ReTour to France with the 1976 Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum

So already, I'm back. Summer has officially begun.  And I am wondering how best to talk about the extraordinary experiences I've had in France in the last few weeks. 

How many people are lucky enough to return to the site of a significant, formative, multi-faceted late-adolescent experience in the company of the very people with whom they shared that experience in the first place? That's what I got to do earlier this month: to return with many other alumni members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum (HRCM) to Paris, one of the places we performed during our 1976 eight-week European Tour.  We went on the ReTour to reconnect as both singers and old friends. After two days of rehearsal, we sang two concerts featuring pieces from our old tour repertoire by Thomas Morley, Josquin des Prez, Johannes Brahms, Williiam Billings, Virgil Thomson, and Randall Thompson. Around our rehearsals and concerts, we ate, drank, and caught up; remembered fellow tour group members who weren't with us, some of whom couldn't make it to Paris this time around, and others of whom will never be able to join us; met one another's loved ones; visited new and favorite old Parisian attractions; and walked and walked and walked.

In a nutshell, it was wonderful.  

It's never easy to write about the emotionally extraordinary--and I believe the ReTour was an extraordinary experience for all of us. There's so much to say that's probably true for all or many of us, but that's also potentially very personal, given the separate lives we've lived since college. Over the last few days, I circled around this topic, looked for the right entry point, and went round and round in my mind so much that I was reminded of the countless roundabouts* in Alsace, where my husband Scott and I traveled after the ReTour. Scott and I had to drive around many of them multiple times before choosing which exit to take.

Most roundabouts offer at least three possible exits, so I am expecting to write at least three blog entries related to the HRCM ReTour and my time in France. Today's blog post takes the exit that leads onto Île de France, where the HRCM ReTour Ensemble's activities centered; the subject matter of other blog posts will take their cues from Paris beyond Île de France and France east of Paris. It's possible that my blog posts may capture the group's experience from time to time, but I won't presume to speak for the group. Frankly, I'm as interested in the personal and individual, and the historical and cultural, as I am in the collective and communal. There's plenty to try to understand and synthesize.

Perhaps what was most gratifying and reassuring about taking that Île de France exit for me personally, especially as someone who has been wrestling with the disorientation and unsettledness associated with my recent "retirement," was feeling so authentically connected simultaneously to the group--and also to the self I have become since I graduated from college.** While my adult self, my identity, my life have all been shaped most directly by the professional decisions I have made since college, the HRCM ReTour let me experience the subtle and not so subtle ways they reflect the sensibilities, interests, values and friendships I developed long ago, especially through intense experiences
that offered people and purpose--such as singing and traveling with the HRCM. However different the members of the HRCM were as people thirty-eight years ago, we collectively and enthusiastically embraced the challenge of becoming an ensemble that could routinely make beautiful, meaningful music together. We loved the privilege of being able to sing great music for others, and we collectively and joyfully took that privilege seriously.  About what else should be embraced with seriousness and enthusiasm, we differed greatly. But we had lots of long bus rides during which to recognize our differences--and sometimes even to appreciate them.

So I've come away from our ReTour weekend with a profound sense of affirmation and integration (a feeling I haven't had often in the last few years); with so much gratitude for old, renewed friendships and musical relationships; and with the dull, sweet heartache of saying good-bye without the knowledge of when we will next say hello.

And I've come away from France wondering about the relationships between the old and the new, the past and the present, the past and the future, the visible and the invisible, culture and justice, culture and change--and how these relationships differ in France and the USA. So I leave you with this last photo.Yes, that is a replica of the Statue of Liberty: in Colmar, France, the "Mother of Exiles"*** keeps her torch raised to guide all those navigating a major roundabout. There's so much that seems incongruous here, at least to me. But maybe a lot is possible, too. Stay tuned!

*Screen shot of <https://www.nevadadot.com/uploadedImages/NDOT/Traveler_Info/Safety/roundabout_sign.gif>
**Screen shot of <http://blog.allstate.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Roundabout.jpg>
***The Statue of Liberty is referred to as "Mother of Exiles" by Emma Lazarus in "The New Colossus."