The Art of Our Small Town

One day in Week Two of first year, I noticed a small crowd filing into the McPherson Recital Room as I was leaving the music centre. Laidlaw was still new to me, so I asked the man stationed by the door what was going on, just out of curiosity. He handed me a pamphlet and said it was a concert: Caroline Fauchet, a brilliant pianist visiting from France — was I a Music Centre member? I said yes, and before I could glance at the programme in my hand, the man ushered me into the room. “Free for members”, he explained. Suddenly afraid to disappoint this man I’d never met, I thanked him and found a spare seat among the audience of elderly couples. In the time before the show began, I skimmed the pamphlet and recognised only one piece in the program, Claude Debussy’s ‘Claire de lune.’

Every piece Ms Fauchet played that afternoon was spectacular, but I’d be lying if I said the Debussy tune I admittedly only knew from Ocean’s Eleven didn’t stand out most. It’s one of my strongest memories from first year: listening to the performance and staring out McPherson’s narrow windows at the trees lining the road outside. Over the last two weeks, I’d been trying to grasp what living in this town meant. Like many of us, I’d considered other schools in cities, and this comparative hamlet with fewer streets than I had years here to go, while lovely, seemed to come at a small expense — of art and museums and shows and cultural experiences that never fully reach the quieter nooks of society. Looking through the window at that moment, though, the town swelled. Not to the size of a city, but big enough for surprises. Big enough to stumble into a room on a Wednesday afternoon and have an experience.

Two weeks ago, Caroline Fauchet returned to Laidlaw for another recital of Debussy compositions. On another quiet Wednesday afternoon, I found a seat among the town’s older demographics and let myself be surprised again. And while she didn’t play ‘Claire de lune’, the town did expand again.

In the time between these two concerts, which comprises the near entirety of my time in St Andrews thus far, I’ve often returned to the common claustrophobia many of us experience. Especially for those of us familiar with big cities, St Andrews can feel like relative peace and charm at the cost of a cosmopolitan or artistically textured life. To some extent, this is only right; St Andrews isn’t New York or London, and nor should those of us from such places impose our standards on it, dismissing what makes the town itself in the attempt to make it like everywhere else (a well discussed phenomenon in this paper). And yet, this claustrophobia is still partly ignorance. When I felt like there was nothing to do in this town, that’s because I wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t learn from that first Lunchtime concert; I didn’t stay curious about the things that happen in this town.

It’s true, the town has lost its movie theatre. But there are still profound cultural experiences to be discovered, even if they don’t come from figures with profiles in The New York Times or reviews from the BBC. If the age demographics of Ms Fauchet’s audiences are any indication, most of us don’t take advantage of this fact. I know I haven’t. 

Like anywhere else, St Andrews is only as big as your engagement with it. If you walk through enough doors, it can be (almost) as big as you need it to be.

Illustration by Halaah Bin Hashim