Appalachian Spring

Every time I listen to Aaron Copland, I always wish he was still alive so I could give him a giant hug. While I was in Chicago, I had bought a book at a used bookstore in Hyde Park entitled The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity by Nadine Hubbs that shows how a group of Manhattan-based gay composers (Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, etc.) crafted the “American sound.” I had started reading it while in Chicago and it became my plane ride literature. However, I haven’t gotten very far as it’s not an easy read. It’s been fascinating though. Currently I’ve been reading The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin. Before this, I had read his book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. It was a great read, but some of it got repetitive and other times, dull. I am though highly enjoying his second book. There’s just a short little statement I’d like to share with you from the chapter I recently finished about joy:

“Like life, music speeds up and slows down, it breathes, it has peaks and valleys of emotion, it engages our attention more or less strongly, it holds us then lets us go, and then picks us up again.”

I love the description. For anyone who would like to learn a little more about music on his/her own, I would suggest reading This is Your Brain on Music. For someone who loves both science and music and has knowledge in both fields, I highly suggest reading The World in Six Songs. There are studies and comparisons made that make many things I experience as a musician make a lot more sense as of why I feel the way I do when I perform music, or even listen to music for that matter. There are a few things I’d like to mention that I have learned but I feel aren’t quite appropriate to discuss here (even though I ranted forever on civil liberty issues).

I have moved on to listening to Arvo Pärt’s Festina Lente. This was the first piece I saw performed at my very first orchestra performance. TOP~, my violin instructor for the first year and a half of my undergrad, had let me have her comp tickets to see the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra perform. I still have the program I believe. I was 18 when I saw my first symphony. And I loved every minute of it, especially Pärt’s piece. I’m sure many others have experienced this, but when I sat in my seat listening to this piece and picking my instructor out of the 1st violin section, my eyes welled up with tears while the music made me feel like I was sitting in a wind storm. It is still today one of the most emotionally grabbing pieces of music I have heard. TOP~ is one of the two instructors I’ve had who has played a role in why I want to become an orchestra instructor. If she would have been able to stay in Lincoln, who knows how great of a violinist I would have become, or even a violist since she decided to split my hour lesson in two during my last semester with her. Part violin, part viola. It was great. I continued lessons with the new instructor but withdrew about a month before the end of the semester. I didn’t find myself getting along with her and she was trying to turn me into something I didn’t want to become. And so, I haven’t taken a violin lesson since, which, honestly, is sad. But I at least stayed in orchestra and played violin on my own watch (more folk, fiddle, than classical). I miss the instructors who pushed me to become something well-rounded and diverse. Even though I’m not where I hope to be in my own playing, I hope to at least become a great instructor like the two women who pushed me in my violin studies during high school and beginning of college. I have a lot of growing to do in many aspects of my life. And the wonderful thing about being a musician is that there’s always room to grow. Slightly off path for a moment, this is one of the reasons why I want to move back to Chicago. I grew so much as a person while living there and I feel I can grow further. I am well aware it won’t be easy. I am going to provide you with another excerpt from The World in Six Songs:

“My father gave me a book written by George Plimpton called The X Factor that described how people become experts in their respective fields. Plimpton points out that successful people have had far more failures than unsuccessful people. Or course this seems paradoxical. But the resolution is this: People who eventually become successful have had many, many failures along the way, and what distinguishes them from the rest of the population is that they don’t give up. These leaders - corporate heads, expert chess players, actors, writers, athletes - look at failure differently than everyone else. First, when they fail, they don’t assume that there is anything wrong with them (“I’m not good enough,” “I suck”), nor do they figure that this is a permanent state (“I’m never going to get better,” “I will always suck”). Rather, they look upon each failure as a necessary step toward reaching their ultimate goal. People who become successful see the progress toward a goal as involving a number of steps that will inevitably produce some minor setbacks. “This is something that I need to know in order to reach my goal,” they say to themselves. “And until now, I didn’t even know that I needed to know this. This setback is an opportunity to now go about acquiring the knowledge that is necessary to succeed.””

As summer nears its end, I gain a glimpse more every day of what I want and where I want to go in this life. I know the next few years are going to be intense as I try to get my feet off the ground. I’m just looking forward to everything I’m going to pick up along the way.