A story with the roar of the greasepaint but none of the blood

The audience was one of the hugest I'd ever seen. We were playing the Dvorak Cello Concerto. Yo-Yo Ma was the cellist and John Williams was conducting. In my humble opinion, I think John Williams was entirely too serious, egocentric, inflexible, unintuitive, and not a lot of fun as a conductor. I was playing Principal Horn with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the Grand Opening of the New Hynes Convention Center. I was 16 or 17 years old.

The cello and horn have such marvelous lines together in that work. I just adore it. As the time approached for a glorious song to emerge from the horn, one which causes the cello to sing back with passion, Yo-Yo looked up at me and smiled from the bottom of his toes. I beamed back.

John Williams glared at me and time stood still.

My horn reached my lips as always it does and sang that song, and Yo-Yo sang back. Life was beautiful for that moment, very, very beautiful. Yet I couldn't really connect to how we made the audience feel.

Academia and I have been odd bedfellows. Though interested in being a veterinarian, I was convinced to pursue Music and Art. So when I got into Harvard/Radcliff, I didn't attend. I attended New England Conservatory, Boston Conservatory, Mass Art, and ended up with two BS McL degrees from University of New Hampshire - one in Performance and another in Applied Art.

After playing horn in the Opera di Roma for a stint, I got immediate work in NYC. Thus, I was given the Doctoral Horn Fellowship at Yale. Yet admissions turned me down; my degrees were only from UNH (though each Magna cum Laude and I'd gotten into Harvard/Radcliff and chosen not to go). So that pissed off that horn department.

Next, Jerry Ashby, Associate Principal Horn of the New York Philharmonic and the first black musician to grace their orchestra, had a personal fit when Juilliard said no after he'd personally chosen me for his studio. He thought they were discriminating against him... so we went tearing around NYC in his Porche.

Being one of the small number of natural horn players in New York, Jerry gave me his old, makeshift McCraken natural horn with all the crooks rattling around unceremoniously in a plastic grocery bag. “Here,” he said, “you know what to do with this thing.” Years later, I made a canvas carrying bag to contain all those crooks and got it back to him through a mutual friend.

I hung around in the Met after that, studying intensely with principal hornist Howard Howard and continuing that relationship through pregnancy, and that’s when I was offered to be groomed to become Principal Horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. My husband at the time had other plans to live in Vermont and asserted that if I chose the Met, he would need to raise our child.

I would spend the next couple of decades in Vermont. Jerry died in 2007 from a prolonged battle with prostate cancer. A piece of me went with him.

I shifted heavily into composition and improvisation. While touring the USA as a composer and improvisationalist, I was offered a Doctoral Fellowship at Stanford in Composition. My husband said it would be the end of our marriage... that marriage ended anyway…

The spirit of Jerry and I made our amends with Juilliard in the end. He’s looking back from his esteemed place in Heaven with more peaceful wisdom now.

After years on stage and coaching performers, as well as sitting in the audience and feeling their response to music I've written, I realize that I love to connect to people. So now I write music and work closely with human pathos. It brings me contentment and joy to sense shifts in human states, experience their stories, and witness their feelings while helping them heal. It's a blessing of wise and energetic musical conversations.