Being a musican can be lonely.  You practice alone for the most part.  Maybe you teach one-on-one or rehearse with one other person.  When you're in larger groups, often it's a competitive situation, and it's certainly like that when you go up against other musicians in an audition.  When you talk about your work to non-musicians, sometimes they think you're bragging.  It can be lonely.  A few lucky musicians have a support group like the one I find in my music club.

I had always thought of music clubs as organizations of music lovers who did good deeds to support young musicians at the beginnings of their careers, so i was a little unprepared for the thinking behind The Thurday Morning Music Club.  This club was founded in Atlanta by some musical ladies, primarily Bonita Crowe Wagner, in 1926.  The idea was that she and several friends who were music teachers felt that they were not performing often enough to keep their skills up, hence the idea of a club strictly for music teachers who agreed to perform once a year.  To keep the dates available in a year in balance with the number of members, they limited the membership to twenty-five.

It was probably around 1992 when I was invited to join.  My children were in elementary school, and I was being the world champion volunteer with the PTA, the Girl Scouts, and the church.  I had plenty of time since I was not singing as much as I would have liked: children and colds go together, impressarios like to hire folks that can be entirely at their disposal during the run, and so forth.  I really thought that I was at the end of my career as a singer, my studio was pretty skimpy, and all things considered, it was pretty depressing.

Enter The Thursday Morning Music Club.  Here were wonderful professional women, many retired, who still had their skills and kept working at their music for the love of it.  They were lovely to me, and I was pleased when they liked my performances.  Maybe I wasn't dead yet!

As I continued in the club, I learned more about them.  The founders names were familiar to me from my years working for the Atlanta Symphony; they were the same names that were early presidents of the Symphony Women's Association.  It seems that these ladies had non-musician friends who wanted to join the club to hear the programs, which the rules about music teachers only would not allow.  So the same ladies and their non-musician friends formed the Atlanta Music Club, which in the late 1940's formed the Atlanta Youth Orchestra, which eventually became the Atlanta Symphony.  Talk about doing good deeds!

Yesterday I spent part of the day with these lovely friends.  I was able to go because the college's fall break hit the right week this year.  As usual it was a wonderful experience with wonderful men and women who are musicians and who all treat each other with love and respect.  There should be a club like this on every corner!