective anticipation for what is to come. “Expectant waiting,” to use an old Quaker phrase. As Mozart famously observed, “The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.”

And as its alums, parents, and current students also know, whether during a performance, in the classroom, or playing outside during recess, this palpable sense of community is Cambridge Friends School.