2022/23 Audience Voices Contest Winners

2022 /23 Season

AWARD WINNERS

From Forms of Consolation , page 8 by Audience Voices Grand Prize winner, Eugenio Monjeau

Everything is this and more than this; nothing is exactly what it seems; everything flows mysteriously in this work of hypnotic beauty.”

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY CONCERTS 2022 /23 AUDIENCE VOICES CONTEST

CREATIVE WRITING CATEGORY

Grand Prize: Eugenio Monjeau

Grand Prize: Jacqueline Burkholder

Honorable Mention: Lorraine Goodman

DRAWING CATEGORY

Grand Prize: Janice Gossman

Honorable Mention: Amber Ameen

THE 2022 /23 AUDIENCE VOICES CONTEST

A contest designed to capture the impact of music, as perceived by PUC concertgoers

Princeton University Concerts’ inaugural Audience Voices contest invited all members of the public to submit a reflection inspired by the Healing with Music series, which sheds light on music’s profound impact through sharing musicians’ stories of resilience.

CONTEST PROMPTS:

1. How has music served as a healing force in your life, or in the lives of those around you?

OR

2. How has your relationship with music changed since the start of the pandemic?

FINAL JURY:

Creative Writing Category

Jeff Dolven – Poet and Princeton University Professor of English

Dorothea von Moltke – Princeton University Concerts Committee Member and Owner of Labyrinth Bookstore

Visual Arts Category

Marsha Levin-Rojer – Visual Artist

Kristy Seymour – Program Associate for Visual Arts, Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts

Tom Uhlein – Graphic Designer, Princeton University Concerts

Submissions were evaluated anonymously. Grand prize winners received a 2023-24 season subscription. Honorable mention recipients received tickets to upcoming Healing with Music concerts.

2022/23 AUDIENCE VOICES CONTEST

WINNERS

Grand Prize: Eugenio Monjeau

Grand Prize: Jacqueline Burkholder

Honorable Mention: Lorraine Goodman

GRAND PRIZE CREATIVE WRITING

Eugenio Monjeau Forms of Consolation

My father, Federico Monjeau, died on January 23, 2021. A few days later, his physician wrote to my mother: “As befits our human nature, we escape misfortune as much as we can, but sometimes that escape is like a dance to the wrong music.” The phrase brings together two topics, music and health, which had always been central to my relationship with my father. Indeed, I feared my father’s death all my life. And yet, when it was finally close, I didn’t think it would happen.

This May, I went with my mother to a concert at the Teatro Colón. It was the first time since my father’s death. He was a music critic and a university professor, and we had been there together countless times. The first of those family visits took place while I was still in the womb. It was a concert by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra playing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

When I was born and my mother took me home for the first time, my father played a recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, a gesture of a gravity unusual in him. He was also quite solemn when he told me one day: “Tomorrow, you are going to miss school. They are playing Mozart’s Requiem at the Colón, and it is important that you see it live.”

Twenty-two years later, I was again in that hall. Among the works they played was “Kuleshov,” a concert by Argentine composer Oscar Strasnoy. One of my father’s last articles had been a review of Alexandre Tharaud’s rendition of “Kuleshov,” where he coined the term “Strasnoy effect.” This effect, my

father explains, “begins with the materials themselves, which, beyond the procedures of montage or juxtaposition, retain a powerful ambiguity. Everything is this and more than this; nothing is exactly what it seems; everything flows mysteriously in this work of hypnotic beauty.”

Today I received a copy of Strasnoy’s latest score. Its title is “Tombeau de Monjeau,” in the manner of Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin,” in tribute to his friends killed during World War I. Like “Kuleshov,” “Tombeau de Monjeau” carries significant ambiguity, and the “Strasnoy effect” is immediately felt. The last minutes of the piece consist of nothing else than the sound of bells, made with the piano but enhanced by the placement of magnets on one of the strings of the keyboard.

When a performance of the piece by Mara Dobresco, a Romanian pianist my father was very fond of, was made available online, I sent the link to my mother. She told me it sounded too much like a funeral march. It did, but that was the musical tradition my father loved the most. After all, one of the works he studied and taught about the most was Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Short Pieces, op. 19. The last of the pieces, which also evokes bells, was Schoenberg’s “tombeau” to his mentor, Gustav Mahler.

My father was hospitalized for the last forty days of his life in a state of semi-consciousness whose precise nature we will never know. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year before. On the morning of December 12, 2022, he felt sick, and

they called an ambulance. With my mother by his side, he went into cardiac arrest and was rescued from it when he got to the hospital, but the ensuing brain injury was so severe that he never fully woke up again.

The night before, my brother had dined at my parents’ house and sent me a picture of my father smiling, with an expression that made him look like his mother, my grandmother. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, almost completely unbuttoned, showing on his chest the scars of the open-heart surgery he had at 40.

The months before my father’s death, I took a seminar on Wagner’s tetralogy with Carolyn Abbate. There we read “Phantasmagoria,” one of [Theodor] Adorno’s most famous articles. My father came into contact with Adorno’s philosophy during his exile in Brazil, and among the names that surrounded me from my earliest childhood, that of Adorno always shone with exceptional brilliance.

I wrote an essay as the final paper for that seminar. The memories of its writing process are as painful as they are dear to me. During one of my father’s hospitalizations (just one month before the final one), my father sent me a 12’41” voice message about Adorno, Wagner, and Nietzsche, which I still haven’t listened to again — I haven’t heard my father’s voice since he died. The message, delivered under the intoxicating effect of morphine, was full of brilliant ideas, several of which ended up in my final essay. My mother told me that the essay had become

an obsession for my father. He kept telling her they had to help me find a good topic for the essay. The topic ended up appearing thanks to those WhatsApp exchanges: the connection between cowbells in music and the concept of natural beauty in Adorno. While I was writing the essay, my father wrote to me, “There’s a moment when you begin to feel Adorno’s effect on your life.”

I then brought my father a printed copy of the essay. Bedridden, he made the monumental effort to read it to the end (in those days, he found it almost impossible to read even crime stories, which to him was second nature, to use an Adornian expression), asking me a few questions now and then.

In 2016, my father wrote in an article, “The literary critic Frank Kermode argued that, by an aspiration for concordance, the endings of works of art provide us with a kind of consolation. But this is not to say that things are always heading in the same direction, and perhaps there are as many forms of consolation as there are works of art.”

The ending of “Tombeau de Monjeau,” indeed the whole piece, and “Kuleshov,” Wagner, Mahler, all my musical memories, the musical and spiritual adventures I shared with my father for thirty-five years, of which these words give minimal testimony, are my forms of consolation.

GRAND PRIZE CREATIVE WRITING

Jacqueline Burkholder

Response to the prompt: How has music served as a healing force in your life?

Sprouting on a sprawling Mennonite farm surrounded by fields of alfalfa and vegetables had its advantages. It was like growing up in the 19th century, quaint, resourceful, almost idyllic. Our clothes were homemade, sewn by my mother and older sisters. Food was homegrown, cooked with more love and less skill from vegetables and animals that grew around us. Music was homemade. We sang as a family, eleven voices in four-part harmony singing hymns nearly everyday in the mini-service we called family worship. My siblings and I learned to play harmonica, riding dirt roads in a Buick Century on the way to a three-room church school where students would begin the day with devotional songs in four parts. Nighttime prayers were sung by our beds, our childish voices asking God to wake us with the morning light.

But endless repetitions of Amazing Grace and Great Is Thy Faithfulness eventually wore thin and I wanted more. I spent free time in school reading decades-old World Book Encyclopedia articles on Bach and Schoenberg, trying desperately to imagine how Schubert’s songs, purportedly the most beautiful in the world, must sound. Later, having found a dusty copy of Handel’s Messiah in the corner of my dad’s restricted bookshelf, I risked my dad’s wrath, secreting the score to church and into the office, locking the door so that I could photocopy a few dozen pages to pore over later. The section I happened to copy included the

chorus All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray and I painstakingly applied my then minimal sightreading skills to sounding out the wandering melismas. My musical interest led me into a lot of trouble with the church during my teens and lower twenties. Often I had to stand in front of the church to make a public confession, repenting for hiding CD’s of Haydn’s concertos or Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite

But no public humiliation could possibly outweigh the utter bliss of hearing Schubert’s Die Forelle for the first time. Schubert’s florid lines of otherworldly melody were intoxicating and I still feel that there is some merit in a 1970s World Book’s claim that his was the most beautiful music of all time. I will never forget the life-changing experience of hearing Bellini’s superb aria Casta Diva while listening to a Barnes & Noble recorded lecture series on music which I had furtively checked out from the local library.

On my next trip to town I checked out a copy of Casta Diva’s opera of origin, Norma, with Joan Sutherland as Norma, Montserrat Caballé as Adalgisa, and Luciano Pavarotti as Pollione. Driving the half hour to and from work daily, safe from surveillance by my parents and siblings, I followed along with the libretto, steering the car with one hand, holding the album booklet with the other. I knew then that I would never be the

I SANG TO SURVIVE.”

same. The pathos of Norma’s plight, Bellini’s divine sense of line and melody, and the transcendence of the vocalists were beyond anything I had ever anticipated. My budding obsession with opera and classical music could only grow from there.

Four years ago, I effected a sort of escape from the restrictive cult, throwing belongings into my truck and driving to Philadelphia where kindly folks let me sleep on their couch til I found a place to live. Crumbling belief along with deep questions about my gender identity and sexual orientation made the culture and faith untenable for me. In leaving I paid a cost, losing nearly everything I owned and facing rejection and censure from family and friends. As I cleaned houses and apartments in Philadelphia I sang hymns from my childhood most of whose lyrics I no longer believed. I sang arias from operas that I knew only vaguely and art songs that I learned in my spare time. I sang to survive. One day a client who was an excellent musician came to me and offered to help enroll me in a Philadelphia music school that gave voice lessons to adult students. I loved studying there and those lessons became a springboard for my continuing education.

Last summer I gave a concert to help raise funds for my enrollment at Westminster Choir College. I sang two arias from Handel’s Semele. I sang Schubert’s immortal Die Forelle and Who Is Sylvia. And I sang hymns and songs that I had sung

with my family when I was a child. There was something deeply healing about singing an aria by the forbidden Handel alongside Copland’s beautiful arrangement of At the River. Ten years ago I could never have believed that I would now be enrolled in a great music school studying voice performance as a soprano. My twenty-year-old self would be confused and secretly delighted at the woman I am today. And he would have been in awe of the music that I am now surrounded with daily.

A few weeks ago my Westminster classmates and I made the Princeton University Chapel echo with songs of Christmas in our annual amalgamation of service and concert called Readings and Carols. Thousands of people showed up over the two nights the concert ran to hear us perform old English standards, choral classics, and yes, hymns I remember from somber Sunday services now lush with brass and organ making the huge cathedral reverberate in gorgeously reclaiming glory. Although there is a sense of embarking on a new world full of music, I also feel that the circle was somehow completed with that experience. The voices of the audience mixed with those of the choir, the mellow brass, and the unmatched organ among the stone domes of the chapel ushering out the years of repression and welcoming what I can only hope will be years of musical abundance and celebration; and yes, healing.

HONORABLE MENTION CREATIVE WRITING

Lorraine Goodman

“Musick

has Charms…”

While music has been a part of my life since my earliest days — whether that meant trying to stretch my small hands to reach across an octave on our baby grand piano; toting my cello to rehearsals for high school chamber orchestra, the Suffolk County Training Orchestra, or the Long Island Youth Orchestra; or driving my sisters crazy by practicing Handel’s Rejoice Greatly over and over and over again—its real importance to me emerged in the mid-80s, shortly after I graduated college. I had decided to pursue a career as a singer/ actress in musicals when my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. A lifelong Broadway fan, my mother became obsessed with two songs in particular: the hit tune “Memory,” from the recently opened musical sensation by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cats, and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. The lyrics: “When you walk through a storm hold your head up high, And don’t be afraid of the dark,” combined with Richard Rodgers’ soaring music still make me cry and remember her and that frightful period in my life.

But it was “Memory” that she wanted to hear most often — over and over and over again. Any time I sat with my mother, she would ask me to sing it to her. Being somewhat shy and somehow sensing that a hospital ward was not the place to let my particularly loud voice fill the halls, I demurred. My mother never gave up trying, but I was too young, too stupid, too… embarrassed? I tried to make up for it by creating a “not-really-a-mix” tape that had only two songs on endless repeat. Should she so desire, she could listen to, “Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement. Has the moon lost her memory? She is smiling alone…” over and over and over again.

Five years later—four after she had passed and after I had auditioned for the role numerous times—I was cast as Grizabella in the Vienna, Austria production of Cats. For nine months (nine lives?), night after night, six shows a week, I belted out, “Touch me! It’s so easy to leave me… all alone with the memory… of my days in the sun” — and, of course, on stage, before a packed audience and yet alone with the memory of my mother and my refusal to sing for her when she was ill and wished for that comfort.

For years after the production closed and I returned to the States, at every family event, be it Bar Mitzvah, wedding, funeral, BBQ, birthday celebration, people would ask, “Will you sing Memory for us?”

My penance, perhaps? But also, I now know, an enduring reminder of my mother and the gift of music that she shared with me.

I eventually lost my hesitance to sing in hospital corridors — not during the Covid pandemic, but during an earlier one — the height of the AIDS pandemic of the early to mid-80s. While performing on Broadway in Les Misérables, I was asked to join a small troupe of traveling singers as part of an initiative called, “Hearts and Voices.” Each week, five, six, or seven of us Broadway performers would spend our day off visiting one of the too many AIDS wards in the City. We would gather in a common area and sing songs of hope and joy to the rail-thin patients there. I remember the smiles on their gaunt, ashen faces, their bodies marred with lesions and ulcers, some barely able to sit up. Oftentimes, we would visit some of the rooms, as many of the patients were too ill to get out of bed. But when we walked in to sing? These invalid, very sick, weak, old-looking men in their 20s would reach out and clasp our arms. They would sway to the beat or try to hum along. I will never forget the sense of joy and connection to community that our music brought to those desperate halls. It, too, was a reminder of the enduring power of music to bring hope and comfort to people in need.

I now know more about the research and academically-proven importance of music in healthcare settings. I have read about its numerous therapeutic benefits; how it can reduce anxiety and stress, improve sleep, and provide a sense of calm and relaxation. I have been told that it can even help manage pain and other physical symptoms and that it is a medically-useful tool in coping with chronic illnesses such as cancer and AIDS.

But reading about music’s benefits and witnessing them in person are two very different things. I will never again decline the chance to sing to someone in need or share my music with someone in pain.

I will never forget the sense of joy and connection to community that our music brought to those desperate halls.”

2022/23 AUDIENCE VOICES CONTEST

WINNERS

Grand Prize: Janice Gossman

Honorable Mention: Amber Ameen

GRAND PRIZE DRAWING

Janice Gossman

The music of Miles Davis has that rare quality of being able to express a feeling which is too complex and elusive to pinpoint accurately with words. And when it seems to match something inside of the listener, there can be great healing power.

HONORABLE MENTION DRAWING

Amber Ameen

My drawing tells the story of my relationship with music over the last three years; in particular, how my on-again, off-again connection with the violin has changed since the start of the pandemic.

In March 2020 (days before the pandemic lockdowns went into full effect) my family had hosted a memorial concert for my father, an avant-garde jazz musician who passed away in the summer of 2019. He was a violinist who taught me the instrument as a child. Throughout adulthood, I would have long breaks between practice sessions, followed by spurts of starting back from the basics to where I’d left off. The memorial concert was my catalyst to begin practicing in earnest. I enlisted help from a tutor to get comfortable enough to perform a few pieces in front of a dozen attendees. The memorial turned out to be six hours of musical tributes and group improvisations—one last meaningful gathering before the long months of isolation and lockdown

I expected this downtime would be the perfect opportunity to continue practicing, but instead I primarily took advantage of the newfound flexibilities of remote work to spend as much time in the outdoors as possible. I played from time to time, but the next milestone in my practice didn’t come until a year and a half later. At this point, most COVID restrictions were gone, with vaccinations and boosters widely available.

As the restrictions eased, I was able to spend more time at my childhood home, embarking on the daunting task of cataloging my father’s extensive musical and literary libraries, packing up hundreds of records, CDs and books, assisting my mother in preparing the house to be sold. Then there was the question of what to do with my father’s violins. I reached out to my father’s luthier as his two violins had now been untouched for over two years. Incredibly, they were both in decent shape and required minimal work to be restored to playing condition. One violin was my father’s original violin, an older German instrument, with a dark, solemn tone. While not a particularly remarkable instrument, this was the violin my grandmother had bought for him— when affording violin lessons was almost impossible to begin with. The second was a 20thcentury Italian De Luccia violin, a high-end instrument for concert performances. Having only played on a mass-produced student violin previously, this instrument was noticeably luxurious, with a rich, bright, and effortless sound.

The winter of 2021 I resumed a more regular practice, discovering a collection of beginner concertinos, with accompanying YouTube recordings and sheet music to follow along. Here, my relationship with the violin(s) became profoundly distinct. I was no longer playing the same warmups and practice pieces I’d been taught. Instead, I sought out interesting and accessible pieces that fit my skill level and were simply enjoyable to play. Without a solid background in music theory, nor being particularly literate in reading music, I played the videos over and over to learn the melodies and interpret the sheet music. I’d found a somewhat unconventional, informal method that was working for me.

For about six months, I practiced semi-regularly. Then the sessions became less and less frequent. Over the summer and fall, I barely played at all. The longer I didn’t practice, the more guilt I felt about it, which in turn, made me avoid it further. The amount of catching up to do felt overwhelming — not only with one violin, but both of my father’s, which came with intense

emotional weight. I continued to put it off throughout the second half of 2022, until this December when my company closed for winter break.

With no distractions, I took out the German violin at last, determined to tune it and revisit some of my favorite concertinos. The violin had a different plan. The wood had constricted in the dry winter air and the pegs on every string were slipping repeatedly. After a protracted negotiation with the strings, I was ready to play. As I drew the bow across the first open strings, the bridge immediately snapped in half and broke off the violin entirely.

Horrified and in tears, I reached out to our luthier to request a service appointment. I was afraid to do more damage but was anxious to know the condition of the Italian violin, in case it needed repairs, too. I was relieved to find the second violin in wonderful shape. With the consequences of neglect fresh on my mind, I’ve been playing the De Luccia violin almost daily while my other instruments are in the shop. The barrier to entry feels a little bit less daunting each time. To ease my self-consciousness, I play in my bedroom closet. Surrounded by a wall of colorful clothes, it feels like a cozy, soundproof studio where I can play at my own ability.

In conjunction with music, I’ve dabbled with amateur acrylic painting at home, and was inspired to submit a drawing for this contest. The idea of the violin comprised of geometric shapes and patterns represented the broken bridge—fractured into sharp, angular pieces. The light and dark shades reflect the characteristic tones of the two violins I inherited, as well as the learning process itself—muddling through the measures of a piece with uncertainty until the music is finally illuminated. Lastly, the pops of color bring balance and a playfulness which is essential to my musical development. Out of the many motivations I’ve had to practice during the past three years of the pandemic, I’ve found the most success when I approach the violin from a place of honest curiosity and happiness.

After a protracted negotiation with the strings, I was ready to play.”

ABOUT THE WINNERS

Eugenio Monjeau

Eugenio Monjeau is a writer, translator, editor, former choir baritone, and professor of music history and appreciation. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, he now lives in Princeton with his spouse who is a graduate student at the Princeton University Department of Spanish and Portuguese (and, coincidentally, who was a winner of the 2021-22 Creative Reactions student writing contest). Eugenio is currently “recovering” from his former involvement with Argentinian politics. He prefers to concentrate on “things bringing pleasure and joy,” such as Roberto Murolo’s recordings of Neapolitan songs, his mother’s eggplants with yogurt (when he’s in Argentina), movies with Gene Hackman, and Prince’s album Graffiti Bridge. He describes his experience of writing his winning entry as both painful and rewarding—“similar to Victor Hugo’s definition of melancholy: the happiness of being sad.” He entered the contest because the topic of “Healing with Music” appealed to him in a very personal way, as his writing attests. Eugenio identifies the Tetzlaff String Quartet’s appearance in April 2022 as his favorite Princeton University Concerts program since he began attending our events with his husband a year ago.

Jacqueline Burkholder

Jacqueline Burkholder is a Philadelphia-based vocalist training at Westminster Choir College. She has been a Princeton University Concerts patron for over a decade, and the Tenebrae Choir’s 2018 performance of Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles in the Princeton University Chapel continues to resonate in her memory. Jacqueline entered the Audience Voices contest in hopes of winning the opportunity to see more such events, believing that attending live performances is a vital part of her music education. She has passed on her passion for music to her delightful eight-year-old daughter and loves introducing her “to the wonders of the musical universe” that she adores so much. Jacqueline shared: “It did me very much good to write out my story and try to see its potential universality. I am profoundly grateful to have been heard.”

Lorraine Goodman

Lorraine Goodman, Princeton University Class of 1983 (Department of History), is a Princeton-based nonprofit professional and former singer on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall, and abroad. She is currently the Director of Advancement at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Mercer County. Having performed in the Phantom of the Opera and Cats, among other musicals, Lorraine entered the Audience Voices contest because, in her words, “the prompt stirred memories (pun intended!)” of why she wanted to become a professional musician. In addition to being an amateur cellist, she is also a published cruciverbalist (crossword puzzle constructor) and is working on a novel based on her experiences as an understudy on Broadway.

Janice Gossman

Janice Gossman, a recently retired art teacher of 31 years, lives in Kingston, NJ. She is a committed member of the Princeton community both as the daughter of two Princeton University faculty members and as a longstanding Princeton University Concerts patron. Describing her relationship to music, she shares: “There is a wide range of music from different time periods and areas of the world that I love and appreciate, and I know that there is still so much more out there to be discovered. Most of the artwork that I have been doing recently has involved an attempt to create my own translation of the sounds of selected music into visuals on the paper through art elements such as lines and colors. Miles Davis is one of my favorites because of his masterful spontaneity and the ways in which he is able to express subtle emotions through his trumpet. I very much enjoy playing the guitar, though I do not yet play it well.” You can explore more of her work at www.janice-gossman-art.com

Ameen

Amber Ameen, a former Princeton University employee, is now a Grants Administrator at the Broad Institute. The daughter of a musician, she began playing the violin when she was five years old under the tutelage of her father—a pursuit that she returned to during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although she had never before attended a Princeton University Concerts event, Amber found out about the Audience Voices contest on social media and was immediately inspired by the prompt about how her relationship with music changed since the start of the pandemic. At first starting her response as a personal essay, she wanted to challenge herself to experiment with representing the narrative in a more abstract, visual format. The resulting painting was inspired by her father. In her spare time, Amber enjoys hiking throughout New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania with her dog, Cooper.

Amber

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