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The road out of Johannesburg spins into oblivion. There are more billboards than people. Silent interrogators, they grill passers-by: “Where are you going?” “What are you doing?”“Why do you think this journey will save you?” 

We did not know the answers to these questions. Graduates of South Africa’s school of inexperience, we were there to learn.

To grow up in Johannesburg is to grow up in a thought experiment. A childhood in a city conceived as a temporary town is a childhood defined by chaos and confusion. New-Democracy-themed birthday parties. Party-politics-themed democracy. To grow up in Johannesburg is to not grow up at all. 

There is no order, nor consistency, no plan. The city built itself up and down and up and down around the generation it calls “born-frees.” Forced to piece together Johannesburg’s identity before we had ones of our own, we were born responsible. Surrounded by skyscraper ideas and monumental buildings, life was all-consuming and claustrophobic. Life turned us into many people. 

There were the sanguine, whom I knew of but would never know. There were the ignorant, who did not know of themselves. And there were the disillusioned. It was the 28th graduating class’ disillusioned who left their caps, gowns, and burdens behind in late June. Joseph said drive. Tiya asked where. Joseph said it didn’t matter. Tiya knew this was true, so they climbed into the front. I slouched into the back. We made our way onto the road. We had to escape. The spinning began. 

To come out of Johannesburg is to begin a journey into nothing. Lone trees serve as minute hands on a clock that would be deemed broken were it not for their presence. Moments drag on. Landscapes blend into each other. Dirt becomes grass becomes hill becomes mineshaft.

Squeezing the road from four lanes to two, two lanes to one, this part of the R51 is a money sandwich. Mineshafts as bread; road as filling. You’ve never liked sandwiches, but you eat them for sustenance; you’re told that you have to. For as long as natural ground has been natural profit, we’ve had to stomach the money sandwich. Along it, miners would stop for work. Their pay was little, their joy was plentiful.

“My Dear Patricia, 

For five weeks I have longed for your warm embrace. There is no light underground. There is no end in sight. There is no joy in the middle. Old Rooibek says that we are lucky to be here, that we are the chosen few. I wish they had picked somebody else. I know the where, have found the what, but have lost the who, and forgotten the why. I am tired. 

With love and honesty,

Patrik.”

Their joy was plentiful.

Their lodgings were underwhelming but as best they could do. Clusters of small towns litter the money sandwich. Towns built before privacy and peace. Towns where the mayor knew the baker because they were married, were always going to be married, would always be married. Towns where things were the way they were. We drove past the homes that “once belonged to people like Patrik and now belong to people like Panjo’s owners,” Tiya remarked.

“Panjo?” I asked. Joseph pulled into the slow lane.

Tiya began: “Panjo’s a tiger: orange fur, black stripes, intrusive thoughts. An actual tiger. But in 2012 or maybe ‘11 or maybe ‘13, Panjo began to dream. He was in the back of a pickup truck, on this very road.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated. It’s important. It’s irrelevant. It’s blurry, but most things are. As far as I can remember, as far as it matters, Panjo wasn’t the tiger he once was. He used to roll and roar, but it’d been days since his owner had seen that gnashing smile of his, and a gloomy tiger doesn’t bring in the big bucks. So they left for the vet with a broken tiger in the back and arrived there with his broken chains.”

“What?”

“Yeah, he was gone. And it was this big thing, man. His owner was distraught. She phoned a radio station and was like, ‘Panjo’s gone, my poor sweet Panjo,’ and the host was like, ‘who?’ And when she’d gotten the details out, everyone wanted to help find him – to dedicate themselves to something, even fleetingly. And they did, after two days they found the little guy. He was on a farm just up this road. I’ll take you guys there. I swear it’s real. They found him on this farm, alone, roaring, free, and they took him back into the city. The media were restless:. ‘Panjo is home!’, ‘Panjo is depressed.’, ‘Panjo finds love.’, ‘Panjo grows old.’ What does Panjo care? He was happy out here. And they took that from him.”

Tiya stopped the car. A single sign separated fact from fiction, the fickle from the farm. It read “Panjo was was likely was probably may have could have been here!” We got out and stepped onto hallowed ground. Panjo found purpose here. We found two windmills and a train track. Walking along the track, we made an unspoken agreement to reflect on his loss. Panjo wasn’t the tiger he once was. We would soon leave him behind.

“This track could take you to the end of our world and the beginning of the next one,” said Joseph, “but no one uses it anymore.”

Back in the car, as the mid-afternoon light streaked through the window, I looked out and counted cows. Joseph pointed to a building on the horizon that looked as out of place as us. Soon after, we arrived at Carnival City.

People come from far and wide to gamble in Vegas because Vegas is a gambling city. Brakpan, halfway between Johannesburg and Mpumalanga, was not built this way. It is a city of illusion. It was built with money on the mind. The outskirts are sparse because the center glistens. The price of water doubles by the mile. Carnival City, Brakpan’s main attraction, is no city at all. People do not come from far and wide. They come from very close and they stay for very long. Carnival City is a casino. It belongs to the road.

The first thing one notices about the City is its lack of reality. If mineshafts rewinded time, this building froze it. There were no windows, no clocks, no mirrors. There were food courts, showers, and overnight rooms. One could live and die in Carnival City without ever wondering if there was more world outside.It is defined by its shiny wheels and desperate crowds, its rigged games and lost souls. Ready to live, we each forked over R50 and tried to take our first steps.

R50 won’t buy you more than a sandwich, but as children of a cynical nation, it was what we were willing to stake. R25 was lost to the slot machines. R50 was lost to Texas Holdem. Disheveled and disappointed, we found ourselves at the Black Jack table, looking for a way to break even.

“Black Jack’s a simple game,” an unkempt gambler told us. “It’s us versus the dealer. I win. We all win. You lose. We all lose. He wins…” he sighed and thought a thought we would never know. “Play behind me,” he whispered, “that’s all you need to do.”

And so we did. For what felt like minutes, but could have been hours, we hedged our bets against the institution and bet on one another. We watched a group of gamblers drink their troubles away. Gazing through the cigarette smoke and past the inscrutability, one might declare that this was a family, if only for a moment.

“Look at that thing go,” a member of our makeshift audience said, “I could watch it spin forever.”

When we stepped back into our world, we were R150 richer, the sky was many shades darker. The sun fell into the horizon. We drove into it. We could challenge the sun, waiting for our wings to burn. We could never stop. And yet, soon we would turn around. Soon, we would go back home.

We would drive by the petrol stations where they once prayed for Panjo, back to the petrol stations where they prayed for lower fuel prices. We would drive past the tracks and into the new abyss. It called our names. It was a road away, physically close but obscured by the histories between us.

A cow becomes a cow becomes a cow becomes a cow. A thought becomes a thought becomes a thought. The road stays the road. It’s oblivion out. It’s oblivion in. There’s no meaning on the road. But the road raised us.

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This piece reflects the somewhat unreasonable — yet at the same time, somewhat reasonable — desire to forcibly sacrifice the past and present for the future. Perhaps it’s a justified feeling; after all, such a mindset is commonplace among many of the communities I belong to, such as the immigrant and FGLI communities. But maybe it’s merely a product of selfishness and greed, making the choice to chase an unpredictable future, all while blinded to the benefits of having a non-burnt out lifestyle.  

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Richard Hausman ’24 and Pradz Sapre ’24 “enjoying a lovely picnic.”

A beige couch was set in the center of Cross Campus. A white table set with a snake plant, a Dunkin Donuts coffee jug, and a speaker playing “Budapest,” “Tongue Tied,” “Redbone,” and “Let Me Adore You.” A girl on a bench nearby sang along. Some people in the group hugged each other and chatted while, others worked on their computers. Two of them ran with an inflatable couch, capturing the air the way one would capture butterflies. Most of them wrapped themselves in blankets. It was reminiscent of the beginning of the Friends theme song. “This is what Yale’s like everyday,” one of them said, talking to a large tour group passing by.

Passing people is my favorite pastime. Every week in October, I chose to set my striped blanket on Cross Campus and study outside. My dad told me “Eres muy palida” — that I needed more “Vitamin D” — plus I loved waving at people that I knew, or overhearing bits of conversations that, out of context, could serve as an interesting quote for creative inspiration or as a distraction.

The Saturday that people placed the couch was a chilly day. I sat on Cross Campus for five hours. It was a random day; I didn’t know who I would talk to or what would happen. But multiple events happened in that short time span.

Two hours after the first group of students placed the beige couch, four students walked out of Berkeley’s north court with a white couch and set it on the side of the lawn. They came out with a television, an extension cord, a white-and-red carpet, a tall floor lamp, and three chairs. They were watching Tom and Jerry and Roadrunner. The first group called out, “You’re not going to join us?” At one point, when the second group had gone to grab more furniture from their common room — a carpet, floor lamp, chairs — the first group almost succeeded in stealing the white couch. They tried to lift it when one of the members of the second group caught them. A friend of mine, shaking her head, approached me after this interaction. “Why is there always something fucking unhinged happening on Cross Campus?”

(The second group of students, some from Jonathan Edwards College and others from Berkeley College.) 

Last year, more people lingered on the green. “Last spring, when people were really starved for social interaction, Cross Campus was the place to be,” Daniel Pita ‘21 said. “I remember coming here, I was gonna meet some friends. And it was filled, it was bustling. It seemed like some city center, [with] a ton of community energy.”

This fall semester, with the transition to in-person classes and the temperature dropping every week, most students I talked to mentioned that they typically cross Cross Campus to get to class or to meet up and go somewhere else. “I’m not on Cross Campus as much as I like to just be outside,”  said Annabella Lugo ‘24. “I feel like lately it’s been kind of empty.”

That Saturday, most of the people I talked to were passing by, on their way to someplace else. Some were lugging backpacks, others were talking with their relatives or friends during a brief coffee break. I asked Yale students, an alum, and a University of Connecticut student what they wish they could do if they spent more time on it and what their favorite Cross Campus memories are.

Josh Chough ‘23+1

“It’s always been a dream of mine to have a little picnic on the green. My first year, I used to hang up my hammock. And it’s funny because if you look at the trees, there’s space so that none of them are close enough to hang a hammock in between, but you can hang a hammock in between a light post and a tree. There were other people that hung up their hammocks too. So we almost had a club going on, but alas.” 

Christina Young ‘24 (on the right)

“I’m in Low Strung, and right before we were having rehearsal in WLH. But at the end we went outside on cross campus. And [we] did a little run through of our songs [that] we were going to play at the Halloween show that night. And it was really spontaneous. We weren’t planning on doing it. We [felt] like going outside and a crowd gathered.”

Destinie Brooks ‘22

“My first time sitting on cross campus was actually last year. That was the first time I sat down. I came out here and [I’ve] done little outside events, but I haven’t done it recently cause I’ve been stuck inside and I’ve been so busy. But last semester I was coming literally every day. I’m supposed to be writing a paper, but I’m not doing that.

“I had a cute little picnic here with some members of the rugby team as a study break last semester. We had cute little fruit and we [were] eating, chilling, vibes, music, you know, all that. Deleted the 20 page paper from my brain.”

Sasha Lioutikova ‘23

“I normally come here to walk through and go to Bass or sit here on the bench, on the side and just sit in the sun. I walk through every day but I come to sit twice a week. Normally I people-watch and listen to music. I really like admiring people playing with animals like dogs. I also think it’s interesting admiring what people are wearing, looking at fashion across campus.

“One time I came here to play Frisbee with some friends at night… it was super cold….We were just feeling kind of funky and wanted to play around. And so we just played some Frisbee on campus and it was really good cause it was so empty and it’s such a nice, wonderful wide open space.”

Hannah Xiong ‘24

“Me and [one of my] apartment mates from the summer… we laid out a blanket and we were stargazing spontaneously because we were originally doing work and it started getting late. And then we just looked up at the sky and stargazed and talked. And I think that’s one of my favorite memories here so far.”

Jee Park University of Connecticut ‘22

“This place is so beautiful. I saw a lot of people [taking a] graduation photo there [on the steps of Sterling]. So I was actually coming here to take my picture there. I thought this is the most Yale view, right?” 

Anne Cutler ‘82 (and her daughter, Sandra Redjali ‘24)

“[Cross Campus] was really a central spot on campus. I studied mainly in Sterling or downstairs. And so this was a place to hang out or take study breaks or procrastinate from studying [by] talking with friends about politics, what our classes were like, how tired we were, who was more tired than the other, who had more work to do. It looks so much the same. It’s nice to have it be preserved that way. It doesn’t stand out to me as a specific memory place. But I do like the continuity of being back with my daughter now and having that shared location and experience.” 

After the first two months at Yale, days and weeks blur together. It’s hardly a gradual process — homework, readings, p-sets accumulate as the semester continues. Routines are established, and Google Calendars are filled. Cross Campus changes too: it recently has become more quiet. But it doesn’t mean that people are using it less. It’s a dynamic space, one that is simultaneously insignificant as a place that one can walk through and significant as a place one can linger, relax on a couch, watch cartoons. It’s a break from Yale, it’s a way to get to Yale, it’s a way to see Yale come alive in a way that is simply human. When I asked a member of the second group, Jake Slaughter ‘24, why they took out a couch, he shrugged. “We saw [the first group] hanging out and we thought that it was a great idea,” he said. “This is a good memory that we’re in the process of making… I’m just happy to be here.”

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Audio Transcript

It is Oct. 21, I’m standing in the Grove Street Cemetery. This place is fascinating. It is the United States’ first planned cemetery, a so-called “City of the Dead.” The streets are lined with plots of graves reserved for whole families. Roger Sherman is buried here, so are Eli Whitney and Noah Webster.

Usually, we visit a cemetery to pay respect to the dead. Today, I am reflecting on a different kind of absence. One that sounds like this:

[Wind, ambient noise]

In a way, an absence of sound characterized last year. Empty classrooms, empty streets and empty concert halls. We heard silence everywhere. Yale’s Woolsey Hall was empty too. Right across the street from the cemetery, Woosley is the home of the Yale Symphony Orchestra and other groups. Woolsey Hall is distinct from Yale’s Gothic Revival architecture. It is classic. 

[Subtle sound of people moving around, talking, taking their seats]

Through the trees from where I’m standing I can see its big, imposing dome and tree-trunk size columns. Inside, the concert hall is huge and ornate, almost gaudy. The walls and columns are lathered in gold paint. The first thing you notice when you walk in behind the stage is a gold-tinted organ with more than 12,000 pipes. It’s more than three stories tall: one of the largest organs in the world.

Look up and you might as well be in Versailles. The ceiling is characteristically French — sculpted paneling, gold cartouches, and a mural of the sky. Students I spoke with in the auditorium told me the ceiling reminds them of an Easter Egg. With a capacity of almost 2,700 people, it is an auditorium that demands to be played in.

Yet, for more than a year, neither the Yale Symphony Orchestra nor anyone else took the stage here. The auditorium was silent.

[Sound of people abruptly stops.]

Junior Supriya Weiss, president of the YSO, tells me how the pandemic affected her musicianship. 

WEISS: “I mean, for me, music is all about communication. That’s communication between composer and musician, musician and audience and between the musicians themselves onstage. I have always loved chamber and orchestral playing because — I don’t even know how to describe it. There’s an unspoken connection between players. Okay, for example, when I’m sitting principal flute and I have the principal oboist next to me and we have a duet — we can’t talk to each other when we’re on stage. Instead, it is entirely through this unspoken communication. This intimacy of knowing each other’s playing and each other’s body language. That is something that you lose when you are in a pandemic. It’s something I didn’t realize how much I missed until I was making music alone in my bedroom and just recording it and sending it to my friend to play along with. There’s a beautiful connection between people that happens when you’re creating art simultaneously in the same place that you lose when you put a screen between us.” 

But I should interject. To suggest as I did that music was dead at Yale last year is not quite right. Students and faculty I interviewed were clear that while Woolsey Hall might have been silent, most bands on campus were working harder than ever. The YSO was no exception. They enlisted prestigious alumni to teach “master-classes” for students, held sectional rehearsals and performed virtual concerts.

The group — Yale’s first undergraduate orchestra — was founded in 1965 by a cohort of Yale College students who were disappointed by the lack of opportunities for undergraduates to perform orchestral music. Today, the orchestra welcomes undergraduates and graduates alike. And it is worth pausing here. Orchestral music has been performed for more than 300 years — the genre is older than Yale itself. I spoke with John Mauceri over the phone from New York. He graduated from Yale College in 1967. Now, he is a Tony, Grammy and Emmy award-winning conductor, having conducted for the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony, as well as the Metropolitan Opera. He was the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s first full-time conductor, a position he held while pursuing a PhD in music theory. 

MAUCERI: “The group wasn’t the group when I took over. The few years before the Yale Symphony, and even when it was called the Yale Symphony, it was playing in Sprague Hall, and it was a very small group that played to almost no audience and had a very limited appeal. And, what I did — every September I would go to the Old Campus and just listen to see if someone was practicing. A window would be open, you’d hear a flute; A window would be open, you’d hear a cello, I go up the stairs! I changed the entire — I mean, I wasn’t alone in this, but I was the architect of what you now think of as the Yale Symphony. I moved the orchestra to Woolsey Hall (it always played in Sprague Hall). I created that first season, if you look at the first season, if you just look at the archives, you’ll see that everything changes: We were giving world premieres, American premieres, we were giving New Haven premieres of almost everything we played.”

The YSO has between 80 and 90 members. It is still an extracurricular club for all Yale College students regardless of their affiliation with the Music School. In fact, most students are majoring in something other than music. The YSO rehearses twice a week and performs between five and seven concerts annually. Music Director Brian Robinson told me that young people energize the orchestra. 

ROBINSON: “I have to say, one of the reasons why I’ve lasted 18 years doing this job is because of that vitality. In a conservatory environment, typically the orchestra is a class that is compulsory, that you have to go to. I went to music school in New York as a composer and I witnessed my orchestra-musician friends groan and grunt and complain every time they had orchestra to do because they had other ambitions and they wanted to do other things other than orchestra music. But here, they created this orchestra because they wanted this. This was a student created and student organized orchestra, which is really unusual for the level of quality that the YSO is.” 

Students I spoke with agree with Robinson. Aria Harris ’24 is a trumpet player and co-produced the 2020 and 2021 Halloween Shows with Supriya Weiss.

HARRIS: “I think that a lot of people, myself included, were drawn to the YSO and Yale in a larger sense because you can have this amazing musical experience without having to be a music major. People can then still play music at a high level and connect with other people who are really passionate about music without having to lock yourself into a music major or a music career in a way you would have to in other places. So I think it is absolutely true that people are really really passionate about other things and also are fantastic musicians.”

There might be one concert that best captures the character of the orchestra in its early days. It was called “The Contemporary Scene” and was performed on Nov.16, 1968. I dug through Yale Symphony Orchestra archives and found the concert bill for the Nov. 16 performance. There is a quote from legendary American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. “‘The orchestra is dead,'” he is quoted writing in an article for the New York Times. “He pointed out that no new music is being written for the orchestra as we know it today, and what little there is has no audience.” This quote was front and center on the bill, distributed to everyone in the audience. “‘Orchestra is dead.'”

That night, the orchestra responded to Bernstein. The repertoire included four orchestral works written within the previous twenty years, including “A Survivor From Warsaw” by Arnold Schoenberg and “Atlas Eclipiticalis” by John Cage, who is a modern and controversial composer. The Yale Symphony Orchestra stood up and said: “Orchestra is not dead. We’re a brand-new orchestra playing brand new music. We’re right here.” Brian Robinson tells me the energic defiance exhibited in 1968 still animates the musicians.

ROBINSON: “You know, from the very get-go in the super charged political era of the late sixties. There were many questions about: You know, are these institutions — they’re primarily old white men making old white music–what are we going to do about that? … Programming not just new composers, but new women composers, new composers of color, new composers from different backgrounds that aren’t just the white western canon.”

Today, the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s Halloween Show might best capture both the group’s musical excellence and youthful, energetic interpretation of the genre. Every year, the orchestra shoots and edits an original silent movie and arranges an accompanying soundtrack. They play the soundtrack to the silent movie live on Halloween. Aria, co-producer of the Halloween Show, explained that production begins months before the performance. Supriya described her first Halloween Show like this:

WEISS: “The actual show itself, oh my god. Just —I’ve never been in a concert like that before, where the audience is screaming and you’re having fun and we’re all in costume. I imagine that people who play in professional Pops orchestras, this must be what it feels like for them, and yet magnified a thousand times because I’m surrounded by my peers on campus. The fact that the level of music making is so high and yet we’re not taking ourselves seriously at all, I absolutely love that feeling. It was exhilarating. I think that from that point forward I chased out: ‘I want to be involved with this. I want to be one of the people who is leading this.’… part of what is so incredible about the Halloween Show is that it’s not just about the YSO, the Halloween Show is a Yale institution. I mean, I remember my aunt was hiking in Arizona and she saw someone wearing a Yale shirt and they ended up chatting. Turns out this person was a Yale alum who had watched the show that weekend. This person had not connection to the YSO, didn’t know any current members, and yet, she was just so excited. She was like: ‘Oh, my old Yale friends and I can get together and participate in this Yale tradition from back in the day.’ That was just insane for me to hear.” 

Besides the film crew, the silent movie’s cast are exclusively orchestra members. The production team told me work on the Halloween Show usually begins in February, when producers solicit movie scripts from other members of the orchestra. Usually, they said, a plan for the show is finalized by May. Filming begins the first week of school in late August and concludes in October. Movie director, senior Lucy Wilkins ’22, told me about this year’s filming and why she became interested in the Yale Symphony Orchestra.

WILKINS: “We also shot the entire thing in a week, which is kind of insane. I think usually the Halloween Show is shot, when it’s a normal non-COVID year, it is usually shot over the first month of school, whereas we literally packed the whole thing into one week. And it’s also interesting, especially this year, because we had to adhere by the indoor ‘wearing a mask’ rule, and, you know, maybe half the show was shot indoors. So it was weird because you’re trying to get people to act but you also can’t see half their faces, so it became a lot more about physicality, because realistically they could be saying anything under the mask … One of the reasons I wanted to do the Halloween Show was because I actually remember writing about it on my ‘Why Yale?’ question of the admissions application, because somebody had told me that the tickets sold out quicker than a Beyonce concert, and I was like ‘I love Halloween, and it is so cool how the community all comes together to celebrate film and music.’ So directing the show, especially this year, the last round of school, it just feels like a very round-circle moment.”

The show debuts at midnight on Halloween. This year, because of University restrictions on in-person gatherings, capacity in Woolsey Hall was capped at 275 audience members. After a brief opening performance by Low-Strung, an undergraduate rock-cello group, the orchestra rushed on-stage in costumes coordinated by section. There were bananas, insurance salesmen, Squid Game players, storm troopers and the Marvel Universe, just to name a few.  

[Sound of organ, crowd cheering] 

Then the show started.

[Orchestral music]  

This year’s movie was a spoof of Monty Python’s Holy Grail. It was called “YSO and the Search for the Holy Ale,” starring Yale President Peter Salovey as King Arthur and all 14 Head of Colleges as his knights. 

[Holy Grail trailer]

Junior YSO violinist Ines Chung-Halpern ’23 and senior oboist Alec Chai ’22 played lead roles. Sophomore Francis Fedora ’24 wrote the script. Because the Ale is said to make undergraduates lazy, Salovey and his knights work diligently to destroy it. But Alec and Ines work harder. Racing against time — and even bribing Handsome Dan along the way — they find the Ale. Along the way the film satirized Yale, poking fun at frats, elitism, overworked students and the Yale to professional consulting pipeline. 

Conducted by YSO student director junior Jun-Davinci Choi ’23, the orchestra performed the soundtrack for the silent film live. Jacob Miller produced the music score. It included modern pieces, like Britney Spears’ Toxic.

[Britney Spears, Toxic]

As well as classical music, like Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture. 

[Magic Flute Overture]

In the end, after consulting a knowledgeable Directed Studies student, Ines and Alec realize the Ale must be destroyed. In their own — mimed — words, if Yale students drink the Ale, making their classes all easy, “no one will know anything, and the world will cease to function.”

Spilling into the street after the show, it felt like we had taken a sip of the Ale, having been freed for a moment from the pressures of work and study. John Mauceri explains why the orchestra is vital for the University.

MAUCERI: “Now here’s the point. Music students have a way of sharing what they do with the community which is unlike almost any other field of study. Because you can be a great physicist—no one at Yale knows what you’re doing. You can be in thermodynamics, right? If you’re an English major, you’re reading “Beowulf,” or you’re reading whatever you’re reading, but a musician is studying. And what they do is, they perform. They actually share what they’re learning. So the entire environment of the community is enriched by having music students do what they do, which is to share their music with everybody. The orchestras of the equal universities, whether you’re talking about Princeton, or Harvard, or Cornell, they don’t have orchestras like this. Now you and I are talking and it’s 2021, and the Yale Symphony is now like the grandma, the old, the orchestra that has always been there. But believe me it wasn’t always there in the 1960s. It became that. From 1968, when I became music director, it created the kind of template, and then it was continued by all those who followed and all the students who played it and it’s something quite glorious.”

The Yale Symphony Orchestra’s next concert is Saturday, February 19, from 7:30-9:30 p.m. in Woolsey Hall. Tickets are free and can be reserved online at yso.yalecollege.yale.edu, where you can also find more information about the orchestra. My name is Oliver Guinan with the Yale Daily News Magazine. Thanks for listening.

[Orchestra music fades back in]

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In this audio essay, the narrator builds relationships with new cities by listening closely. He finds comfort in recurring sounds, connects with people through music, and meditates on homemaking through the practice of paying attention.

Illustration by Dora Guo.

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