In 1964 Bob Dylan told us
that “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Nothing underscores just how right he was more
than attending a seven-year-old granddaughter’s violin recital in Charlotte.
I was in college when Dylan penned his provocative lyrics,
attending a university where almost every student was white and most of them
were male. Fewer than five million
people lived in North Carolina, and most of them had been born here. Our population included the lowest
percentage of Catholics of any state, and the only people who spoke a foreign
language were school teachers.
At first blush you might not think that listening to 20
or 25 young Suzuki students between the ages of four and 14 play their brief
recital pieces for an audience of dutiful parents, doting grandparents and
fidgety siblings would engender reflections on Bob Dylan’s prescience, but even
if the event is held in a beautiful church chapel, as this one was, you can
only spend so much of the time admiring the stained glass windows while you
wait for your granddaughter (#22) to take the stage. If you have been admonished to leave your
book, Kindle® and iPhone® at home, your eye naturally will focus on what’s at hand: the
printed program listing the performers and their selections. It’s there that you can readily see that the
times not only are a-changin’ but how
much they’ve already changed.
If there had been such a thing as a Suzuki recital in
Charlotte in 1964, all of the players would have been white and their names
would have reflected North Carolina’s Anglo-Saxon (and specifically
Scots-Irish) heritage. These days about
half of the children probably will have those sorts of surnames – names like
Lamm, Hunter, McClellan and Stevens – but the first four performers are just as
likely to be named Christina Yue Xin, Pavan Thakkar, Gisel Zapata and Nikhil
Vaishnav, as they were at our granddaughter’s event. As the program proceeds, Emma Willis, Katie
Polk and Archer Herdon may well be followed by Micaela Flandoli, Gabriela
Ortega and Ana Palomino. Even the
alphabetical list of the children’s teachers – Ker, Smilovici, Stanchauskas and
Talley – reflects the ethnic and cultural diversity that makes North Carolina
so different today from the North Carolina of 1964.
