The audience bursts into
applause as the last notes of a Haydn sonata resonates through the air. At age fourteen, I had just completed my
first solo piano recital, and it felt amazing.
Five years later at the University of Michigan, that same feeling swept
over me as I signed a contract for my first steady music gig as a pianist for
an Ann Arbor restaurant. Music has
always been the most important aspect of my life, from piano lessons and harp
lessons to summer camps and music schools.
A few weeks ago I declared myself a music major within the school of
Literature, Science and Arts (not the School of Music) with a concentration in
musicology. Innumerable factors were
involved in this decision, including my family, one of my past music teachers,
and the year I spent at the Baltimore School for the Arts.
My
family is extremely musical. My
grandfather gave me my first piano lessons when I was five years old, and my
mother continued to teach me until a private instructor took over when I was
about seven. I grew up in a house full
of music; both my sister and brother took piano lessons in addition to playing
the clarinet and trumpet, respectively.
Christmas always brought family recitals, with all eight cousins on my
mother’s side playing piano and various other instruments. Both of my mother’s sisters play the piano,
and my eldest aunt owns not one, but two Steinway pianos. My grandparents always used to tell me
stories of my great-great Aunt Gladys, who traveled the country as a successful
concert pianist. She studied the piano
with a man named Oliver Denton, who studied with Theodore Leschetizky, who
studied with Carl Czerny, who studied with Ludwig van Beethoven. And while I never actually received musical
instruction from my great-great aunt (the only memory I have of her is a
100-year old woman in her deathbed), I still like to think of myself as
genetically inclined to be a musician.
And it is because of my parents’ never-ending support and encouragement
that my love for music has been able to grow and develop throughout the
years. They drove me to music lessons
two or three times a week (sometimes up to thirty minutes away, insisting on
nothing but the best for my education), paid for those lessons, attended music
recitals, rehearsals, and auditions, and hauled a full-size concert harp around
to performances and gigs.
My first influential piano
teacher was Mary-Alice Riley. She sensed
my musical abilities from my first lesson, and relentlessly pushed me to my
musical extremes. Soon she was entering
me in National Piano Playing Auditions, on top of seasonal studio
recitals. The auditions required that I
memorize ten compositions, including the mastering of sight-reading, ear
training, and scales. When the National
Auditions were accomplished with superior markings and I had barely broken a
sweat, Mrs. Riley moved me to the International Auditions without hesitation. She employed what I now refer to as
paper-clip madness. She marked pieces
that she wanted me to learn by paper clipping pages in music books. After I had learned the piece and played it
to her satisfaction, she would record the name of the composition, remove the
paper clip, and drop the music book to the floor. We dropped music books at such a prolific
rate that soon I was memorizing not ten, but twenty compositions for the
International Auditions. I achieved
superior-plus ratings, even at the International level, at age ten. But it was because of Mrs. Riley that I even
entered the auditions at all, and my biggest advancements in musical ability
took place during my years with Mrs. Riley.
It
was also Mrs. Riley that brought the harp into my life. One summer, while my older brother and sister
were away at camp, I was left at home with my piano lessons, still too young to
go to camp. Mrs. Riley was also a
harpist, and a magnificent gold-trimmed harp sat in her living room. Like any child, I was enthralled by the
gigantic instrument, and one day after a lesson mustered up the courage to ask
her about it. She carefully sat me down
and pulled the harp back to my shoulder, explaining the basics of the string
placement. There I was, this tiny little
girl with a giant harp resting on my shoulder, and low and behold, I had a
knack for playing it. I picked up on
playing the harp so quickly that by the end of that lesson Mrs. Riley had sent
me home with a twelve-string lap harp, perfect for my short arms and small
body. My parents, sympathetic that I
couldn’t attend camp with my siblings and enthusiastic for my musical
development, allowed me to take harp lessons with Mrs. Riley, adding more
practice time and another weekly lesson to my schedule. Before I knew it, I had fallen in love with another
musical instrument. Mrs. Riley provided
a solid foundation for my musical education.
She taught me how to disciple myself by practicing, and emphasized the
importance of mastering the techniques
of an art before mastering the actual notes.
I would not be the musician I am today without Mrs. Riley, and while she
moved to Florida when I was about twelve, the things I accomplished while
studying with her gave me the confidence I needed to continue my music studies
with other teachers.
During
my sophomore year in high school, my aunt encouraged me to audition for the
Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA), one of the top five public music high
schools in the country. I sent in an
audition tape, was accepted, and in August of my junior year moved to
Lutherville, Maryland to live with my aunt and her family and attend BSA. At seventeen years old, I was only just
starting to think about my future. I
knew that attending a music school would help me determine whether or not I
wanted to study music for the rest of my life.
BSA gave me an excellent preview of what college would be like as a
music major. All of the students were
very serious about music, practicing hours a day. For the first time in my life, I was
surrounded by young people who had just as much talent and drive as I did. The school featured musicians, artists,
dancers, and actors, and the artistic environment was unlike anything I’d ever
experienced. No longer was I the star of
the community, praised in local newspapers and admired by all of my parents’
friends. At BSA I was just as talented
as everyone else, and the people sitting next to me in math class practiced
just as many hours as I did, if not more.
We performed for each other in weekly recitals, and simply hearing my
peers play one of Beethoven’s hardest concertos motivated me to practice even
more hours than before. I was working
with the best teachers and the best students, constantly striving to be better. But BSA also showed me what I didn’t want to be: a professional
performer. The competitive nature of
professionally studying music stripped some of the joys of music from me. My piano teacher insisted that I play musical
compositions as he saw fit, the way he or other professional pianists presumed the composer intended it to be
played. We disagreed often on
expressional matters, but he was the teacher, and my academic grade and GPA was
contingent on playing to his satisfaction.
So I played according to his interpretations. Soon I wasn’t really expressing myself
through music as I always had; rather, I was expressing my teacher’s sentiments about compositions. Music was no longer fun for me, and I
realized that in the professional world, music isn’t simply about
expression. I was practicing four or more
hours a day just to keep up with the rest of my class. I wasn’t playing the way I wanted to play,
and my social life was practically nonexistent.
By the end of the school year, I was sick of practicing, sick of my
teacher, and ready to go home to a normal public high school.
However, my love for music
returned during my senior year. Stripped
from the professional environment of BSA and working with my previous music
teachers, I was once again able to perform compositions the way I saw fit, and
truly express myself musically. BSA had
taught me that while I loved music more than anything, music performance was
not a career I wanted to pursue; I wanted music to be a part of my future, but
in a non-professional way. Being a music major outside the School of
Music allows me to study music without the strenuous practice schedule and the
expressional limitations that professional musicians demand. I’m now doing everything I love: taking casual piano and harp lessons from
graduate students, studying the history of music (musicology), music theory,
and music technology. My family, Mrs.
Riley, and Baltimore School for the Arts were all parts of my life that helped
me to determine my major in college. And
while I’m still unsure as to exactly what I want to do after graduation, I know
that music will always be a part of my life.
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