Carnegie

66 Creative Essay

The walls of Carnegie Hall were built with the assenting consciousness of a Great Man. The Scott-born Andrew, who built his portion of work union America with two-thousand tons of pig iron, George Pullman’s version of first-class freight travel, and a heap of gold bonds measured today in too many billions. While shaking hands with Twain and democracy leaders, his hundred million donated bricks arose in shelters for treasured relics and trees, books and people. I’ll tell you now that the brown masonry stacked on 57 th and 7 th back in 1891 was made sans steel frame—was made from a philanthropist who made possible a manslaughter. But only because Economy often likes an Old Fashioned, made of two parts irony with a dash of red bitters.

The walls of Carnegie Hall shielded me once from eighteen-degrees-and-dropping, from frigid toes and fingers. Its gold hand-carved moldings and layered balconies going up and up and white panels framing a discus crowned with lights—it was like the ceiling of Heaven and History.

The Beatles had shared part of their mania on this polished wood. Judy Garland gave the “greatest night of show business” before Duke Ellington gave new face to jazz; before the likes of Nina Simone, of Celine Dion and Luther Vandross, of Ike & Tina Turner, and of Led Zeppelin in more rippling shades of genre and rapture. How many bows and brass and pure symphony had it taken to litter the air with such legendary colors?

All of this could be yours for $209 even. A ticket priced for just one of those 2,804 plush chairs; that would have been my deal, if I wasn’t already a small inclusion in the program of February 27, 2012. Guest conductor Dr. Hugh Floyd was the precisely necessary kind of eccentric needed to corral and polish a group of high school choirs from different parts of the country, to unite them all under Handel and Barnum and “Now, try it with your arms hanging down and bend and the waist so your nose is parallel with the floor.” He had us reverberating from the tops of our heads, occasionally cracking from previously poor vocal technique, yet eventually made us a unified chord progression that could rival any collection of strings. On the day, my sensible flats were hidden by a slightly less sensible, but required, short-sleeved black dress. Crossing 57 th from the rehearsal hall to the backstage of the Isaac Stern Auditorium was like pulling the curtain behind Disney magic and finding an inanimate broom and wash bucket. In those moments I forgot what I hadn’t truly seen the night before in practice.

Four steps brought me to the stage and into a vast, still multiverse, where darkness was forward and beyond, and above was dust in spotlights. But in that place sound was a living thing. Even silences were charged with now and past in almost equal measure, and while my eyes followed Dr. Floyd and time signature and dolce and notes below the staff, I impressed upon myself, this this hold onto this. I don’t remember the name of the orchestra that stayed like soldiers at rest after our part was done and we were made spectators in back-end theater seats. They played Eric Whitacre’s “October” for wind instruments, which I had only heard before through seven-year-old Sony headphones. Yet that was all that reached and stayed with my gasping ears when it wasn’t dark anymore and we were forced to leave the way we came in.

I didn’t know then that Andrew Carnegie had once given his right-hand man a free pass in creating war with starving laborers. He closed his eyes in June of 1892 to a demand for fair wages, treating his headaches with a Scotland vacation. When he again opened his eyes, ten of nearly four-thousand battle-weary men laid dead on bloody Pennsylvania earth. In a letter to a colleague he called it “that Homestead blunder.” And yet and yet… For the remainder of his life turned from mogul to benefactor, June of 1892 would likely be the reason Andrew Carnegie signed checks and dedicated schools, public libraries and concert halls. Still, I don’t believe that damning charge—

The one that says all gifts are tainted by their sorry gift givers.