In Conversation with Rachel Segal
For more information on the Primavera Fund or to make a contribution to their important initiative, visit www.primaverafund.org.
---------------------
—So here’s the deal. I’m socked in in the snow.
That was one of the last messages Rachel and I exchanged on Facebook to find time to talk. I had no idea what “socked in” meant, but given that Philadelphia was under two feet of snow, I figured it was some variation of “trapped indoors until the snow plows get me out.”
Snow had left me stranded in Philadelphia for the one and only time I’ve been there. While killing off a day waiting for my flight, I walked amongst the grey depressing buildings downtown built upon 250 years of long-gone glory days. The shattering of my romanticized anticipation of our country’s great birthplace was sealed at Benjamin Franklin’s grave. The chipped, common marble slab slowly sinking into the ground was unceremoniously gated off next to a dirty sidewalk. It was covered with pennies from sullen, nodding passers-by; alms for the ghost of a beggar without a tin cup. The occasional grumble of cars trudging by on the way to work was a bit too close to my heels for comfort. Everyone seemed to want to get off the streets, as if descending into The Gallery—an underground mall running parallel to the street—for a few blocks was a brief step through a looking glass to anywhere else.
Rachel picked up just before it kicked over to voicemail.
“Hi Ben! Hold on just a minute, I’ve got to let the dogs in.”
“Rachel...you own a beagle. How the hell is that thing running around two feet of snow?”
Her laugh sparkled. “They dug out little paths through the backyard. All you can see are the tips of their tails sticking up as they run around. It’s really cute!”
For a moment I briefly forgot why I called. Some combination of her laughter and the image of disembodied dog tails prancing through snowy trenches like the white ends of the hunt servants’ whips as they harried invisible cartoon foxes around in circles was too much. If I ever visited, the first thing I’d want to know was if I had imagined her backyard, or if there was a childish clairvoyance to it all.
“Sorry! OK, I’m back.” Clearly the dogs were hilarious. “How have you been?”
“I’ve been great, but I should be asking you that question. It sounds like the city is almost locked down.”
“I’m stuck in my house, but I don’t really mind. Getting a snow day as an adult is pretty great.”
“I can’t even imagine. So tell me about your job and how things are working out in Philadelphia.”
“I love Philly. I started the Primavera fund in 2014 to help fund extremely talented and disadvantaged young musicians. One of the challenges I saw in the arts landscape is that it’s so expensive we’ve cut out an entire section of society that could contribute to the arts world. Philadelphia has several music outreach programs that are designed to give students basic instrumental education, but they can never provide the kind of training that will allow them to pursue a career. It’s not a criticism—they are a vital component of the solution and do wonderful work. We focus predominantly on Philadelphia’s poor black communities to identify talented students who have the spark but not the money, and give them what they need for a professional shot: an instrument, private lessons and mentoring. ”
“That sounds fantastic! But you started the Primavera Fund from scratch? I thought you were moving for a position.”
“No, I started the program when I got here. I had to do all the website copy—everything.”
Rachel had been a successful performer with the Colorado Symphony for years, and abruptly dropped everything and moved back to Philadelphia to take over as Executive Director of a fledgling—in truth, hatchling—non-profit. In terms of a musician’s performing career it certainly seemed high on the list of “Ways to Ruin Your Life”, but on the other hand, the lands of our childhood have a way of welcoming their sons and daughters home with open arms.
“That sounds like a tremendous amount of work to exchange the fingerboard for the keyboard," I said. "Have you done a lot of writing?”
“I’ve never done any serious creative writing before, and now I wish I had. The biggest difficulty is finding a way to write both scholarly and emotionally. For instance, I have to produce two documents in a month for a report, and one of them is a research paper. Data is great, but it doesn’t capture or inspire the reader.”
“I can certainly relate. I’ve worked on grants with several outreach organizations, and by the time all the numbers and details are wedged in it reads like a dictionary that’s been through an autoclave.”
“Our kids are wonderful, amazing people,” Rachel said, “and when I write a grant, that’s what I really want the grantors to know. I feel like we diminish what is most valuable about them when we have to treat them as part of a head count or ethnic statistic, as if that’s what we look for in a student. It’s hard to know when one type of writing or the other is appropriate—how to meld them. According to my friends I’m good at speaking passionately, but I find it’s harder for those thoughts to manifest on paper. It’s forced me to think a lot about how we use language.”
Given that she had a degree from Yale, “harder” was probably determined by an extremely high standard, but nonetheless Rachel certainly made her friends’ point—if she were speaking another language and all I could hear was the inflection in her voice, the passionate spirit therein betokened a person of utmost sincerity and conviction.
“It’s election season, so you definitely picked a good time,” I followed.
“Oh my god, don’t get me started. Orwell’s Politics of the English Language should embarrass anyone who has endorsed some of the science textbooks in use today. Half the time people today can’t even tell the difference between news and opinion. I read an article recently that talked about the way social media is changing the way our brain works. It’s affecting our short term and long term thought processes.”
“Just guessing, but does the word ‘dumber’ appear more than once?”
“Now, now,” she ribbed. “I mean our more contentious communication has become ego driven, terse and argumentative. The phenomenon of commenting has made it almost impossible to have a real discussion. There are times when I have something I really want to say, but when I post it on Facebook I immediately delete it.”
I agreed. “The well thought-out opinion definitely seems easily brutalized by those who think that visiting a choice website or two makes them an authority," I said. It’s unfortunate that online advertising metrics are constantly creating an individualized digital landscape for us to further customize, and as a result, the factual threat from the real world is all the more dangerous to our comfortable paradigms. I suppose if you have a choice between the two it’s easier to live in a somewhat fictionalized world that massages your convictions.
“It’s also very difficult not to get dragged into it. Because of the reactionary nature of commenting we posture very quickly if someone appears to disagree with our opinions, and it’s convenient to pigeonhole them as ‘the conservative’ or ‘the liberal’. Once you’re sorting people into boxes it’s easy to dismiss what makes each of us special: our subtle variations. “
I couldn’t help but feel slightly chagrined for the times I’d indulged my hubris in that way.
Rachel continued, “We trivialize thoughts by engaging them in a knee-jerk way. There’s no delving into a topic, learning something about history, or even the simplicity of ‘I think this because of this’. If we’re talking about the political landscape, I want to talk with people about it a meaningful way, the way you would if you were having a glass of wine in your backyard.”
A glass of wine on the patio with Rachel did sound like a fabulous idea at the moment, albeit in comparatively balmy Colorado rather than amongst the frozen puppy trenches snaking their way through Philly’s neighborhoods.
“Today I assume a living room with a fireplace would suffice,” I replied, “but I know what you mean. I’ve definitely found in my life that I have trouble relating to people who don’t slow down and take a leisurely pace with you as a person. No pressure; just life.”
She sighed. “The irony is, the places in our lives where it is most important to find the intangible in people are the ones we desperately flood with blunt criteria in an attempt to narrow the field. Look at eHarmony: what’s the recipe for finding the perfect match? 5’8, less than 200 lbs, at least a bachelors degree, over $150,00 year, and owns a car past 2012. It doesn’t tell you single thing you really want to know. For instance, my criteria are things like, are you critical thinker? Do you love nature? I want Mimi and Rodolfo. I want my first conversation to be about how the moonlight inspires them, not a fleshing-out of how closely they match their profile and picture.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but now that she mentioned it a dating website did seem like an almost cynical approach to true love.
“I suppose in a way it’s the same difficulty I face when writing grants for the Primavera Fund. I have the best job in the world because I’m searching for the fire in a student, not a pay stub or a street address in a financially depressed district. Talent and desire have nothing to do with being from a poor black community, but that’s precisely what’s tough to find the space to insert in a data-oriented document.
Our kids still face the other disadvantages of poverty, but then again, hurdles are good. America loves a story of pulling up the bootstraps, and a student who is talented and impoverished will have scholarships waiting for them when they go to college. We have a girl who was playing on a terrible instrument and had a lot of catching up to do. However, she had an incredible drive and the desire, and after five months of lessons playing on a good instrument she got into Interlochen.”
“Jesus Christ, five months? That’s almost unthinkable. How is that not your entire grant, followed by a ‘thank you very much for your continued support’ letter two days later when it’s confirmed?”
“As our reputation builds over time, hopefully that type of dialogue will manifest,” she laughed. “Once we get the passionate kids on track it’s a foregone conclusion that great successes will follow. The communities we work with are too big a pool of untapped talent not to. This is a great city, and we’re really proud of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Curtis, but almost nobody who is actually from Philadelphia gets in. What does that do for Philadelphia and its residents? The only reason it’s not different is because the kids here aren’t getting the training. If the next William Primrose ends up working at a gas station, it’s going to be because of nothing more than money and opportunity.
Aside from being my hometown and the place that has always had my heart, Philly is where things begin. We became an autonomous nation. It's a good place come back to when you want to start something new. We want to create a culture where the Philadelphia Orchestra is a tangible aspiration for young people in our city, not just a fixture. I feel privileged to be a part of that.”
----------------------
When we said goodbye, I couldn’t help but recall the single day I spent walking Philadelphia’s streets. The buildings in my memory seemed to have brighter walls. Rather than descending into The Gallery, to escape, everyone seemed ready to walk out into the sun on the other side. I know that sounds hard to believe—perhaps even cheesy— but after talking to her, I always recall my time there as a little more sunny that it might have been. In truth, I overlooked Philadelphia. The image of Denver is easy sell with its mountains and clear blue sky, and the only mountains I saw in downtown Philly were grey, depressing office towers.
I met Rachel when she was in Colorado performing, however, if I’m honest, she never seemed happy. I never understood what was not to like here. The mountains, hiking, clear blue skies—it was a paradise to my Midwestern eyes. All I can say is that it was as if she was constantly under a cloud of scrutiny and oppression from an unseen eye. Maybe it was the job, her social life, or just a longing for a change, but an overcrowded elevator forced her elbows tight to her sides.
Then all of a sudden she stepped off. Unbeknownst to many people she had been invited to Lisbon to perform as concertmaster in a magic land of ocean breezes and crystal glasses filled with the rubies and diamonds of Lisbon’s Vinho do Porto. Three months, and surely over too soon.
She came back she brought us a bottle of the white port, my wife’s favorite. Although hand delivered, it was clear the message in the bottle was an adieu—corked on distant shores and cast into the sea by a soul that was waiting elsewhere for a phone call to pick her up at the airport terminal of a new life. Another six months in Finland and it was foregone. Perhaps for some the dying embers of Ilium lead to Rome, but for others, twenty years of war, heroism and the pleasures of Circe are enough for two lifetimes; Ithaca is and will always be home.
For Rachel, the communities she works with aren’t just her fellow Philadelphians; it seems to me she thinks of them as Philadelphia itself, and her children are the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra by birthright, if not yet by ordination. For me, I’m overjoyed to see how happy she is. A performer’s life is one of self-focus, but I don’t think she was ever meant to be the sole vessel of her spirit. Rachel seems to be happiest when her genie is free, working her magic and granting wishes to the young people who have the fire to light the lamp.