Mean Eugene

I went to a Philly Pops concert at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia on May 15, 2022, a beautiful, sun-streaked Sunday. It had been dreadful all weekend, the weekend I went up to New York to cover a concert at the Jazz Gallery on Saturday night, staying in New Jersey the Friday night before, each city connected by the same cloudy, dark sky. NY lulled with an overhanging fog that was so thick, buildings lining 9th Avenue disappeared into the sky, no tops to prove that they ever stopped climbing—towers of Babel. But that Sunday was beautiful while still among us lay a pandemic, a tightening, possibly global—and nearly so—war, and an irreparable division over pregnancy and abortion. No one was tuned into the news of a racist shooting in Buffalo the day before so that Sunday, still, was beautiful.

I was a speck standing in the lobby with the audience before the show started. I couldn’t see where the black people were. I walked the floor, from the front entrance on Broad St. to the central sky-light dome above the middle of the lobby. Then I walked all the way to the back of the building.

I couldn’t find the Black people. I took selfies to unfocus myself and scan slowly through the audience behind me because maybe I missed someone and I just needed to zoom in to take a closer look.

Growing up in Atlanta, I was at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s (ASO) concert hall at the Woodruff Arts Center every weekend. The ASO raised me, groomed me, painfully trained me for the profession of classical percussion. The Talent Development Program (TDP) under the ASO provided lessons, assisted with buying instruments, and prepared the funneling of Black students into summer music camps. TDP gave all the students tickets for every ASO concert in the classical season, and I never once considered how expensive a habit like that was, impossible for Black kids not sponsored and made evident by the $110.00 ticket I thought to buy at the beginning of the concert. Two of my brothers and I were in TDP and studied with Tom Sherwood, Chris Martin, and Ralph Jones—the principal chairs of their sections. We took lessons every week, practiced for hours every day, were in all the top orchestras and wind ensembles across the city, state, southeast region, and country. We sold incredible recitals to the public, then at the Interlochen Arts Camp, we were internationally recognized by playing in and soloing with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra, which I did as a winner of its international concerto competition.

But while that sounds good, there was a lot of bad for us as well. We weren’t treated all that well in our own sections, sometimes by our own conductors and faculty professors. And it came from different directions: even when attending the concerts, not all, but many of the ushers made us feel like we didn’t belong. The worst one challenged us every weekend about whether we had tickets to the concert despite us being there every weekend with our tickets. His name was Eugene. Now that I think about it, we should have called him “Mean Eugene,” but the very truth of the matter was that we cared more about the music than how we were being treated. That’s why we went all the way to conservatories, won orchestra positions, played around the world, but eventually became public school teachers, non-profit founders, and teaching artists for those non-profits around the country. We wanted to see more Black students coming after us that could go just as far, and further.

I haven’t played in any orchestra with another Black percussionist, man or woman. All along the way, I’ve had incidents where white, male percussionists said demeaning things to me, one yelling out into a room full of percussionists about my inadequacy to defend the layout we had for a percussion ensemble piece. We had already vigorously rehearsed it that way and the concert was in a couple of days, but he wanted to change our placement and I said, “No. it’s too late.” Or another percussionist putting his mouth to my ear to whisper a chant about how “I’ll never be able to make it. I’ll never be any good.”

They know who they are. Then there are the percussionists who never treated me harshly. All those percussionists were around when things like that happened. But no one spoke up to stop the humiliation and disrespect being dealt me. They got quiet. They breathed very slowly and momentarily froze because they knew what they were seeing was wrong even though they did nothing to stop it. Those percussionists know who they are, too.

I didn’t go in to see the Philly POPS concert that Sunday. I didn’t want even one more performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in my life. Instead, I stayed in the lobby and kept an eye on the audience when they first poured in, then poured out for intermission, and then once again after the concert was over.

While washing my hands in the bathroom during intermission, an older, sophisticated, and slender Black lady wearing a flawless cream-colored suit leaned into me with one shoulder, her front facing the direction of my back, and said, “Are we the…only?”

While she yet spoke, I turned to her and snapped my neck nodding my head.

“Yep,” I responded while she continued her slow-moving question.

“Are we the only in the…”

“Yep.”

“…in the audience?”

“Yup,” I said again.

This never happened to me before. The 25 years I graced these concert halls, the one, two, possibly three other Black people have never leaned into me to say, “What’s going on here?” I never asked what was going on myself because I was there for the music, the training of my ears to hear rather than my eyes to see who was on the stage.

There are more Black musicians on stage now because of the efforts we put in to change it, but also because George Floyd was murdered. Yet the audience still looks the same. And the percussion sections do, too.

Tense

Pianissimo. Relax. It must be barely audible, but fully heard. My body wants to be invisible and yet I’m seen. My fingers and wrists are doing their best, trying to make me disappear, but each hiccup rips my invisibility cloak open. Four hours I spend, five, six because it isn’t smooth yet. The tension in my hands won’t release—the tension in my mind clings to each rough burst of mezzo-forte in a snare drum roll that should be smoother than silk, thinner than cotton candy, less audible to the human ear than a dog whistle. My arms grow heavier by the millisecond, my mind tightens like it’s testing my blood pressure, constricting the steady flow of a drum roll that should sound as though it never began or will ever end. Hour seven approaches as I realize I have been holding my breath for the last six. No wonder I’m feeling light-headed. The drum roll of anticipation that should have preceded a great announcement has flattened the arrival of any triumph. My hands hurt, the joints in my fingers have to be forced open, slowly, through pain, and then cracked to straighten completely. Hour eight and I’ve stopped, but the tension saturates my psyche.

One Part: E = mc2 for complex rhythms pulsing complex minds

/ˌkämˈpleks,kəmˈpleks,ˈkämˌpleks/

When I try to consider rhythm merely as timing, I always fail. I fall into the gaps of space I didn’t know were there–or maybe I knew, but didn’t gauge how big they were, or are, or will be (because time is in all space, even if it isn’t always real). But if I knew twenty years ago when I was learning my first five-stroke roll that space and time are important for relationship more than for rhythm, I wouldn’t have played percussion. I would have focused on drawing or sports or writing or nothing at all because my mind, the complexity of my mind and my relationship to it has changed too much to tune to those pitches of an unchanging relationship.

The intersections of time and space: accepting a job offer and committing to spend half of every day in one place, time shooting forward without hardly any movement. Getting married and committing all the time left in my life along with all the space I will ever have. Picking a major at college, unaware that some, most, or all of the time that is to come is being chosen for me before I’ve even conceptualized what space(s) I occupy in the world.

When it comes to rhythm, there’s something about dividing time and seeing its division in space. Sometimes I physically see it in the space around me and other times I feel it in the space I’m physically in, which makes it different depending on where I am. Bigger rooms create more complex divisions of time where I can imagine the space between or in rhythms; smaller rooms allow more precise divisions of time where I must repress space to avoid the conflict of needing or using more space than is available. The more space available for time to divide itself and travel audibly, the harder it is to hear, but the more interesting it becomes to see.

The speed of light is a measurement of how much time it takes to travel a distance. The speed of light never changes no matter what mechanism is used to shoot the light. A laser beam won’t shoot light any faster than a car headlight. The only thing that can change are the measurements of distance (how big the room is) and the time (how big the spaces are between each rhythm), but the relationship between space and time won’t doesn’t change. If I move slowly through space, playing so slow that that the silence between each note hurts, more time passes. But if I speed through rhythms–leaving no space between notes, hardly any time passes.

Movies make it seem like it’s really cool when musicians can see what they’re playing, when notes are certain colors, when sounds are certain feelings. When it first started happening my first year in college, it just hurt. It began to keep me up at night, every. single. night. until 5 and 6 in the morning and the only way I knew how to cope was to practice, non-stop, sometimes 10 hours at a time in the exact same space. 10 hours in the same room. Stuck. Then it started clouding my thoughts and taking over my ability to think. I could read music, listen to sentences, and watch a conductor with all the learned knowledge I needed, but then I’d fall in the gaps of space between notes, between words, between beats. That’s when I started losing time, when I’d wake up wondering not what happened yesterday, but why the week skipped yesterday, not understanding why it’s Thursday today when yesterday was Tuesday. Or when a friend from college recounts a prominent event that I have no recollection of, or what happened between ages 19 and 24, 24 and 26, 26 and 31. But most times, it’s just me counting to a certain measure, watching the conductor bring me to that measure, spacing each beat and preparing to play, then not knowing why the very moment I was to play disappeared from the music. The moment disappears and then moments later I just…wake back up…and I’m standing there on stage looking around…and the conductor is still going…and the musicians are still playing…and I just ask over and over, “where did everyone go? how did they get back here? am I still here?”

A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it

Time and space cross, overlap, join together with chemical bonds in an electromagnetic field, and then vanish. I don’t know when I left the stage, how I got back on it, or where the time in the music went. Every concert. Every public performance. No nerves or anxiety about stepping on stage, no self-doubt about how well I’ll play–just black holes, one after the other. It’s why parts of me dissolved and dissolve when I play the drums. Is this the part of Einstein’s theory of relativity that they forgot to teach me at the conservatory?