The Music In My Life: Part IV

Through his wiry moustache and beard, the aural skills instructor asks us to start at the eighth note in the ninth measure. Measures I can count but I have to lean over to the girl next to me to ask which one is the eighth note. She looks at me as if I am insane and asks how do I play if I cannot read music? I ask her how our instructor can play the flute with so much facial hair.

Of course I can read music. Though I can usually sense how each note fits in with the others by its appearance; I cannot call upon them by proper name. My memory fails me. Proper names seem silly. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I've had my nose pushed into a hymnal from age week one. I always ended up staring intensely, week after week, at all those little dancing decorative notations while silently moving my lips along with the rhythmic lines.

It seems something about the music has embedded itself into my being. Perhaps this is why I do not play jazz well since such notes are those of interpretation and do not fit together in a tidy mathematical sensory pattern. I HAVE to have a pattern.

Despite my ignorance, I do find the music theory classes to be interesting. The endless practicing, rehearsing, and competition to maintain my first chair in symphonic ensemble is much more stressful than I’d anticipated. One of the other sax players resents me since I am a freshman – especially since I have not yet declared music as my major. Every chance he gets, he files a challenge to topple my status. Continuing to choose French pieces filled with … the fast notes … he never realizes that these pieces are my strength. Though the notes are smashed together in very small measures, my fingers feed and float around such pieces. If he would choose a piece with frequent time changes and strange notes then my mind would overpower my fingers and he would undoubtedly topple me over but I do not tell him this. His antagonism drives me further into my quest to not only catch-up on but master all of these new intriguing concepts.

My typical schedule starts at 9am in the music building and ends around 11pm in the same building. I am assigned protégée to a recovering alcoholic but brilliant woodwind professor for private tutelage. Week after week, we sit in his small office. The smell of his stale tobacco accompanies us as he drives me to break all of the “bad” habits that I had acquired through my own learning. I am both offended to have MY territory; MY music threatened but, at the same time, I am challenged to leap through any hoop he asks me to jump through. Periodically, he re-hashes the story of my initial Berlioz audition and it gives him a chuckle. I never see any sign of the raging temper reported by his other pupils and instead become attached to the old man.

Unfortunately, or not, I sense that all this will have to come to an end.