Crescendo: new word I’ve learned in relation to my favorite of the symphonic pieces we will hear, the Suite from the Firebird by Igor Stravinsky. Miss Tynes plays a recording of the suite while we paint with watercolors on slick, wet paper, making swirling impressions of the music on the page. I love this; my brush moves in bolder gestures of delight while the music mounts its fanfares, its repeated waves of triumphant flourish. When the paint’s barely dry, I take a small brush and India ink and commence to sketch, atop my swirl of colors, each instrument and its player, little stick musicians all in motion, their bodies full of the rhythms of that fanfare, visible music pouring from cello and horn. Miss Tynes is mad for my drawing; it is my finest work, because I have gone inside the experience of the music, I have drawn the way the music feels.

Another day it is time to experience the music in another way, with all of our bodies. All the desks in the classroom are pushed to the perimeter, creating an open space in the center in which we all stand. Miss Tynes tells us the story of the firebird, how that phoenix immolates itself and dances in the flames, and then rises up again, radiant and new in the veils of its own ashes. We are to close our eyes, and then the music will begin. When we are ready, when we feel the music within us, then we may begin to move. We wait in our self-made dark. Crackle at the beginning of the record, then silence, and then the firebird’s opening strains: something approaching, like weather. We’re still at first, but then a few kids begin to sway, and then to rock, and soon we are stepping and turning, turning every which way, in a freedom of motion which, in truth, I myself have instigated, because I am suddenly deeply at home in the music, which seems to inhabit me, and as the piece mounts in intensity so does my movement, the fluidity of my arms in their ripples and archings, the bowing of my legs, the bending of my spine. At first I must be careful not to bump into them, but soon they’ve become invisible to me, the other children; there isn’t any classroom around me anymore; the music is effortless grace and, subsumed by it, I also am effortless, something written quickly in the air. I’m utterly transported, and free, and weightless as the slides projected on our living room walls. Haven’t I always been fire, and never known it?