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Many of us had stories about being young and having parents put them in music lessons. "But you could have quit." Leo countered.
"I began my career as a percussionist." "Oh really?"
"Yeah, I played a color-coded xylophone."
I was three years old when I saw The Sound of Music. It left an indelible impression on me. I would go around the house singing the songs by heart. I loved Liesl's voice in particular. Incidentally, when I took German in high school, my German name was Liesl. I had one of those Fischer Price xylophones and used to tap out the notes until they sounded right: "Do, a deer, a female deer, re, a drop of golden sun..." There's photos of me banging on the piano at my grandparents' house as a toddler, fascinated by this object sitting in their parlor that made sound:
Instead, I learned music theory, form and analysis. I played in two string quartets and several orchestras. I learned about music history from the ancient Greeks to John Adams in broad, sweeping classes that covered hundreds of years at once. My music took me to Dallas, Salt Lake City, Toronto, Boston. I took a closer look at the development of rock and roll, at early music performance practice, at chamber music literature, at violin repertoire, at the history of jazz. I took drop the needle tests and juries. I read scholarly journals, attended lectures by musicologists, took dates to the Cleveland Orchestra. I spent a year with a motet by Josquin des Prez.
"Why? You could have quit."
Because. Because there was something magical about hitting the keys of a piano at age three and having sound come out, and there's still something magical about drawing a bow across a string in just the right way. There's a quiet hum when I'm playing a chord, at that moment when the pitch locks and the beats disappear and you feel the clarity of the interval. The tactile sensation, the muscle memory, the years spent training your ear, listening to masters of the instrument, the exchange across generations of other people who find the same magic in the process as I do.
It is miraculous to me to read musical notation, to take for granted this literacy. To know how to translate that manuscript into motion, knowing that the note is a map to a piano key or the placement of my hand along a string. To not be aware of this process, this incredible synergy, every single day of my life.
I do not know any other way of being. All that I learn about music becomes so entwined, such a part of me that I forget where it came from. It seems as if it has always been there, as if it was waiting behind a door until I came in and unlocked it with a little skeleton key. It's hard to remember a time when I couldn't read music, and I forget that this language is as foreign to some as a page of Russian to me.
I am a musician because I am a musician. I define myself in the music of others and in the music I learn how to create. Music is a celebration of oxygen, of present tense, of being alive. Could I say the same of any other field? Could I find this incessant passion for any other thing in life? I don't really care to find out.
Music is so complex and it has all these organic mechanisms and life forces and flora growing inside it. It's so unpredictable, like nature, and you can't put it in a box. It's belittling it to say music is left or right or pro-this or anti-that. It's a much bigger force than that. -Björk
