Stein !

1
Sophie Stein
October 30, 2015
After Ivan
A/Do
You should know: there were indeed things about Meadowmount that were beautiful. The
way the mist would hang low, shadowy orange and soft over the neighboring farmlands on the
mornings when torrential rain didnt confine us to our beds, when we rose before breakfast. The
way the floorboards seemed to absorb our footsteps when we padded across them late at night.
The way the white sidings of the dormitories gleamed against the green of miniature pastures.
The way we could see cars moving along the distant highway but couldnt hear them, as though
our three-mile stretch of dirt existed in some parallel universe, apart from the rest of the world.
Though the Meadowmount School of Music is nestled like a gem into the crown of
upstate New Yorks Adirondack country, its setting evokes a sense of complete isolation rather
than one of woodsy-summer-camp relaxation. The firm rules that prevent students from leaving
the Meadowmount campus are a mere formality: even if we technically could go somewhere,
there wouldnt be anywhere to go. For the most part, we assumed that Ivan Galamian1 had
planned for accelerated technical improvement to occur at Meadowmount, not musical
revitalization.2 He had, after all, been known to punish lackadaisical practicers by locking them
in a storm cellar when he found that they were not complying with the daily practice schedule.

1
2

The famous Juilliard pedagogue who founded Meadowmount in 1944

Meadowmounts website describes Galamians vision for the school as a practice retreat, a place to
recover from a school year filled with the stress of student life and obligations, and a place to enjoy the
camaraderie of other young people who are serious about their musical development. Cue massive,
sarcastic eye-roll.

Stein !2
The big destination for Meadowmount students is the nearest gas station, Stewarts. Its about
fifteen minutes away from campus by car. We could get ice cream there, sometimes.

B/Re
I turned eighteen halfway through my first summer at Meadowmount. Two of my friends,
who were both nineteen at the time and could therefore leave campus with permission, took me
to Stewarts late at night to celebrate. We sat on a plastic picnic table outside the gas station at
midnight, quietly working our way through enormous, messy cookie dough cones. We must have
made an odd-looking triumvirate. We had arranged ourselves3 in order of height: tall, beautiful
Hannah with her mane of orange hair and smattering of freckles to the left; myself, pale and
wearing white in the middle; and Lena, Thai and thin, dark and always sort of smoldering, on the
right. As we watched in something like awe, a five-foot-four guy with flaming red troll-doll hair
pulled up in a flatbed truck. He caught sight of us as he pumped gas into his car.4
I could feel our awe hanging in the air as though it were something tangible, and when
the troll-doll man turned and approached us it solidified and blackened and changed into horror.
Hey, ladies, he said, lovely night.
Lena and I looked at each other and mutually decided to ignore him without actually
speaking a word.
Hey, Hannah said.
Oh god, here we go, I thought.

Unintentionally, of course,

Which car was the exact same shade of red as his hair.

Stein !3
Names Jeremiah, he said, and I happen to be the best-looking ginger in E-town.5
Im Hannah; this is Lena, and this is Sophie.
And what are you pretty girls doing way up here in the Adirondacks?
Were road-tripping. On the way to Niagra falls.
This just got fun.
Yeah? Whatchya plan to do there?
Were tightrope walkers, from Colorado. Were going to walk across the falls.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
Brief silence. The air smelled like rain.
Well myself I just got sprung,6 ex has the kids but Im gonna get them back. You know
how it is with women. Cant live with em, cant live without em. Except this one. Shes a bitch.
Had me locked up after we split. But its all fine now. Anyway, how do you girls know each
other, then? Must be pretty good friends to drive all this way together.
Fuck it, I have to say something.
Were sisters, I said, gesturing at Hannah. And then, pointing to Lena, And shes our
cousin.
No way. You all dont look alike.
Hannah and Lena were giggling. You dont see it? Hannah asked, The resemblance is
in the eyebrows. She put her face right up next to mine.
5

E-town is local slang for Elizabethtown, the town in which Galamian decided to hide Meadowmount. It
is the closest you can get to the absolute middle of nowhere without actually being in the woods.
6

From prison. This guy was just coming out of jail.

Stein !4
I see it, I do see it, said Jeremiah.
And Lenas mom married into our side of the family, I added, Shes half Taiwanese.
Gotcha, Jeremiah said. Do you three have Facebook? Lets add each other.
Sorry, Hannah said, We deleted our Facebook pages when we left Colorado.
Were off the grid, Lena said.
Our ice cream cones had melted.
We should get going, I said, Its a long drive to Canada.
Lovely to meet you girls, the ginger troll-doll man said.
Lena, Hannah, and I got in our car and drove back to Meadowmount, laughing until our
breath came in short gasps and tears rolled down our cheeks and our stomachs hurt.

C#/Mi7
Allow me to discuss the cows for a bit. The farm immediately neighboring
Meadowmounts property produced beef. They had a herd of incredibly strange cows, all black
with one enormous, white stripe down the middle. Theyre called Belted Galloway Cattle, but we
called them Oreo Cows. These cows, they never shut up. When it was 7:30 in the morning and
we were too tired to converse on our way to breakfast, the cows spoke for us. When it was well
past midnight and we wanted nothing more than a few precious hours of sleep, the cows were
wide awake and lowing with what must have taken every ounce of their lung capacities. The
cows were the predictable soundtrack to our predictable daily routine. I miss them, sometimes.

Shit, that was a little flat. Let me try again.

Stein !5
D/Fa8
My second summer at Meadowmount, I got fairly sick. The Elizabethtown doctors are
nothing if not merciful, and prescribed me cough syrup heavily laced with codeine and also some
other forms of strong painkillers. The first time I took all of the medicine, I felt a sudden urge to
go outside. I went and knocked on Lenas bedroom door.
Come for a walk with me, I said, I want to go out!
Lenas eyes got a bit bigger as she realized what was going on.
We wandered out into an enormous pasture across the road from our dorm. Everything
shimmered slightly.
Look at the trees, I said, theyre beautiful.
Lena laughed. We walked a little farther out into the field. To our right, about a mile
away, the Oreo cows stood in a herd and mooed at us.
I want to go pet the cows, I said.
You cant do that, Lena said. I did not listen.
I broke into a run, and made it almost all the way across the pasture before I tripped over
a tree root. By the time Lena caught up with me, I was lying on my back in the grass. We
watched the clouds roll over our heads, and managed to while away another hour. Another day.

Check it with the open string. There we go.

Stein !6
E/Sol9
For the two summer months that Meadowmount is in session, things at the school go on
as they have every day since 1944. It reminds me a bit of Brigadoon, actually. The enchanted
town in the Scottish Highlands, from the musical of the same name, appears once every hundred
years. The residents of the town carry on with their lives exactly as they always have, in a
manner thats totally out of keeping with the centuries in which they appear. Time passes, but
nothing in the town changes, and every single day is the same. Meadowmount works like that.
Every day, from June through August for the last seventy one summers, students at
Meadowmount have dragged themselves out of their beds at 7:30 in the morning and staggered
like hungry, reanimated corpses to breakfast. In June, it rains daily in the early morning and at
night. The walk to breakfast is a bit like trying to navigate a tropical town after a landslide. In
July, it gets hot. Oppressively hot and humid, so that the cows on the surrounding farms moo in
protest and your legs stick to chairs and its hard to stay standing up in your bedroom for long
periods of time, and the minute hands on clocks turn slower because its impossible for them to
move through the dense, sticky air. But always, by 8:30, students must be in their bedrooms with
the doors shut, practicing. We all stay like that for the next four hours, taking ten-minute breaks
every fifty minutes to hold mundane conversations with our next-door neighbors in our dorms.10
At 12:30, everyone emerges from their rooms for lunch, dazed and pale-looking and
ravenous. Between the hours of 1:00 and 5:00, students are free to occupy themselves however

Did I seriously miss that shift? Thats unreal. I do this every day. Come on. Back up, do it again.

10

I use the term dorm loosely here. Meadowmount exists on property that was once a fully operational
farm. Ever pragmatic, Galamian turned the farmhouses into dormitories when he purchased the land.
Nobody has ever updated them, and the only thing that Galamian did to make the structures habitable in
the first place was install wooden flooring, plumbing, and some extremely thin walls.

Stein !7
they choose. This means absolutely nothing. If your chamber group isnt rehearsing, your
friends chamber groups usually are. So then youre stuck hanging out alone because nobody is
around in your dorm, and you certainly arent allowed to go spend time in other dorms. Or at
least, its frowned upon. So you either practice some more or you attempt to forget where you
are: you sleep or read, call home if you can manage to find a spot with cell service, or run outside
if you are extremely ambitious and its not six thousand degrees. Dinner is from 5:30 to 6:40.
Youre probably not hungry, but you will rush to the dining hall as though nobody has fed you in
years because its something to do and its a chance to actually talk to someone. Dinner
conversations are breathless and noisy, sucking so greedily on the much-anticipated
communication that people usually forget to touch their food. Which means that by eight, theyre
starving. Which is unfortunate, because there are concerts from 7:00 to 9:00 every other night. I
cant remember what anyone did on the nights when there werent concerts. Maybe thats
significant. Concert nights are sort of exciting, for a while.11 Mostly, that's because you have to
dress up for them. The opportunity to put on a nice-looking dress in the midst of the relentless,
mind-numbing sameness of every single day, the chance to walk in heels like Upper East Side
royalty across three miles of dirt and dust to a concert hall with air conditioning, those are
reasons to keep going, to get up in the morning and do everything all over again. Those are ways
to feel put together again, and human.

11

Concert is a professional-sounding term for a long, student-given solo recital, which means that you
and several elderly couples from the surrounding rural townships get to watch your most talented peers
play exceedingly difficult concerti that you could never even dream of learning.

Stein !8
F#/La12
Meadowmount divides its student body into two distinct groups. There are the Over
Eighteens, and there are the Under Eighteens.13 In the eyes of the Under Eighteens, the Over
Eighteens live in a magical fairy world of freedom.14 Their practice hours arent technically
mandatory or monitored, they dont have a curfew, and they can leave campus if they can
manage to find a car to get them out. Boys and girls are also allowed inside of each others
dorms if youre an Over Eighteen. If youre an Under Eighteen, thats grounds for immediate
expulsion.15 But Over Eighteen girls and boys live on opposite sides of the three-mile campus, so
older students rarely make the effort to visit friends of the opposite sex. Under Eighteen students
live on Dorm Row,16 which is a half-mile-long stretch of identical white farmhouse buildings.
Each dorm is the designated living area for girls or boys of a certain age, and comes equipped
with signs that warn about the fragility of country plumbing and with one or two counselors,
otherwise known as Practice Monitors.
There are also the Door Signs. These are enormous sheets of paper, distributed weekly on
Mondays at precisely 8:30 in the morning, which all Under Eighteens must fill out and tape to
the fronts of their doors within two hours. The Door Signs have slots for every hour of every day
of the week, and students must designate exactly where they plan to be during those hours. Then,
12

That time was a little sharp.

13

Flat. Oh my god.

14

There it is. Okay. Thats right. Now, again.

15

Somehow, this does not stop all of the Under Eighteens from coupling off within the first two weeks of
each session. The number of Meadowmount relationships that develop among Under Eighteen boys and
girls who can only see each other for four or five hours per day is sort of incredible.
16

We all know exactly what this sounds like. We arent sure whether thats the official name or just a
nickname that stuck after decades of systematized practice/torture-time passed within the confines of
those thin, white walls.

Stein !9
the Practice Monitors patrol the dorm halls during practice hours and check up on their
students.17 If you arent where you say youll be at any given time, you get an X.18 Three Xs
and a larger penalty goes into effect, which usually involves several hours of physical labor in
Meadowmounts insect-ridden gardens. If you get enough Xs, Meadowmount administrators can
expel you. Little wonder that Under Eighteens often compare Meadowmount to prison.

G#/Ti19
Ultimately, people go back for two reasons. First, Meadowmount can prove extremely
productive if you do it right. If you focus, and take your lessons and practice time seriously, and
dont surrender yourself to the terrifying monotony of everyday repetition, you can learn a thing
or two. Second, the people you meet at Meadowmount are a singular kind of people. Nowhere
else will you find as dense a concentration of serious artists, who understand why music is that
air that you breathe and the life you have chosen. And the friendships that you form with those
people, who seem to innately understand you, are also singular. Because theres something oddly
binding about silent early-morning walks to the dining hall shrouded in orange mist.

17

I imagine that, for the counselors/Practice Monitors, walking down the hall of a dormitory during
practice hours sounds like what a hive of bees would sound like if someone were to come along and turn
it upside-down. Theres an angry, constant buzzing, and the occasional stream of frustrated curse words
off in the distance. But we students didnt hear the cacophony while we practiced in our own rooms.
Focused practice is such an absorbing, isolating experience that every external sound disappears, due
mostly to the cocktail party effect. Its like magic.
18

This is literally a large red X, which your Practice Monitor draws on your Door Sign when you are
either missing or not practicing. There is no warning. You simply return to your room to find that you
have received an X. Other X-incurring infractions include going to the bathroom without permission
during scheduled practice hours, not checking in with your Practice Monitor daily at breakfast, not
attending an official concert, leaving campus, using your cell phone without permission, the list goes on.
19

Its not high enough. My leading tones are never high enough.

Stein !10
A/Do20
The thing about Meadowmount is that its very easy to lose oneself in all of the practice.
Day in, day out. Most people dont understand the real meaning of that phrase until they enter the
working world. To experience the level of mundane drudgery, repetition, boredom, and
inadequacy that characterizes an adults everyday experience is exceedingly difficult - pretty
much impossible - for students who havent matured enough, either mentally or emotionally, to
handle the feelings of intense disappointment and dissatisfaction that come along with being
almost-there-but-not-quite, day after day. Day in, day out. But thats what music is. Theres never
an end in sight. Combine that endlessness with the intense isolation and mundane routine of
Meadowmount, and people start to forget that theres a purpose to anything theyre doing. Do
that to young students, and forget any prospect of creating a rejuvenating summer retreat. You
may see some progress, but students get lost in all of the purposelessness, all of the loneliness.21
All of that, the eventual mundane purposelessness in isolation, it only has one possible
result in adolescents. What happens is that everyone at Meadowmount starts to impose a purpose
upon everyday experience. One specific purpose, actually: getting away from it all. Or getting
back to wherever they came from, given that Meadowmount is pretty much designed to be a
place away from everything else. Nightly dinner conversations revolve entirely around the next
thing: what piece well play when we finish all the repertoire weve been assigned to learn at
Meadowmount, what foods will comprise our first meals at home once weve escaped the
confines of the Meadowmount cafeteria, what well do on the internet when we arent restricted
20

Okay, heres the top. Going back down is always the harder part. But I can do this. I can do this.

21 And

I chose this. As a seventeen-year-old, about to enter conservatory and not particularly wellinformed about the wealth of summer music festivals that exist apart from Meadowmount, I chose the
school so that I could improve myself before college. And it worked. So I went back a second time, too.

Stein !11
to about an hour a day of using it, what well watch when we can get to a movie theater without
having to drive for three hours, how it will feel to sleep in a room with air conditioning once its
all over, once were gone. Nobody lives at Meadowmount, even when everybody is physically
staying there. In our minds, weve all gone on to the next thing. At Meadowmount, everything
hangs suspended in the brutally hot, humid, air: we are almost where we want to be, but not
quite. Not ever.

G#/Ti22
I cannot remember what I did with my idle time as an Over Eighteen. I suppose that I read a lot.
My group of friends formed out of a mutual attachment to this British TV show called Skins.
Theres not much to say about the show itself: a bunch of high schoolers smoke a bunch of weed
and do reckless things. But the show brought three girls to sit and talk in my bedroom every
night: Lena,23 Celaya, and Amelia.
Its worth mentioning that I had already seen every season of Skins twice by the time that
I watched the show with those three Over Eighteen girls. The first time was when I discovered
the show as a fifteen-year-old. The second time, I was seventeen and it was my first summer at
Meadowmount. I spent about twenty hours a day alone in a thirteen-by-fifteen-square-foot room.
Confined not only by the tiny space I inhabited but also by the endless set of rules that dictated
my daily schedule, I decided to escape. I watched other teenagers break rules.24 It worked. For
22

Flat again.

23

We were both back for our second summers, despite our better judgement. It was the simplest possible
thing to do, and I think we were both drawn, magically and inexplicably, back to the school (though
neither of us would have ever admitted it).
24

I did not intend to get kicked out of Meadowmount, no matter how hemmed in I felt.

Stein !12
the space of each episode, I forgot about the relentless buzzing of my neighbors incessant
practice. I forgot about the humidity and the abstract sense of fear and pointlessness in every note
that I played. I forgot about the X system. I felt almost normal. The third time I watched the
show, I was eighteen and bored again, sitting in my room with Lena and Amelia and Celaya.
Celaya was the only one, out of all four of us, who had never seen Skins before. She was also the
only one out of all four of us who had never attended Meadowmount before. I suggest to you that
this was no accident.
One nice thing about being over eighteen was that we could also physically escape, sort
of. We could go on walks off campus. Early on, I would run a couple miles to a nearby riverbed
before breakfast. Students called it The Creek, and it was a notorious spot for nighttime drinking.
But I preferred the creek at six thirty in the morning, just after sunrise. At the Creek, you could
hear birds. The Oreo cows were usually up early and mooing away before we could ever hear a
note of birdsong. And the birds, and the sound that the water made as it rushed over giant,
smooth boulders, they were as musical as anything at Meadowmount. The Creek in the morning
was the only place where it was pleasant to be alone. The air felt lighter, the sunlight wasnt so
strong and it danced across the surface of the stream and made everything else glow a little. I had
to climb down a shallow rock face to get to the riverbank, in a little clearing that emerged out of
the trees like a mirage. A perfect circle of pines surrounded the bed of The Creek, like something
out of a fairy tale. And in the morning, a light breeze made all the tree branches sway in unison.
The Creek was a place further isolated from Meadowmounts isolation. It was a place where
purposelessness felt appropriate, acceptable, and maybe even a bit good. Refreshing.

Stein !13
F#/La
My second-summer sickness may also have something to do with my memory loss.25 During
about the second or third week of the seven-week session, someone who served food in the
cafeteria caught a cold. And then, as if by magic, the entire camp caught the cold. It only lasted
for a week, and then everyone got better. But I didnt. I got worse. The hospital called it acute
bronchitis, but we called it Meadowplague.26 The limits that having nonfunctional lungs put on
my life compounded the mundane limits of the day-in-day-out Meadowmount routine. I can
remember sitting on my bed and making a concerted effort to recall how it felt to breathe
normally. The Meadowmount isolation was already suffocating enough, but being physically
unable to breathe made that feeling ten times worse. Lena, Amelia, Celaya, and I all tried to find
moments of escape, and we tried to impose some purpose onto our days, as we always had. But
usually we just wound up watching Skins, or going out for a walk.
I stopped going to The Creek after I got sick, which is maybe why I have a harder and
harder time recalling what we did with our idle hours as the weeks dragged on and my asthma
attacks became increasingly frequent.27 After my second trip to the hospital for chest x-rays and
yet another prescription for antibiotics, my mother shipped me my nebulizer. Its this ridiculous
box that uses a fan to make liquid albuterol into a gas for the purposes of maximum absorption
into my shitty, dysfunctional lungs. I spent a lot of time hooked up to the machine by a mask that
spewed creepy-looking smoke everywhere when I exhaled. Holding conversation while taking
medicine from the nebulizer was next to impossible, because the fan made me sound like
25

Do the shift another time.

26 Again. Again.
27

No.

The codeine-laced cough syrup I was taking probably didnt help much, either.

Stein !14
Gollum. I did an excellent Gollum impression. I would sit at the edge of my bed, hunched over
my nebulizer, and croak, We hates the nasty Meadowmounts, in the voice of death itself.
Starved for interaction and air, lacking any purpose or an end goal except getting out and getting
to a real hospital in a real city, I figure that I must have done a lot of thoughtless sitting around.
And my friends sat around with me, and we watched Skins.

E/Sol28
One night, my Over Eighteen clique was particularly bored. Lena and Amelia had picked up a
smoking habit at Meadowmount for lack of any other recreational activity. Practice breaks are
ten minutes long. It takes just about ten minutes to finish a cigarette. It worked out. Anyway, on
this one July night, Celaya and I joined Lena and Amelia outside at dusk when they went to
smoke. On the way back to our dorm, we saw the figure of a cat dart behind the concert hall.
Was that Ivan? Celaya asked. We looked at Amelia. She was the general expert on all
things Meadowmount, having already passed through five summers at the school.
Maybe, Amelia said.
Lets go find him, Celaya said, I want to pet him.
Ivan, named somewhat insipidly for Meadowmounts founder, is an apathetic black cat.
The story is that he once belonged to the Admissions Directors boyfriend. But the boyfriend left
her years ago, and left his cat behind. The cat, fed up with all of the Admissions Directors
emotional post-breakup cuddling, escaped into the woods one day. He hasnt let anyone pet him

28

I cant do any of this right.

Stein !15
since, but sometimes he shows up around Meadowmount buildings during the summer. The
Admissions Director still leaves food out for him.
Ivans notorious hatred for all people was not going to stop Celaya. She took off in the
direction of the concert hall with renewed vigor and a bounce to her step that none of us had ever
seen before, and nobody could get a word in edgewise.
For the next hour, we chased Ivans shadow around the property. Maybe we did it
because that night was a concertless one, and we had nothing to do. But there was something else
there, too. We stopped talking after about ten minutes. It takes fifteen minutes to walk from one
side of Meadowmount the other, so we must have crossed the entire campus four or five times
that night. But every time we walked across the grounds, something was different. We strode
quickly through the sunset-pink evening, and we laughed when Ivans head or half of his torso
appeared around the side of a practice cabin. But we wouldnt have dared follow him into the
cabin itself, not at twilight. There was something foreboding about the darkened insides of those
buildings. They were only four wooden walls and a door. But going inside would have felt like
walking straight into the belly of a beast. The four of us stood facing the building for a moment.
Our silhouettes prepared for battle with the cabin. But the light was fading and we knew Ivan
wasnt inside, and we turned and kept walking.
Our pace slowed. Dusky grey clouds rolled over our heads. The stars were too timid to
come out. On Dorm Row, one boy in the cabin for fifteen-year-olds was practicing a piece that
none of us liked. We didnt say a word. We could see streaks of dirt on the white sidings of the
dormitories, and Ivans eyes gleaming yellow from a hole underneath the Frankenthaler boys
dorm. Celaya knelt down and crawled towards him, but a spider scurried by and she fell back,

Stein !16
shrieking. The sound bounced off of the trees and the dorm walls. We helped Celaya up and kept
walking.
Girls stood in groups and whispered amongst themselves on a white porch. The bushes
whispered back. It was colder now. Pre-teen couples walked by, hand in hand with heads inclined
towards something secret and strange in the space between their shoulders. It seemed like those
couples could never get close enough to each other. If it were possible, they would have
swallowed one another whole, just to have constant company. We walked by, unhurried. Ivan sat
a few feet away on the stone wall in front of Main House, as though hed been waiting for us to
catch up. Tiger lilies cowered behind him, cuddling up to the side of the cello teachers studio.
Ivan tilted his head back, and we followed his gaze up towards a waning moon. We took a step
towards him, and he was gone again.
Fuck it, Celaya said.29
Fuck it, we echoed, and walked home to watch an episode of Skins.

29

Fuck this scale. Im going to lunch.