"Chamber Music" by Cory Gardner
On November 18, 2013, Saint Louis University hosted a performance by the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis at ERDCC.
It is, perhaps, the unlikeliest place to find a live performance by a world-class chamber orchestra and on the unlikeliest of days. The numbered tables—where on visiting days, inmates spend a few fleeting hours with their wives, mothers, fathers, and children—have been pushed against the walls. Chairs are arranged into two sections of neat, orderly rows—one section for inmates and one for everyone else.
Two guards sit at a slightly elevated observation desk and look out over the scene. One taps her pencil. The other scowls.
The chamber group—consisting of an oboist, cellist, violinist, violist, and their respective instruments—has arranged itself into a small semicircle opposite the chairs. The musicians’ all-black attire complements the inmate-gray and guard-blue uniforms. The color-coding accentuates group boundaries and ensures that everyone follows her or his respective role.
As the final few inmates file in and borrow empty chairs from the staff section, the musicians introduce themselves and then begin to play the first piece of the afternoon, a violin sonata by Mozart. The female guard drops her pencil and storms out of the room, closing the door behind her with a bit more force than necessary. She emerges from the same door moments later, jingling keys in hand, and stomps back to her post and pencil.
Between selections, the musicians take questions from the audience. One person asks about Stradivari violins. The violinist laughs and says that whatever a Stradivarius is, it isn’t what she is holding. A French manufacturer, she says, made her violin in 1813. A pencil snaps.
No one has so much as alluded to the inmate in the isolation cell behind the Christmastime photo backdrop, the sole approved place for inmates to have photos taken with their families. He’s on suicide watch awaiting execution at midnight and is no doubt wondering at the source of the music. Today, it seems, he is the ordinary, the expected, the ignorable. Classical music, normally a symbol of stability, has become the radical force in the room. The guards are unaccustomed to confronting anything in this space that carries such authority. During the next selection, a trio by Bach, their cacophony of talking, clanking, and tapping reaches a crescendo. No one, to their irritation, seems to notice.
Over the next two hours, the chamber orchestra plays a dozen more selections. The inmates sit transfixed and silent. The desk-guards continue their struggle against the music with their own noise. Three other prison staff come to take advantage of the visiting center’s soda and snack machines and manage to purchase Dr. Pepper and Cheetos without so much as a glance toward the highly irregular event unfolding in their workspace.
Following the afternoon’s final selection, the guards order all inmates to file out of the visiting room. The event ends as abruptly as it began.
On November 18, 2013, Saint Louis University hosted a performance by the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis at ERDCC.
It is, perhaps, the unlikeliest place to find a live performance by a world-class chamber orchestra and on the unlikeliest of days. The numbered tables—where on visiting days, inmates spend a few fleeting hours with their wives, mothers, fathers, and children—have been pushed against the walls. Chairs are arranged into two sections of neat, orderly rows—one section for inmates and one for everyone else.
Two guards sit at a slightly elevated observation desk and look out over the scene. One taps her pencil. The other scowls.
The chamber group—consisting of an oboist, cellist, violinist, violist, and their respective instruments—has arranged itself into a small semicircle opposite the chairs. The musicians’ all-black attire complements the inmate-gray and guard-blue uniforms. The color-coding accentuates group boundaries and ensures that everyone follows her or his respective role.
As the final few inmates file in and borrow empty chairs from the staff section, the musicians introduce themselves and then begin to play the first piece of the afternoon, a violin sonata by Mozart. The female guard drops her pencil and storms out of the room, closing the door behind her with a bit more force than necessary. She emerges from the same door moments later, jingling keys in hand, and stomps back to her post and pencil.
Between selections, the musicians take questions from the audience. One person asks about Stradivari violins. The violinist laughs and says that whatever a Stradivarius is, it isn’t what she is holding. A French manufacturer, she says, made her violin in 1813. A pencil snaps.
No one has so much as alluded to the inmate in the isolation cell behind the Christmastime photo backdrop, the sole approved place for inmates to have photos taken with their families. He’s on suicide watch awaiting execution at midnight and is no doubt wondering at the source of the music. Today, it seems, he is the ordinary, the expected, the ignorable. Classical music, normally a symbol of stability, has become the radical force in the room. The guards are unaccustomed to confronting anything in this space that carries such authority. During the next selection, a trio by Bach, their cacophony of talking, clanking, and tapping reaches a crescendo. No one, to their irritation, seems to notice.
Over the next two hours, the chamber orchestra plays a dozen more selections. The inmates sit transfixed and silent. The desk-guards continue their struggle against the music with their own noise. Three other prison staff come to take advantage of the visiting center’s soda and snack machines and manage to purchase Dr. Pepper and Cheetos without so much as a glance toward the highly irregular event unfolding in their workspace.
Following the afternoon’s final selection, the guards order all inmates to file out of the visiting room. The event ends as abruptly as it began.