We took Music for the Ocean to St. Louis, and it was an amazing week full of school visits, radio shows, and fiddling everywhere, including the banks of rivers. We found time to dive in too! And the concert was one of our very best!

The Confluence

I arrived on Monday evening and picked up the concert’s brilliant composer and violinist Chad Cannon. Chad always has the intention of writing a piece about local waterways when we do a show. So we headed out to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers just to the north of St. Louis.

It’s a powerful place, where water bodies that drain ten states and a sixth of the country come together. Water can travel 2,500 miles to reach this point and still has 1,100 more to reach the ocean. The Mississippi is slower and mighty, while the Missouri is rollicking and full of debris. You can see them collide.

Chad pulled out his violin and began to play a fiddle piece called Missouri Sawyer, which is about a piece of log that gets caught in a river, and the bowing is like the log bobbing back and forth in the current. It was apt because the logs were flying past in both rivers. The sun began to set, painting the water in pastel pinks and blues. We stepped toward the marshy bit of ground just in front of the confluence, and a dozen frogs hopped away. But one stayed, as if transfixed by the music.

Wydown, Baseball, and Diving the Ozarks

The next morning we were up and out, headed to our first school visit of the week. Wydown Middle School welcomed us to a wonderful audience of 120 students. I gave a little talk about becoming a marine scientist from St. Louis; we screened our film The Rebel Reef; and then Chad performed a few pieces from Music for the Ocean. It’s always awesome to hear Chad play along with the final theme of the film, which he also scored.

On the way out the door, the orchestra teacher said that there was a very fine violinist in the first row who had recently toured Japan named Kanon Ogura. We invited her to play with us if she was interested. Lucky for us, she was! More on that in a minute.

Next stop was a radio interview on KTRS Frank and Jill Show. The studio was located at Westport plaza, where the Rawlings baseball equipment company is headquartered. So we took a second to play Take Me Out to the Ballpark in front of a 12-foot high copper baseball.

Finally, we were free to head out on the adventure we’d been planning for weeks. Chad wanted to try to scuba dive in an Ozark creek. My family has a bit of property about an hour from St. Louis on the spring-fed Indian Creek. We picked up dive gear at wonderful Y-Kiki in Chesterfield and headed west.

When we arrived, it was obvious that it was too shallow to dive, but we grabbed our underwater cameras and donned our wetsuits, masks, fins, and snorkels and submerged. It was beautiful! Lots of long-eared blue gills (or sunfish) and largemouth bass came up to check us out. Minnows danced in the rapids. Underneath a big log, a group of smallmouth bass arranged themselves in a battery. We saw crawdad apartments build into the silty soft shoreline. Beneath some reeds we found two longnosed gars, which were so cool to see, but apparently, people don’t like them because they have a reputation for eating other fish. The water was freezing cold, so I got out shivering after about an hour. Chad made an awesome post about the adventure.

A Full Day At UMSL

The next day I had a full day at the University of Missouri St. Louis. I started off in the English Department as part of a wonderful panel called Writers Talk Writing. The energy in the room was so perfect! The students were really engaged and asked fabulous questions. Huge thanks to  Lauren Obermark for arranging, Lauren Terbrock-Elmestad for moderating, and Lesley Sieger-Walls for being an incredible conversation partner.

Then I zoomed down to main campus and gave a fun lunchtime talk to the environmental science students. Thanks enormously to Aimee Dunlap for arranging and to the Harris Center for helping to sponsor our performance. I also got to meet with a small group of students for a writing workshop in the afternoon. Huge thanks to UMSL for publishing a terrific article about my visit.

Meanwhile Chad was at the John Burroughs school doing presentations for their middle and upper school orchestra classes. We packed it in!

Nostalgia and Crossroads

Thursday started off with a dose of nostalgia for me. We headed to my high school Parkway Central High. And walking through the doors was like walking back in time. Nothing about the layout had changed. The gym was to the right. The cafeteria, a sunken rectangle of tables and chairs, was exactly the same. There was a landing above it where I spent many hours practicing cheers when it was too cold to be outside and the gym was in use. I knew automatically how to find the orchestra room, which was in the same place. Even the kids looked like they were wearing the same clothes I’d worn. Turned out, it was spirit week and each grade was dressed for different eras, one of which was the 80s. So yeah.

Chad and I did our science talk/Rebel Reef/concert excerpts presentation and then I got a huge gift. The orchestra teacher Alicia Bont printed out copies of the Rebel Reef theme for her students. And they sight read it! One student hopped from the violin to the piano. It sounded amazing to me – so rich and full of beauty. Of course I was emotional already, but I got the chills. They also played Electroreception, a piece about sharks’ ability to sense electricity in the water.

Next we headed to Andrews Academy, where we performed for a group that included pre-schoolers up through fifth graders. My sister had gone to this school, so there was a bit of nostalgia for me here too. They were a wonderful audience. We hopped back to Parkway Central to meet with the freshman orchestra, who also sight read a couple pieces of Music for the Ocean.

Our fourth school visit of the day was to Crossroads School. My dear friend Karen Handelman sent her kids there and had arranged the visit. The head of the school Mark Norwood asked her introduce me, which was anohter wonderful gift for me. The Crossroads students were joined by students from New School and this audience was incredible. We did a science and song presentation, and the applause was fantastic! We really felt it up on the stage. Everything about this visit was sensational.

The Touhill Show

Sound designer Will Chen, pianist Hui Wu, and light designer Evan Murnane all arrived late Thursday night for the Friday show. The harp we rented for Chad’s sister Cate Todd arrived around 9 am, along with Cate and her husband Mike, who helped haul it to the right spot. The Arianna String Quartet landed Friday morning from a week-long series of performances in El Paso and they basically came straight to the theater to rehearse  The crew at UMSL’s Touhill theater was fantastic and Will and Evan were in full swing getting the lighting and sound set up by the time I arrived around 2. Around 4 pm Kanon arrived to rehearse and we were also thrilled that Alicia Bont and her viola student joined us for the final piece as well. And just like that, the doors were open!

This was one of the most beautiful shows we’ve done. Perhaps it was all of the guests, or maybe just a lot of practice. Or maybe it was the smoke machine that Evan decided to use. But the sound was incredible, the energy built and built, and the experience was immersive and thrilling.

Chad wrote a very special piece about The Confluence for the Arianna Quartet to end the night. It alternated between a slow power and a jerky violence until the two themes merged together. The audience shot to their feet with applause. I sold out of all my books. And everyone walked out of the theater smiling and thinking a bit more about our oceans.

To top it off, the show brought us within $6,000 of our goal of raising $100,000 to build a coral genetic biobank in Tela. If you’d like to help push us over the top, here’s where you can do that!

Thanks so much for everything, St. Louis! We will be back!

Below: A shot of Chad composing The Confluence (among other things) in the basement of my parents’ house! Thanks mom and dad for the hospitality!