Over the past year or so it has become clear to me that Tertulia’s success relies not on how successful I make it, but how successful I set it up to be. This seems relatively obvious, but if you look around our classical chamber music world it is not actually how most organizations are run.

Like many Americans, my own identity has been shaped by the diverse threads from which I am woven. Summers spent with family in Canada and the UK, stories of my father’s Italian-American childhood in an Ohio town that seemed to be inhabited mostly by cousins of one sort or another. It was in 2015, during my first trip to Istanbul, that I took on a deeper understanding of my maternal grandfather; more than a decade after his passing I was surrounded by people who looked like him, who ate the kinds of foods he liked. Born in 1915, not far from this weekend’s Beyoğlu festivities, Haïg Aram Oundjian was a son of this city.

I remember, in high school, sitting with a friend in the computer lab (remember the computer lab?), listening to composer Paul Hindemith’s clarinet sonata. Hindemith, recalling the clarinet's top-of-the-movement turn of phrase, allows the single treble voice to descend across a series of piano chords which, without the listener realizing, circle us from a harmonically distant world towards the home key - the tonic - and the conclusion of the movement. The friend, aware of my musical satisfaction at the compositional craft, broke the silence: “I wish I could hear what you hear”.

There it was, a plastic band model lying forlorn on the fold-out table, waiting for a departing fourth grader to choose it amongst the picked-over band instruments. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to play the oboe, per se, but rather that I was aware of all of the instruments I did not want to play. Flute? Clarinet? Saxophone? Trumpet? Percussion? By no means. Did I know the oboe was itself unusual? Beyond the fact that it had not yet been chosen by any one else, probably not. Did I realize the lifetime of toil crafting its mouthpieces from dried cane would entail? Certainly not. Whatever the reason, I carried it home that day, and somehow, it stuck.

This city lives its history not just for itself but for everyone who walks its streets, rides its yellow U-Bahn, its red S-Bahn; by embracing its painful past Berlin offers us a present - and a presence - that we rarely encounter in our own metropolises.