This story was first published in Classical KC's "Take Note" newsletter. You can sign up to receive stories like this in your inbox the first Wednesday of every month.
“The Christmas Musicians,” by Classical KC volunteer contributor Andrea Hoag, depicts a 1974 performance of George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” at Trinity Episcopal Church in Lawrence, Kansas. Hoag’s mother, Mary Tuven, was a longtime violist in the Kansas City Symphony. Her father, Charles Kelso Hoag, was a double bassist and taught composition and music theory at the University of Kansas for nearly 40 years.
‘The Christmas Musicians’ by Andrea Hoag
The satin ribbon on the outer leg of my father’s black tuxedo pants is perfect for driving a matchbox car up and down. He allows me to do this as he warms up at home before another Christmas concert.
Soon my father will trace a gloved hand across his Oldsmobile to loosen the snow and maneuver his double bass into the trunk.
My mother thinks it’s unfair how well he can manage with so little practicing. He sails into the church right before each service and always sounds fine. Better than fine.
My mother practices every day for hours at a time. This is how I learn all the best curse words. She forgets I’m there, playing on the floor beside her with my soft fabric books, the cat curled up in the plush lining of her viola case. Her biggest outbursts happen when she misses a note.
When she finds a particularly tricky set of thirty-second notes, she slows them down to a snail’s pace, making them whole notes, repeating them over and over slowly, then gaining momentum. Finally she plays the notes even faster than “he will take it,” she whispers aloud. Even now, long before I’ve started preschool, I understand she’s talking about the conductor and his tempo.
My whole childhood there will be things I assume all children know. It will be all the things other children know and I don’t — names of cool television shows, sports icons, pop music stars — that will always make me a stranger to people my own age.
My parents are hired to play the “Messiah” performance of every church in town with the budget to pay musicians. One particular church becomes my favorite. Each year their parish hall is a sea of eye-level tables covered with unfamiliar Christmas cookies: soft pillows of sugar and butter, red hots and corn flakes, green dye and sprinkles.
My mother is beautiful — and not just because she’s my mother. She sweeps past me in shiny black concert attire trailing a cloud of Chanel No. 5, a stripe of Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow across her mouth.
The “Messiah” is a relief to her after 20 “Nutcracker” performances. A longtime member of the Kansas City Symphony, each day during the holiday concert season she drives an hour from Lawrence to play her viola deep in the orchestra pit beneath twirling ballerinas, the Mouse King and Herr Drosselmeyer.
We will never be a religious family. Brahms, Bach and Beethoven are the only deities my parents worship. Still, my idea of Christmas will crystallize into several requirements over time: the glow of white pillar candles flickering beneath these particular stained glass windows, specific Anglican hymns and the scent of a church’s incense. Nothing else feels authentic.
During a grouchy stretch in my teens, I’ll be envious of my classmates’ carefully choreographed Christmases: lush holiday decor, annual ski trips, the impossible mounds of wrapped gifts beneath elaborate trees. In our modest home, tree decorating is a lively, last-minute enterprise once all the holiday concerts are over — an earnest effort with a slapdash delivery.
During their “Messiah” rehearsals I’m deposited in a chilly church playroom, where I’m alone with a worn Fisher-Price airplane. I imagine the playmates I’d encounter if we attended church year-round, like I dream of doing.
For the performance, they settle me in the last pew by myself, certain I’ll be fine. I may be a small child but I already know how to behave for a concert.
As parishioners stream in to take their seats, the cold clings to their holiday sweaters and a mixture of too many perfumes competes with the scent of pine bows strung up by red velvet ribbons.
Before the music begins, the pastor speaks in a low, reassuring cadence about strangers I have never met in foreign places I have never heard of. Finally, he mentions a person I do know: Mary.
I’m unsurprised that the pastor knows my mother’s name. As the center of my universe, it seems only reasonable that others should know her and describe her in such glowing terms. Mary.
I doodle on donation envelopes using half-sharpened pencils placed in holes drilled into the back of the pew in front of me. Soon I fall asleep to the same strains of Handel I’ve been listening to for weeks, as familiar to me now as my own heartbeat.
I start awake during the “Hallelujah” chorus, as the big people around me jump to their feet to sing along. But soon I’m drifting off again, my mother’s puffy winter coat forming a pillow beneath my head. I feel cold when the services end, a forceful winter wind blowing through the door each time another parishioner exits.
My father finally returns from stowing his double bass in the car and shifts me onto his tall shoulder. When I awaken Christmas morning in my own warm bed, the memory of how I got there is lost to me.
I stay under my covers a few seconds more, making a tent with my knees, replaying the night before, tasting a grainy bit of stray sugar clinging to my lips as if by magic. Pure magic.
Music used in this story
The Wassail Song / All Through the Night
Traditional arr. by Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer
Yo-Yo Ma, cello; Chris Thile, mandolin; Edgar Meyer; bass
Suite for Viola and Orchestra - Carol
By Ralph Vaughan Williams
János Kovács and the Budapest Symphony Orchestra
Hong-Mei Xiao, viola
Once in Royal David’s City
By Henry Gauntlett, arr. by Nicholas Ashby
The King’s Singers
Slumber My Darling
By Stephen Foster, arr. By Edgar Meyer
Yo-Yo Ma, cello; Mark O’Connor, violin; Edgar Meyer, bass
Messiah
By George Frideric Handel
Christopher Hogwood and Academy of Ancient Music
