Maybe Social Media Isn't All Bad

Logging into Facebook for the first time in a month, I see that I've been tagged: an old acquaintance and fellow musician. He's talking about a concert. About _that_ concert. I was finishing grade twelve. He was I think two years behind me in school. But we were playing in the same youth orchestra, in Montreal, the first anglophone orchestra to perform at the AOJQ (Association des orchestres de jeunes du Quebec) festival since its inception.

The trip itself was a blast. A lot of hard work, a lot of fun; I remember a visit to the locker rooms at the Bell Centre where the Habs play, and the agony of the bus ride home through traffic, as I'd ill-advisedly forgotten to use the facilities before we left. There was a lot of weirdness and want as well. We were a group of teenagers a couple thousand kilometres from home, meeting so many people we'd know for a week and never see again. I remember one of my friends, one of our bassists, fell for one of the trombonists from another orchestra. Like him, mixed ancestry, Chinese and Anglo-Canadian. An instant connection. Nothing so interesting happened to me, but I did spend one afternoon in Vieux Montreal in a little subterranean cafe with one of our percussionists, talking about the girls we couldn't get over. I told him about the first person I'd ever opened up to about my sexual assault and the taunting and bullying that followed. That the person who sat and listened unconditionally was a lovely blonde girl I knew from the next city over, and who I'd have in my life as a friend for a few summers when I was 13, 14, 15. He opened up to me about the girl he'd fallen for, with whom he'd been together for a while, and how it was all starting to come apart. The helplessness he felt about not being able to stop that. He told me how they'd sit and listen to Gould on his front porch and drink black tea in silence; and improbably, six months later at a party, I'd meet a girl with her name and description. _Hey,_ I asked, _Do you know _____ by any chance?_ Yes, she told me, it never quite worked out; but I remember we sat out on his front deck and listened to Gould and sat there in silence, and...

A week of rehearsals, a series of concerts at the end where we'd all perform. We ended up pairing with one of the Quebec orchestras, and were conducted by the festival's invited conductor, Emmanuel Plasson, for two of the pieces. There was an electricity and tension. We worked so hard for this. We wanted this moment so bad.

And when the lights went off and after our oboist gave us the A, we ran down our program almost flawlessly. There was a real silence in the audience. They recognized that this was special. We recognized this was special. When we were done, the audience jumped up and gave us a standing O that felt like it went on forever. I've never experienced anything like that before or since: the feeling, the music! (Shostakovich, Saint-Saens, Kalinnikov...), or even the people. We were young and figuring things out, as all teenagers are. But for me, it came at a point in my life where I was casting off the worst years of my life and coming into an understanding of myself that was fully my own. We flew home. The concert faded to a vivid memory: a week in Montreal, the people I played with, the conversations and moments we had; a darkened theatre; a raucous standing O.

Until last night, when I found out there was a recording, which I'd never even thought might even be a possibility. I downloaded everything. I uploaded it to my cloud storage. I re-indexed my Sonos music library, and put it on to listen to with my partner.

It's wild to say we weren't as good as I remembered, but we were actually better. After the Shostakovich, my partner asked me, _who's the piccolo player?_ A flautist herself. Deeply impressed with the playing. That piccolo player, as far as I can tell, done that year. Had a child immediately after high school. I ran into her a few years later in university, and was gutted when she didn't recognize me. The story of my life. She never played in the university wind bands. I think she's in financial services now. I'm sure she's great at it. I hope she's still playing, in some kind of way.

After we finished the final piece, I was crying. As my partner puts it, I cry at everything, but especially this. Especially this. To get a chance, decades later, to remember even more about a special week in your life; be honest, how often does that happen? The recordings were mastered so well. We sounded so good. My only concern a small one of ego. The music was as I remembered. But, they left off all the applause.