Lineage

Story of every parent's life.

They say it's only a matter of time until you turn out just like your parents.  You're cruising through your 20s feeling independent and unique until you run straight into the wall of parenthood and find yourself sounding exactly like your mother as you flatly deny a child's request for a later bedtime and fish things out of the garbage disposal. All wild speculation of course since I don't have kids, but my recent experiences teaching have shown me that there's probably a lot of truth to this unintended cycle.

I was incredibly lucky to have the same horn teacher from the time I was a beginner at age 9 until I graduated high school.  This woman saw me almost every week of my childhood, beginning at just 30 minutes at first until my senior year when we'd have marathon 3-hour lessons.  She charged $15 a lesson until 8th grade when she raised her rates to $25.  I didn't know it then, but she really became a second mom to me.  I love my mom dearly (hi mom!) but she wasn't a musician and there were vast expanses of my growth and development that only my teacher witnessed.  And she was an amazing teacher.  I learned to transpose before 5th grade, had complete parts to every Mahler symphony and Stravinsky tone poem before I entered high school, and had a deep understanding of the physics behind brass instruments; all of which seeped into my horn bone marrow in ways that I couldn't have predicted then.  But most significantly, she was just a really really really nice lady.  My other teachers (piano, band, orchestra) were nice too, but nobody could top my horn teacher.  She was always smiling and giggling and never criticized me.  I mean never.  I was a diligent student of course, but come on, never picking at your student is pretty amazing.  In 8 years, I cannot recall her ever seeming annoyed, impatient, or dissatisfied with my progress and despite her busy freelance career, she never seemed like she wanted to be anywhere but in her studio, working away at whatever issue I had that week.  She got me through the grueling and ultimately rewarding college audition process, and I remember crying all the way home from my last lesson before I left for college.  She set me up so beautifully to have a well-rounded life in music; I don't think I could ever adequately express my gratitude for that.

Not rocket science, just music science.

This year was the first year that I've actually had talented students, more than just young beginners who have little musical experience.  And lo and behold, my first teacher is expressing herself through my teaching at almost every turn.  I use the same scales and etude books, the same easy but still musically rich solos, even the same wording to explain what transposition is: "I have an F horn in my hand, and I need to get to a Horn in D.  What do I do?"  (Sounds simple, but it can really mess with your head if you don't explain transposing accurately the first time.)

The thing I've been noticing the most, though, is that I'm turning out to be a really nice teacher.

This is a bit surprising to me.  I always thought I'd take after my piano teacher, a very erudite and caustic theory scholar who assigned me thorny contemporary recordings to study and Thomas Mann books to read.  I'm much more like him when it comes to being my own teacher, often critical and always looking to up the ante.  But with my students, I find myself being very friendly, warm, and encouraging.  It's not that I don't care about their progress, I just want them to enjoy our lessons and enjoy playing what can be an incredibly frustrating instrument.  I want to be pleasant, to elicit their best selves and that's just easier if you're consistently friendly and kind.

This past weekend while visiting my parents, I met a young girl in the neighborhood who's playing horn in school.  She says she chose the horn because she grew up hearing me practice in my living room (heart: warmed) and she's taking lessons from this very same teacher, who I thought had retired.  Talking to this girl about our shared teacher made me so very happy.  I saw a lot of myself in her earnestness and desire to ask all the right questions about what she should be doing.  And thinking about her in lessons learning all the same exercises and tricks that I learned was so cosmically comforting.  Just like your parents, you can never really appreciate what your teachers gave you while you're growing up.  But somehow I absorbed enough of the warmth and love that my teacher gave me to pass it on in the zany disjointed world of New York City.  I am really proud to discover that I take after Sally; the universe needs more people like her.

I actually listened to "The Circle of Life" after writing this last paragraph.
Everything I learned in life I learned from Rafiki.

Step into the Light

There are experiences in life when, even as you're living them, you just know that this time will forever change you.  The important moments when you first open up to your best friend, have your first solo travel adventure, have your heart broken- where your self dissolves into this universal, transcendent vitality.  And even though you know you'll be talking about these experiences for the rest of your life, you also know the words will seem adulterated, woefully inadequate, pebbles in the ocean of what you were feeling then- growth.  Transformation.

Office for the week.  Heavy on the X-ray machines...

So, apologies for the grandiose intro, but I had one such experience last week working with 20 incarcerated men at a maximum security prison in South Carolina.  My colleagues and I received a grant to facilitate a songwriting workshop for a special community within the prison dedicated to safe, open living through communal education.  Most of these men have life sentences without parole, most of them have been behind bars for 20+ years.  They have now committed to being accountable to their cell-mates, teaching classes on any subject of which they have knowledge (from German to bee-keeping), and living without locked doors.  I have many reflections on what kind of integrity it takes to learn something new with so many hard knocks against them, but I'll save those for another post.  For now, I just want to express my gratitude that I am a musician.

It's such an arts education platitude these days, but music does truly connect people in a way that nothing else can.  In the 5 days we spent working, writing, teaching, and jamming out with these men, we got to know their personalities and life stories.  They wrote poetry which we helped them set to music and then they performed alongside us.  If only I could share all of the songs they wrote.  Unfortunately we haven't received permission to do so from the Department of Corrections, but these songs were moving, tender, and powerfully honest.  These men shared, in the action-verb sense of that word.  They were also crazy-talented.  Several of them could be gigging musicians in NYC, most of them sang quite well, and all of them learned the fundamentals of music theory in about 20 minutes.
Outside of the actual workshop, the men were collaborating in a way they had never previously.  Several of them reunited with their wives during this week after decades (!) apart.  Most of them described how optimistic they felt at the end of this week for the first time in years.  One of the most grisly, tough guys has a "poetry notebook" now.

I've never been a religious person, but our culminating concert felt like one of those ecstatic, testimony-filled Baptist church services where people cry and dance and laugh.  And we were just as moved as they were!  Yet despite the personal proclamations, the week was about music in its most nuts-and-bolts form.  Sure, it's great to make a grown man cry (well, sorta...) but it was more about the chords we used to transition to a chorus.  And it was about finding just that perfect note to sing "dream" on.

Here's the truth-iest lesson I experienced: the more you make it about the music, the more it becomes about the Big Stuff.  If you can learn and create alongside fellow musicians, while looking them in the eye and shaking their hand, you will connect in a way that seems ridiculously, overwhelmingly
human.

I will never forget these guys' generosity and willingness to trust us.  I will never forget hearing my name sung in a Boyz II Men-style thank you ballad.  I will never forget feeling so relevant.  I think this is the first time I have definitely, no-question made the world a better place through music.  Or rather, made the world a place through better music.  Also, there were some sweet hip hop French horn licks.  Holla.

I google imaged "transformation" and this came up.  Metaphors y'all.

Cone of Honesty

Truth serum. And it's gluten-free!

Because it's a rainy Friday afternoon and I'm feeling introspective as I eat my quinoa (#stuffwhitepeoplelike), I'd like to get just a lil' bit real.  Over the past couple months as I have battled back from the Hydra-like tonsillitis that just won't die and come to terms with the fact that I'll be severely under-employed come July 1st, I have realized how much anxiety is wrapped up in my relationship with my horn.  Ever since I padded my practice resume in 4th grade summer band and subsequently won an award for diligence (coming clean, folks), I have treated horn and music as my vehicle for achievement.  And achievement means a lot to me, for personal probably-healthy reasons and for societal probably-unhealthy reasons.  I have had a relatively adventurous life for my 26 years on this planet because of these achievements.  Most of my friendships have been made as a result of these achievements, most of my meaningful artistic experiences, most of my opinions on the world at large.  However, most of my identity is also wrapped up in these achievements.

A few weeks ago I was talking to an important someone who is struggling with anxiety.  She related that after a completely innocent mistake in her day-to-day life, she was so angry and disappointed with herself that she actually said out loud that she hated herself.  She felt unworthy of respect and love, of even being alive, because of this stupid gaffe she had committed.  At the time, I was both empathetic and moved that she was being so honest with me, and that she had gotten to such a harmful point with her personal guilt.  But then off I went to my afternoon rehearsal, back in my own comfy sweater of a life.  That rehearsal was not so great for me.  My lips were tired, worn out, I couldn't get my sound to focus, I was struggling to play smoothly or really at all in the high register, and I was embarrassed at not being able to sound my best in front of colleagues.  After the rehearsal, I was upset and angry at myself.  I went home to punish-practice, to "beat my lips into submission" as an old friend would call it.  Later that same day, I went for a run despite a knee injury, pushed through the pain and ended up not being able to walk for the next 2 days.

So there I was sitting in my living room, icing my knee and running through an internal monologue about my horn playing: "Why do I suck so much when I'm tired?  Why do I get tired?  I should practice more!  Like, 3 hours every day.  No, wait, 4 hours.  4 hours every day of only long tones.  My colleagues deserve better from me.  How could I let them down?  They must think I suck.  Even though I won this position, they probably think it was a fluke I got this job..." And so on.  The kind of stuff that if I had actually said it out loud to a friend, there would be some serious mental health red flags happening.  I was putting myself through pain, both physical and emotional, because I did not want to be seen as weak, as lazy, as any of the other adjectives that I never hear during the Olympics binge I'm currently on.

That day was the first time I realized that maybe this is not the way I should be living my life in music, or really my life at all.  Feeling like an unworthy person because my high B-flat had fuzz in it that day?  Not okay.  Not even a little bit okay.  But it got me thinking.  Where did this attitude come from?  How did I get to this point?  Admittedly I have always been an "achiever" in the current Millennial detrimental-to-the-psyche way.  But I didn't always have such baggage with the horn.  There was a time, even if it was only for a few months right at the beginning, when I couldn't have known I was good.  When I was just making music, playing tunes, experiencing tingly feelings in my lips that cracked me up.
I just came back from visiting my alma mater this week.  It was wonderful to see my old teacher and my old stomping grounds, feel nostalgic about the glory years.  I thought it would be a total refresher in my horn life; and it was, in a way.  My teacher is a demi-god horn player, and hearing her play was worth the journey alone.  But I also was struck by how competitive everything felt in music school.  There are no sound-proof practice rooms, everyone takes the same auditions, plays for each other at least once a week, socializes together, hears the same concerts, takes the same classes.  And man, it SUCKS.  Coming back for a visit, I now understand why my horn playing has been wrapped in anxiety for so many years.  How could it not with that kind of learning environment?
I walked the halls, listening to excerpts, and I just wanted to knock on everyone's door and say, "You are not your horn (violin, trombone, etc.); you are a completely fascinating and powerful person even if you never play a right note again."  Which I didn't because that wouldn't have gone over well for anyone.  Crazy alumni preaching tends to rub people the wrong way...

I'm writing all this down both because it's healthy to share and because I think almost every musician I know has felt this way.  There is a culture of punishment in classical music, of a Herculean effort to win at all costs.  Beat your friends, win that job!  Group warm-up rooms at auditions are cesspools of insecurity, and almost everyone has become skilled at the passive-aggressive Bragbooking that lets everyone know, "Oh, I got in to that school/advanced in that audition/was offered that gig too.  You are no more special or talented than me, comrade."  And guys, I'm over it.  I'm just over it.

I do not know what my future career holds, I do not know where my horn and I will journey in the next few years, but I do know that I don't want my self-worth to be at the mercy of vibrating lips and a hunk of metal for the rest of my life.  That's just silly.