Or more accurately, the ballad for Judy Loman. Most accurately, it wasn’t a ballad; it was a piece commissioned by – who? I can’t find it online. It’s probably in a paper program somewhere deep in a box, part of my relentless archives.
Some websites say Loman retired in 1991 – she would have been in her mid-fifties. Other sources say she was the principal harpist for the Toronto Symphony until 2002 – mid-sixties. I heard her play live only once, at the American Harp Society conference in Cincinnati in 2000. I was about to be a senior in high school and was applying to conservatories, but I had gotten a late start – fourteen, after six years of piano lessons – and was still behind.
Loman gave the first performance ever of a piece commissioned specifically for the conference – at least, I’m fairly sure that’s accurate; there are no YouTube videos from 2000, and the American Harp Society’s website only has programs for the events going back to 2002. But I remember sitting in the auditorium – a familiar one for me, where I’d played in the Cincinnati Youth Wind Ensemble under the direction of a gentle young conductor and where I’d performed disastrously in a piano concerto competition – waiting for Loman’s performance, then watching her fingers fly across the strings until suddenly her hands came to rest in her lap. She quickly raised them again, and I would not have been able to tell you that anything had gone wrong until the second time she stopped. This time, she shook her head and said, “Well, it happens.” She explained calmly that she was going to go and get the music, because it was a premiere of the piece and she wanted to do it justice. Then she disappeared from the stage and returned with a music stand and a handful of sheets.
I don’t remember whether she started the piece over from the beginning again, or what the reaction of the audience was. I want to say that there was wild applause when she finished, but that’s little more than conjecture, because I spent the rest of the performance in a state of admiration and fear. Here was one of the most treasured living harpists, a professional of at least 40 years, and she, too, could forget the notes? There was a clear positive takeaway dangling in front of me: we are all humans, perfection is to be expected from no one, and an illustrious career will not be torpedoed by one slip of memory. But my conclusion at the time was that even if I became a professional harpist (I would not), even if I performed in opera houses and concert halls worldwide and made such an impression that pieces were commissioned for me, I wouldn’t be somehow separated from failure, on a higher plane where it couldn’t reach me. Essentially: I could never let my guard down.
The idea that professional musicians ever let their guards down was a naive one, but even as an adult I find myself thinking that those at the very tops of their fields must reside in some sort of protective bubble that failure can’t penetrate. The idea that that isn’t so is alternately terrifying and buoying.
I know I’ve written about this incident before, probably on this blog. But I don’t think I used Loman’s name, and there’s not a way (that I know of?) to hit control-F on an entire website, even your own. Or have I not actually written about this before? I’ve thought about it before, many times. But how do I find out? My memories aren’t searchable even when they’re in writing. Putting them on a page is a false sense of security, as if you can never forget, as if you’ve ascended to the rank of artist and will never miss a note again.
