A gift

This was an assignment. I decided to blog about it so that I would finish the writing more quickly:

When I first moved to Seattle for school, every month I received a special email from my father. The note said that he had sent me an Itunes gift of music. The first month was the cd The Best of Joshua Bell, a compilation of violin concertos, sonatas for violin and piano, piano trios, and other violin pieces. The second gift was the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 and Paganini Rhapsody performed by Lang Lang and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre & Valery Gergiev. During December he sent Carols & Christmas Songs by Bryn Terfel. The last gift was Beau Soir by Janine Jansen, a violinist, and Itamar Golan.

My mother told me that he was sending the music because he wanted to make sure I was still listening to classical music. Both my parents had studied music in their higher education and I grew up taking piano and violin lessons, as well as playing in an orchestra. Classical music has always been a binding force in my family.

In Lewis Hyde's theory of the gift, he writes about different types of gifts and the social circumstances these gifts are given in. Hyde adapts three "gifts of passage" from Arnold Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage: "rites of separation, rites of transition, and rites of incorporation" (41). Though rites of separation are not usually associated with gifts, the other rites are; they're given at times of change or transition. Even though rites of separation usually involve a "cutting ceremony" instead of gift giving, I would argue that the music my father sent me was involved in a rite of separation and a rite of transition.

The music was a "threshold gift" or a gift connected with the rite of transition because I was in a state of transition. I was leaving home, becoming a legal adult (even though I didn't feel like one), moving to school. Moving away from home is an important transition that involves a transformation. Hyde uses Annette Weiner's work about threshold or transformation gifts and writes: "She means that there are two sides to each exchange and to each transformation: on the one hand, the person approaching a new station in life is invested with gifts that carry the new identity; on the other hand, some older person - the donor who is leaving that stage of life - disinvests himself of an old identity by bestowing these same gifts upon the young" (43). According to this model, I am the person moving into a "new station in life" and my father is the older individual who is passing on the gift to me.

This is quite accurate because my father grew up with music. He went to school to study violin and became a professional violinist in several different symphonies. When I was in elementary school, he had to give up that life because he injured his arm from playing too much. Since then, his playing has slowly decreased. But, he taught me how to play the violin and has always encouraged my interest in the classical world. When I started to listen to more mainstream music, my father always said what I was listening to was not "real" music and would ask me if I still liked classical music. I would roll my eyes and always reply with a "yes." Moving to school meant that I would be transitioning into a new environment, no longer under the protective wing of classical music. My father's gift could have also been his final exiting of his musician stage: "dis-invest[ing] himself of an old identity by bestowing the same gifts upon the young" (43).

The gifts were also a sort of going-away present. While Hyde distinguishes rites of separation from going-away gifts, they are still connected. He claims that any going-away presents are an attempt to lessen the physical separation by giving a gift that sends a piece of the giver with the one leaving. I felt like this also could be applied to the gifts I received. As I was leaving, my father wanted to close the gap between us by sending memories and pieces of his identity with me.

...there's so much more I could go into here. Especially about the labor of gratitude and how my father's gifts of music created this labor inside of me... but it will have to wait for another time.