Of the many long-shot, risky career and life options I had given my musical and artistic DNA, why did I not choose music? Nothing I am good at has much potential to make me enough money to survive. (I've taught myself that quite well in the last decade.) Music has been around me since my fetal womb life. Both my parents are accomplished musicians. My father still composes, arranges and conducts, and while he is not as much of a performer as he is a quietly strong musical archivist, composer, teacher and general leader his skill at all these things is daunting. My late mother was a pianist/accompanist/opera coach/flutist extraordinaire who I remember practicing constantly as my sister and I were falling asleep at night. The grand piano in our living room would vibrate and waft up the stairs into my room as she crafted circusy Rimski-Korsakov phrases or struggled through passages from some modern, dissonant composition, turning passages over and over again until they were technically and expressively flawless (these were the times I'd lie awake waiting for it to stop or drift off into repetitive nightmares). Other times, Debussy and Chopin would lull me into a familiar sleep of peaceful dreams. To this day, I've never heard a pianist as able to convey emotion and intensity so fitting to each individual piece of music and so true to what I imagined was every composer's vision. She took us to operas, recitals and concerts almost every weekend (many of which she was performing in or helping pull off), had us cavorting with well-known, highly-skilled, probably often famous musicians (I still don't think I know fully the scope of those I met throughout my formative years), composers and artists starting when we were babies, with no fear of how we might behave in places where we needed to be quiet. In fact, I think we just simply behaved because we just knew that music required reverence and we respected the work it took to craft and perform it. I know I personally saw it as something sacred that could stop time and space (and I still do). There was no end to the new dimensions I could hear, even when listening to the same pieces over and over again. I probably innately knew (without even knowing) more about the different styles and periods of what people consider "classical music" at age 4 than a lot of adults (even musicians) ever know about it.
So, why did I ultimately rebel against an official career in music? I really didn't know what I had. I think for a long time I assumed everyone was surrounded by music, got to attend operas and meet hugely talented musicians (and hear them play) every weekend. I assumed everyone could play the cello or piano whenever they wanted to or just pick up any instrument at the drop of the hat and know how it worked (and even be able to play it) in a few hours ... or a few minutes.
I always studied with the very best teachers in the area and played on the very best instruments, even though we definitely didn't have much money. My parents made sure of that. We had a Steinway Grand in our living room (with an insane story about my grandfather finding it being used as a chopping block in a restaurant kitchen and buying it from them for my mother as a gift attached). When I was not even six, my mother came home with a cello (which had belonged to Sir Georg Solti's daughter) and simply said, "I want a cellist in this family, so someone is going to play this." Since my sister was already playing the violin (and we were both playing the piano), the task fell on me. There was no question.
Starting at about eight-years old, I played piano guild competitions. I had to memorize a handful (I believe eight-ten) of piano pieces and accompanying scales and arpeggios. It was a lot of pressure, and it was eventually what brought about the beginning of the end of my "professional child prodigy" career (at least on piano). When I was about ten, I did a competition and got one point off because my judge felt that my artistic expression was a little off in a Mozart Sonata. My score was the equivalent of 99/100, I was ten (maybe not even -- it was a few months shy of that birthday), and I was playing pieces that a lot of pianists don't even play until high school or college. But a kindly-put note from an old man (that I STILL have in a scrap book) named Fran Shuler-Ellis crushed my world. I cried so much that I couldn't go back to school that day after the competition (even though my mom made fun of the judge mercilessly, as he was someone in the artistic community she felt was a hack and we had a roller skating party that night). Mercifully, my mom ended the guild competitions then and there and loosened the rigorousness of piano lessons.
I wonder if she should've pushed me, and if I would still love music now or would've found my own way to my current musical experiments if she had. Am I even as good a person as I could've been, or did I ruin everything because of these decisions? Did I actually quit because I caved under the pressure or because I am actually by nature lazy? I wonder, I wonder, I wonder. Either way, oftenI feel like a failure that continues to regularly fall short of family's and others' expectations, and I think it's because I labeled myself a quitter, possibly as early as that last piano competition.
As a party trick in the car or at social functions (starting at about five or six and then all the way through high school), my mother would often get me to name the composer of the piece playing on the radio/record player/etc., which I could always do in a few notes, without even knowing how. If I didn't get it exactly right (which happened rarely), it was always someone that had lived and composed in the same era or was a derivative of the composer I had guessed. As time wore on, I could name the piece and even the movement in some cases, in fewer and fewer notes. I feel like most of my musical abilities come from complete instinct, but then I look at my understanding of things like music theory and technique and history and realize that it is likely a combination of instinct and an accumulation of a lifetime of study of and complete immersion in music. I've just never felt like it counted because I don't have a sheet of paper from a university/college telling me that I am officially allowed to be a "musician."
After college, where I did play in orchestra and take cello and voice lessons despite the English B.A. I took with me at the end, I decided I was going to continue on and get as many music degrees as possible in cello performance so I could be an official orchestral performer. Unfortunately, I found myself procrastinating practicing for auditions (even though I did practice 4-5 hours per day, 6 days per week for about 9 months) with writing, and ended up deciding that meant I should probably be pursuing a writing MFA instead of forcing myself to do the other thing that I'd worked my whole life to do.
If I looked at my writing and reading life, starting with the first even remotely lengthy book I ever devoured, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, I would probably find a lot of the same trends as in my musical life. I am a creative house divided against itself, and that truth might never end. I may have to continue to be bi-creative and maybe will never know what I want to be when I grow up ... forever. It makes me long for some title to grab onto, like "stockbroker" or "lawyer" or "doctor." Even "cellist" or "pianist" would be a neat little compartment that might make me wonder less about what my past means and why I turned out this way and how unintentionally ungrateful I may have been at times for how lucky I was to be surrounded by such artistic richness during my formative years and beyond.
I can't stop listening to Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2 again lately, most particularly the Adagio movement, which is my favorite musical creation on the planet. (My sister HATES it, because of Eric Carmen's "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again," which blatantly ripped off Rachmaninoff's Adagio melody and is indeed fairly awful.) I never managed to play it in any orchestra, though I've played so many of my other favorites, like the Beethoven Cello Sonatas (I played the first one, accompanied by my mother on Mother's Day as part of my senior recital in college -- again, why did I not appreciate this?), Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" and so many Mozart quartets and quintets that they were spilling out my ears at one point. I even played some movements of piano concertos with my junior high orchestra, as well as an entire cello concerto during the same time. Before my mom died, she bought me some Rachmaninoff cello music to learn in hopes we would one day play it together, but that is not the same. I will play the Rachmaninoff Second Symphony before I die. I'm a writer and a do-er, so mark my words.
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