Bach-Packing in the Woods

Nestled in the grey-green Monadnock mountains of New Hampshire, there's a place--let's call it Pear valley-- where people gather during the summer to play chamber music and lose their virginity. Not quite a music camp, and certainly not a bunny farm, it defies conventional classification. Ask any of its devoted alumni (and there are dozens at Harvard) what it is, and you'll get a dreamy look and something like, "Oh, it's just magical. We went skinnydipping and played the Mendelsohn Octet until 4 a.m. Like, it's the most amazing experience I've ever had."

There were 53 of us that year, as usual more than half women. Age 18 put you pretty much in the middle of a group of high school and college students with an occasional doctor or lawyer thrown in for comic relief. Plunked down in the lush countryside, ten miles from booming Keene. N. H.--seven pizza parlors and four police cars--we spent our days rehearsing, singing, and studying music theory.

Our teachers and coaches were a group of talented Julliard and Oberlin graduates who had escaped the rigors of New York competition to find themselves and true musical integrity in the woods. In the winters they taught part time at local colleges, and some played in the Pear Valley Ensemble, a fairly well-known chamber music outfit, which tours New England regularly. Mostly pushing 35, these nature loving artistes compensated for varying degrees of career frustration by clinging to remnants of their adolescence.

Danny, a fiery cellist with wild red hair, played soccer like a fiend and took young girls for midnight riders on his Honda-destination always a mystery, Deborah, a violinist, was less flamboyant, but ended up in a tortuous love affair with a boy 15 years her junior. Pianists Sven and Andrew seemed normal enough behind the keyboard but suffered a manic addiction to killer basketball, in which the object was not so much to get the ball in the hoop as to tackle whoever had it while ripping to shreds as much clothing as possible. Others were downright eccentric.

The paying customers adapted rather easily to this odd, contradictory atmosphere: grueling daytime practice and lessons, talking and living music, combined with nigh time lunacy. This was no kiddie camp, so there weren't curfews or parietals. And because we were stupid and inspired by our wacky role models, we stayed up incessantly-to bake early-morning bread, or contemplate the eternal under a sky-full of stars. Music was everything, but sex was more than everything. The outside world quickly faded, and no one read newspapers. We all turned vegetarian.

Though there wasn't anyone around to challenge our sincerity, we also felt obliged to prove we were true campers. One night, a bunch of us decided to steal all the underwear from the adjacent male bunk, with the long-range goal of slinging their jockey shorts from the moose antlers in the main dining room. After a day of Bach, there I was slithering across the ground like a Marine commando in sneakers and flannel night gown. My objective to provoke the cute bassoonist who slept in the top left hand bunk. My dignity: like his underwear, soon to be hung from a pair of rotting moose antlers.

That was the summer of a somewhat kinky toga party and a so-called mud dance, which had to have been against the law in several states. It was the summer after the famous last-day streak, a season which had nearly brought a law suit from a shocked pair of parents. It was also the summer a middle-aged pianist cracked up altogether. Before her exile, she had wanted to hold a music salon in the barn and charge admission. She had cried a lot, and everyone was sort of relieved to see her go.

When parents finally arrived to cart home their progeny at summer's end, they didn't immediately appreciate the value of staying up all night to watch the sun rise before launching into pre-breakfast Brandenburg Concertos. Other things parents didn't dig: hazy evidence that junior might have spent most evenings with a bed mate and explanations for why the Kenne police might be calling to follow up on the night John forgot his driver's license. But the best way to give the old folks a chuckle and a sense of the sprit of Pear Valley was a tour of the women's John.

"Why did Bach have 22 children? queried one wall "His organ had no stops. "Below a familiar ode to a certain woman from Nantucket was the question. "What's the difference between an orchestra and a bull?" Answer "In the bull, the horns are in the front and the asshole in the back." That one had killed us all summer.