Jorja & Margaret

To put a bow on this week of blog tributes to our soon-to-depart concertmaster, I wanted to post an essay I originally wrote for Showcase, our in-house program book. For one reason or another, I never submitted the piece for publication (the focus of the issue I was writing for changed, as I recall, and I wrote something else instead,) but since it directly concerns a side of Jorja that our audiences never get to see, I didn't want to let it go unread forever. Here it is...

My grandmother, Margaret Terry Trowbridge, was 82 when I moved to Minneapolis in February 2000. A native Minnesotan and lifelong fan of the Minnesota Orchestra, she could not have been more proud for one of her grandchildren to be joining the ranks at Orchestra Hall.

But in one of those cruel twists that life throws at us when we least expect it, she never got the chance to watch me play as a member of the ensemble she had loved for so many years. In the same week that I had been auditioning for my position in the orchestra in November 1999, my mother and her siblings had confirmed what they had suspected for some time: my grandmother was entering the middle stages of Alzheimer’s, a baffling, infuriating disease that would eventually rob her of her ability to communicate, to identify her surroundings, and even to recognize the people she loved most.

With our family scattered across the country, the decision was quickly made to move her to a care facility out East, where my mother would be nearby to visit regularly and attend to her increasing needs. It was a painful transition for my grandmother. Even before the disease tightened its grip, she had a hard time remembering where she was, and more than once in those first months she spent in southeastern Pennsylvania, she angrily confronted my mother for not having yet taken her to hear me play with the Minnesota Orchestra, unaware that we were now more than 1200 miles apart.

And yet, music continued to be her sustenance, even as her own mind betrayed her. My mother brought her a steady supply of the music she loved best, and listened as she reminisced about the many concerts she’d heard. But these stories weren’t about trips to Orchestra Hall. They were about the smiling, gracious violinist who had dropped in regularly to play for the residents of her retirement community in Minnesota and talk to them about music and life and whatever else they wanted. These were stories about Jorja Fleezanis.

I honestly don’t know how often our concertmaster made the trek to that retirement community in Eden Prairie in those years before I joined the orchestra. But I know how much those visits from Jorja meant to a woman who, while never a musician herself, had made certain that I hauled out my pint-sized violin at every family gathering I attended as a child. I know that, even as her condition worsened and she became less sure of the world around her, my grandmother remembered Jorja’s visits with vivid clarity. (She even began to embellish them: a couple of years after the move, my mother overheard her proudly telling another resident of her Pennsylvania home that she had just recently been a violin student of the great Jorja Fleezanis, and what do you think about that? Being a Pennsylvanian, the other resident had no idea who my grandmother was talking about, but that didn't diminish her pride and enthusiasm in the slightest.)

We all know the effect that music can have on us as people, but we rarely consider the profound impact that a single musician can make. Jorja is just one among many musicians to make a point of reaching out to the wider community, but her generosity of spirit, her willingness not only to perform but to listen, to connect herself to the people around her, will always stay with me.

My grandmother passed away quietly on March 16, 2006. I don’t know how many members of our family she could have recognized in those final hours. But I know for a fact that she would never have forgotten the gift of music given to her by the woman who has stood at the front of our stage for the last 20 years.