Students With a Special 'Calling'

By Cindy Reitzi

April 2003

Before the concert, I scan the program for its offerings. In between Dvorak and Tchaikovsky is “Sinfonietta” (2000) by Elden Louis Steele III (born 1974), a ‘living composer,’ a friend, and a former student. This concert is an answering moment to the question, what will he be in the future? It is the borderland between past speculation and future possibility. It is a moment teachers rarely get to see: the shift from exercises of potential to realization.

Teachers’ gifts are invisible missives sent out into the future: skill and passion for music or art, the need to learn, social consciousness, critical thinking, love of literature. When students accept these gifts, and make them their own, they transform them into the next generation’s or the next movement’s interpretations and creations. But with some students, teachers need to balance when to vigorously orchestrate and mentor and when to just get out of the way.

If each of us has a “calling” in life, then teachers get to hear more than their fair share about budding potential. Sometimes these bursting possibilities get quite loud, what with so many destinies bumping up against each other in the same room and the same school. But far louder than the external racket is the quiet insistent voice. Some students show this voice so clearly that they are like a force of nature. They are the rare individuals we meet early in life who recognize this force within themselves and who don’t require external motives, grades, or job titles to mark their course.

(Einstein was once a patent clerk who was really a physicist. Gauguin was once a stockbroker who was really a painter.)
Students with a strong sense of themselves have a unique stillness, a sureness of their destiny in the external world. But asking them to explain why they do what they do is like asking them to justify why they exist. Their answers seem indistinct, frustrating to the overly practical or literal-minded, a kind of “I-couldn’t-live-with-myself-if-I-didn’t” ethic. They write, compose music, run, construct theories, heal people, make art, or fight injustice because if they didn’t, they couldn’t live full lives. They do it because this is simply who they are.

At age 5, Elden knew he wanted to play the violin, not because he knew anyone who did, but because he saw someone on TV playing one. He was composing songs at age 8. In high school, he wrote complex poetry based on classical music forms and composed classical music too difficult for most high school students to play.

The art of music composition is especially complex and private. If you paint a picture, take a photo, or write, you can share it with someone. But with music, you must assemble a group of skilled musicians and a conductor to hear it the way it is written and conceived. Sticking with this art form requires true tenacious imagination and sheer love.

I once asked Elden why he composed music, how he kept composing, not knowing if his compositions might be played and heard by others someday. He looked at me as though I’d asked him why he breathes.

“Because I have to,” he said simply.

Elden is not currently studying in a music program; he is not a composer by profession. He’s not writing music for credit or grades or money.

The conductor pauses to begin Steele’s “Sinfonietta.” I inhale and hold my breath as she raises her baton; I exhale in relief when the music begins. The piece begins with a dissonant, “modern” sound. I can feel people around me prickling in discomfort. I smile. It’s an abrupt teaser that introduces the main theme in a major key which sounds more “classical.” The audience relaxes into the composition. It’s not a sentimental piece, but I’m moved by it and marvel at this small miracle: a conductor, an orchestra, and an audience play and hear Elden’s music.

After “Sinfonietta” ends, the conductor invites the composer on stage. When the audience sees how young Elden is, they clap more enthusiastically. My eyes well up with tears. She announces, “Elden shows us those who compose for the joy of it,” as she introduces him. By now I’m bawling. Elden’s gift of music, which is as natural and invisible as breathing for him, is now shared with this audience. And like frosty breath on a sharp winter morning, it is now visible for others to see.

Posted April 4, 2003