Coining George
I didn’t think I could stand to attend yet another memorial service in May, especially the one in Goldsboro. Even after obsessively reading the on-line comments for weeks, the feeling wouldn’t go away. It actually felt like a hole in the vicinity of my heart. But I couldn’t invent an excuse to convince myself not to go. Childhood friends facebooked me and encouraged me to. One had become an acclaimed singer/songwriter and I’d never even heard her perform live. In addition to the musicians, his professional offspring, others whom I’d not seen in decades would be there too, literally and figuratively, George’s choir. Besides, I was already scheduled to be in town to see a visiting cousin. There was no getting out of it. I had to face the music: Trautwein had indeed passed away and this was the formal ceremony to acknowledge that grim fact.
Driving over to the service, I did a sprint down my own lane of George memories. The first was in Miss Balance’s class in 1959 on a Monday morning at William Street School. I am looking out the window of the former Civil War hospital watching yellow leaves against a bleak November sky twist in the wind as they float to the ground. I am wishing time would speed up so it would be Thursday, the day he comes for music class. Cut to three days later: he enters the grey auditorium, flashing his warm smile, lighting everything up. He jokes with an unsuspecting boy triggering a mass of giggles from the rest of us. Next, we are all on stage, the first time most have ever uttered words in a foreign language, much less sung whole sentences in German: “Eir kinderlein comet…” (Come little children…).
It boggles the mind how he could get 11 year olds to crave singing Christmas carols in difficult languages we’d never studied. But this would only be a preview of the magic he would work in the public schools in our town over the next decade.
Fast Forward to the late nineties. I have two almost grown children. My husband and I are sitting in a mid-town Manhattan flat enjoying a glass of wine with Sandi and Christine, two old friends from the Goldsboro High School (GHS) class of 1967. There’s a knock and he appears at the door – early, and impeccably dressed, of course. He has a thick head of hair – a rich nutmeg brown with glints of red– the same color it was back at William Street. Later we learn his hairdresser figured out the formula to get it exactly right. He looks amazingly “the same.”
To meet him as an adult and to call him “George” feels surreal, but he makes everything seem normal like we’ve just seen each other, maybe the year before instead of three decades earlier. Being blown away by the quantity of time gone by, his demeanor politely conveys, is a waste of the time we have together. So mostly we focus on our current lives and his at the century’s close.
Next we are downtown near Canal Street at a cozy restaurant only New Yorkers seem to know about. Afterwards, we work our way on foot back uptown. He gives his undivided attention to the one walking beside him. Christine, an accomplished teacher of English and French, has just come over from Paris for a few days. In ‘67 she was GHS’s foreign exchange student and lived in Goldsboro for the nine months of the academic year. But she never forgot “Mr. Trautwein” even though she wasn’t in chorus.
It would probably take an anthropologist to figure out how or why a traditional Eastern North Carolina town of about 30,000 back then came under his spell. Not only was he obsessed with artistic excellence, but also practically speaking, his standards required much hard work and huge quantities of time from students and parents. Moreover, he was not like anyone else, not even a little bit. He was a Yankee and the war as Faulkner famously put it, was part of a “past …not even past.” In addition to his Northern accent, he did things differently, like driving a Jaguar, which might as well have been a UFO it looked so otherworldly in our public school parking lot. He didn’t really try to fit into our Southern small town ways, but instead expected that we would accommodate him and his cosmopolitan view – one in which music and the arts are essential to life, as vital as the air we breathe. He convinced us and chorus became as big a deal at Goldsboro High as football.
Of course, he had enormous personal charisma as well as street smarts, and then there was the fact that he got mega-results: Amahl and the Night Visitors, the Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, and various other showcases were stunning proofs of his unconventional ways. I wonder though if his genius as a music educator would’ve been embraced in many other small towns back then or even now? Today, teachers are told: “don’t get too involved”, “you have to let some students fall through the cracks” and the ever popular: “Don’t kill yourself. After all, educators don’t get paid that much!”
These days arts-related programs are the first to go under the knife when school budgets are tight. It makes me proud my hometown “got” George Trautwein for whatever reason. And, because it did, many kids went down a “road less traveled”, and that made a difference, if not all the difference in their lives.
For me it was the powerful role model of professionalism he showed us before we even knew what that was. Just being under the tutelage of such a consummate pro for several years made for a milder learning curve later on. In the world according to Trautwein, even if you don’t feel like it, you show up (on time, if not early.) You do so even if you’re standing in the back row, hidden from his or anyone’s view. (I learned this the hard way in 6th grade .) You come ready, you know your part, you do your best, always improving on the past performance, or trying to. You appreciate your collaborators and give them your wholehearted support, always reminding yourself, it’s not just about you, but about working with others to deliver something greater than you could alone.
When I was saying good-bye to him that night in the Big Apple, he invited me to go out to several of his favorite jazz clubs with him on my next trip up. Feeling like I’d just been informed I’d won the lottery I blurted out: “You’re just being polite, right? ! “ He said he meant it. I had mentioned I loved jazz but hadn’t realized he was such a huge fan.
I tried contacting him on my next trip but he was travelling. Not long afterwards, 9/11 occurred making everyone and everything numb for a time in the city. After all returned to a ‘new normal’ one thing led to another and listening to jazz with one of the greatest American music teachers of the 20th century is not an experience I will get to tell my grand-kids about. But just being his student for several years from sixth grade through high school was like already having won an incalculable jackpot.
While I know great teachers live on in their students, I also know George isn’t out there any more. He’s not on the streets of his beloved Manhattan headed to a favorite club in the Village. He’s not scurrying down to the underground in London en route to St. Paul’s to enjoy the boys’ choir at Evensong or some other dazzling choral concert.
Nor is he standing on a stage somewhere directing a group of fresh-faced youth, demonstrating by exquisite example to a transfixed audience why music deserves to be front and center in our school curricula.
What he gave us was so huge and so rare, I couldn’t help but feel during the memorial like we were clutching tiny paintbrushes before a vast empty canvas. That said, the speakers and musicians at the service did about as commendable a job as humanly possible. Having gotten through it without losing it, I decided to not push my luck. Skipping the barbecue lunch, I headed out to get an iced latte. Then, in the Starbucks’ Drive-Thru, an idea hit me:
Since it’s almost impossible to find the appropriate words, or fitting lyrics, to describe the phenomenon that George was in our lives, why not create a new word, trautwein!
Here’s a start:
traut-wein
noun
1. great, life-transforming teacher/mentor in the arts, especially in music.
verb
2. to mentor/teach someone in a field of creative endeavor such as music with such passion and commitment that the student’s life is profoundly impacted and the passion for the art form is indelibly transferred from teacher to student.
It’s not unprecented for given names and surnames to become common nouns. “Quisling” and “Polyanna” come to mind, but so does “maverick”, inspired by the Texas lawyer, Samuel Maverick. 150 years after old Sam lived we know what a “maverick” is because there was a mass consensus that he quintessentially represented “independent thinking.” It could be the same for George, who thousands already concede will forever be synonomous with “great, life-transforming mentor/teacher in music/ the arts.” His legacy could become minted in the Oxford English dictionary and all the others, part of the working vocabulary of millions.
The Internet is a potent place for birthing new words, so why not use this dedicated Trautwein web page to start putting this new word into use? Here are some sentences with it as a verb and noun:
1) “ I am very grateful I was trautweined by the man himself, the original.
2) To trautwein another person will ensure that you will never be forgotten.
3) She’s very dedicated to her students, who knows? She might even become a trautwein one day.
I believe George would approve of a mass conspiracy by his former students to hard-wire him into the English language. At the very least, I believe he would be, as we Tar Heels say,“tickled,” by the collective effort. So here’s a challenge: try to use “trautwein” in a sentence this week. If people don’t know what in the world you’re talking about, provide the definition. Perhaps before too long, you’ll be able to say to anyone who asks: “ Look it up.”
Back in March when I saw the e-mail that George had died during his sleep, a song we sang ca. 1966 began to loop relentlessly inside my head.
“Up, up with people, we see them wherever we go.
Up, up with people, they’re the best kind of folks we know.
If more people were for people all people everywhere ,
There’d be a lot less people to worry about and a lot more people who care.”
This piece got a few “eyeball rolls” even back in that less cynical time, but George never perceived these lyrics to be corny or trite. They could have been his mantra because he was genuinely for people, all people everywhere, especially if they were his students.
He elevated us in myriad and ingenious ways, through the music and through his refined knowledge of it, but mostly by giving of himself to each one, whether musically gifted or not. In coaxing superior performances out of us, he revealed time and time again that we have it in us to transcend the forces, great and small that will always conspire against people achieving their highest potential. That is the power of a life-transforming teacher. This is the legacy of a trautwein.
