Two weeks ago today was the first day of classes here at Carthage – and I think for me (and probably for a lot of my music colleagues) it was a First Day fraught with more uncertainty than usual.  The reason is simple:  On a day filled with the joy of welcoming back returning students and welcoming the newcomers, it was impossible (at least for me) not to also be feeling some melancholy over the absence of those remarkable students to whom we bade farewell back in May.  It was not a matter of slots being filled or not filled – nor fears about the calibre of our incoming freshmen and the collective gifts of our upperclassmen.  It was more about the emotional void left in the wake of those graduates’s departure,  and whether or not this place could possibly feel the same.  There have always been twinges of such melancholy every fall,  but I certainly felt it more acutely this time around than at any other point in my time at Carthage.  Never before had I said goodbye to six private voice students – Max, John, Mike, Kevin, Nick, and Fletcher-  and that’s not even counting other students like Steve Hobe and Jack Lambert, who were not my private students but with whom I had worked closely and for whom I felt great affection.  Mathematically alone – and in other ways –  I had never dealt with so many difficult goodbyes in one single graduation.  So what would Carthage feel like with all of these absences?

In a word – it feels great!  It feels strange to type those words,  and I say that with all due respect  all of the  2015 music graduates whom we miss terribly ….. and always will …. just as we continue to miss graduates from the more distant past as well (especially those students who left a deep impression on us and on the school.)    But it is also gratifying to be reminded all over again that one of the beauties of any school that the goodbyes are leavened by the welcomes. What we do and create together is perpetually renewed and freshened by the new students who join us,  and that’s what makes it possible to live with all of the goodbyes that are an inevitable part of this kind of work.

Actually, I was reminded of that on a Friday back in August when I had lunch with one of those now-departed 2015 graduates,  Nick Huff,  right before he left for graduate school at Eastman School of Music.  I was Nick’s voice teacher back when he was in high school,  and both the length and depth of our teacher/student collaboration made this an especially tough goodbye for me.  If anything made it bearable, it was the fact that he was beginning an incredibly exciting new chapter at one of the finest music schools in the world.  But still- to let go of a student with whom I’d shared so much over such a long time was incredibly hard.   There were no tears-  but there was one heck of a lump in my throat, especially during that final hug in our driveway before he drove off.

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A little later that same day,  I taught a voice lesson to one of my high school students –  a great young man named Sam Johnson who happens to sing in one of my sister-in-law’s fine choirs at Tremper High School.   Sam is a great little soccer player, and I suspect that soccer is his real first love- but I think singing is a very close second.   And I have to say that in the time that he has studied with me,  I have been absolutely delighted with the way in which Sam has grown as a singer.  The voice itself has grown substantially over time and he sings with much more energy and confidence than he once did.   (Honestly,  at his very first lesson I could scarcely hear him-  and the distance he has come since then is truly remarkable.)   I suspect that Sam will never aspire to sing opera or study singing with the ferocious focus of someone like Nick (although I could be wrong about that) but he is a gifted singer and a joy to teach.  After we finished up what was an especially fun and gratifying lesson,  I asked Sam if I could take a selfie with him in the same driveway where I’d said goodbye to Nick several hours earlier.  It was my way of underscoring the saving grace of teaching- that there are always new students waiting in the wings.

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I suppose this is one way in which the goodbyes between teachers and students are different from the goodbyes between parents and their kids when they first leave the nest.  If you’re the Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe,   there would pretty much always be another child to fill in the emotional void left by the latest one to grow up and move out ….. but for most parents those farewells are understandably tough.  And when it’s the last of the brood,  it has to especially hurt.   I’m thinking of a friend of mine from Atlantic, Iowa- Bill Nichols-  the youngest sibling in a family that was very close friends with us.  Once upon a time,  Bill was the eighth and last of the Nichols kids to grow up, move out and move on – and I’m sure it was a tough moment for his folks Fletcher and Avonelle. (Of course,  the happy end to the story is that Bill eventually bought a farm right down the road from the house where he grew up, so he wasn’t gone for long before returning to the neighborhood.)  Bill has just experienced that same tough moment himself, as he and his wife Linda recently dropped off their youngest son Reid to begin his freshman year at Iowa State.  I am still haunted by Bill’s Facebook post on the topic:  There is nothing in life that prepares you to drop off your last kid at college. Just plain sucks.   And it’s especially tough, of course,  when the child in question is such a source of pride and joy.  It’s the same with students, I suppose – and the ones you come to love cannot be relinquished without some pain.  But there are comforts, of course.  One’s own children are still your children-  they’re not your former children.  They are still a part of the family, destined to return again and again, and remain just as precious.   And while students do indeed become former students,  some remain in touch and sometimes the relationship and appreciation actually deepens with time, even as they enter the next chapter in their lives and the chapters after that.  And in my case,  I’m fortunate that one of those six guys is student teaching in town this fall and will likely be around for the rest of the school year.  Two others have taken teaching jobs in town,  and another is also working in the area- and the one who has gone halfway across the country to grad school has been sweetly attentive to his old teacher and done a lovely job of keeping in touch.  And of course, even beyond these recent grads I can point to other former students whose lives continue to intersect with mine in one way or another.

But if there is any source of comfort that most profoundly heals the hurt,  it is that moment in a new year when we as music faculty walk into Siebert Chapel for our first music department meeting and see the eager, expectant faces of our new freshmen.  Thank goodness for the new.

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