Summer Awakening
On June 9, 1959, the Yale University Band left New Haven for its first European tour. During the 37 day trip, the Band played nearly thirty concerts, television and radio broadcasts and recording sessions, performing in London, Windsor, Brighton Beach, Rugby, Oxford, Bremen, Hamburg, Cologne, Bonn, Munich, Interlaken, Lugano, Lausanne, Valkenburg, Groningen, Chaumont, Verdun and Paris. The Band traveled by bus, ferry, and train as it made its way from the UK to West Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France. And, I, albeit last chair in the French Horn section, was fortunate to be included in The Band and on the road.
66 years later, I recall with the sweetest of memories the bus trip through the Swiss Alps as we made our way to Interlaken for a two night stay at the Casino, where we would perform two concerts to earn our keep, hearing in my mind as we twisted through hairpin curves on that two-lane Alpine highway various musical phrases from Aaron Copland’s Billy The Kid Suite, a composition which The Band included in its repertoire. To this day I do not understand the association of Copland’s musical poetics to my summertime trip through the Alps; yet the memory of that road and those notes is firmly implanted.
I was twenty years old when I made the tour. It was my first flight by commercial airlines (DC-3, turboprop no less, operated by Pan American Airlines) and my first trip to Europe. It was a time when I could put my Directed Studies History of Art class to the test. What, for instance, did I really know or even care about the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum or for that matter the enormous historic canvases in the Louvre? It turned out that I knew quite a lot, thanks to Yale’s Directed Studies program, and that Mother Yale had taught me to care deeply about aesthetic and humanistic values reflected in city after city in Europe. For me, my summertime trip 66 years ago with the Yale University Band was an awakening to the richness and fullness of life—a love song to the road ahead.