Summertime, and the Livin' is Easy

As a singer in K-town, summertime is a double-edged sword. The opera company, the symphony, church choirs, and other musical groups--all run their seasons from August or September through May or June. But it's not a specific thing to Knoxville.

During summer school as an undergrad at UT, I was talking to my tuba teacher, Sande MacMorran, one day during a lesson about this very thing. (I strove to distract Sande with off-topic questions during lessons so that he wouldn't have so much time to tell me how bad my playing was... It was!) I was wondering why I was so unmotivated to do things (e.g., practicing) during the warmer months. He pointed out the obvious concept I had missed.

From our earliest days of socialization, our earliest days of day care and kindergarten, we wrap our lives' schedules around school. For most of us, that means from August until June, we're calculating every other event around our schooling, which is by far the lion's share of our time and efforts. And, usually from the second day of classes on, we dream about experiencing those heady days of summer vacation again, those days when we'll have all that time to do the things we want to do rather than being told to do the things we should. And yet, even in the ancient days of my education, summer school existed, but it was and still is rarely attended.

When I was in sixth grade, Knox County Schools tried out a program called ESY--Eextended School Year. The idea was that the calendar year was divided into "quinmesters" (five semesters). Each child was required to attend four of them, but each family could choose which four. Want to take the family on a skiing trip to Colorado? Fine. Skip quinmester two (winter) and make it up during the fifth, summer, quinmester (that bon mot makes me gag to this day). I think the program lasted about two years before being scrapped. The reason? Everybody was going to--gurk!--quinmesters one through four, and there just weren't enough students to justify paying a full-time staff for the summers, not to mention having to reteach material to students that had skipped the previous quin... uh, let's just say, "semester."

Summer school still exists, but in its previous form. The single grading period consists of approximately one month of intensive teaching at the beginning of summer, student attendance is still light, and only a few teachers are needed. You would think that such a "compacted" grading period would be stressful, but both teachers and students report that it feels very different, more relaxed, than the grading periods during the year. This feeling exists even at the college level, where summer school is a more "normal" occurrence.

BTW, I Googled "quinmester," and the word is still used by many school systems.

Which brings us back around. Without the opera and without choir, singers--well, this one, anyway--tend to get out of shape during the summer months. Oh sure, there's the occasional solo gig. (After all, who's taking the place of all that choral music in church services? Solos!) But, increasingly, there are less and less of those. And the Knoxville Choral Society/Knoxville Symphony Chorus do their Independence Day thingy, but that's just one concert for them, and I imagine the rep's pretty staid. Summer could be an opportunity! An opportunity to work on solo rep for next year, maybe take a few voice lessons, or just get an ad hoc group together to sing for the helluvit.

But I doubt it.