Word 65 (The Road)

Three Augusts ago I walked through the doors of UNM’s music building to start another Master’s degree. I was about ten minutes early for the first entrance exam, and I walked into the classroom and walked right out again. It was the closest thing I’ve had in my adult life to a panic attack. At the time I could only articulate it like this: it was unbearable to walk into a room of fresh Master’s students and look in their eyes and see that they hadn’t yet been forced to confront the fact that they are completely and totally fucked.

Three years later, I am prepared to explain this differently.

The deeply unnatural thing about music school is that it is predicated on criticism. Your teacher’s job is to fill the hour with ideas about what’s wrong with your music. They are paid to care, or pretend as much, and to provide critique. If you look up to them, you might see this as a skill worth developing, and you too might begin to value and practice criticism.

As soon as you leave music school, you will never be in this situation again. As soon as you walk out those doors, the default position is that no one knows who you are and no one gives a shit about your music. No one is going to expend brain power critiquing it, and no one wants to hear your critiques either. Actually the situation is the reverse: now you have to do something music school never prepared you for, and I don’t mean operating Quickbooks. You have to come up with reasons for people to care.

You will find at times that you yourself have joined the group of people who do not care, and you will be forced to conjure reasons to keep yourself in the game, too.

They might not want to admit it, but this truth breaks a lot of young musicians’ hearts, and it’s why a lot of them quit within a few years, or end up back in the institution. For those of us who believe that a life in music is not necessarily the same as a life in music school, the road is a cold and bumpy one.

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When one performance is described as “more musical” than another, I’m reminded of the encouragement to “just be yourself.” Is it possible to behave otherwise? Can any music be unmusical?

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A piano teacher once told me I wasn’t Horowitz. Good to know: I’ll add him to the list. To date I have also determined that I am not Robert Oppenheimer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or Jim Davis, the cartoonist of Garfield. Recent studies as to whether I am Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933, thirtieth president of these United States) are within the margin of error.

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Addendum to Word 63, on Bob Dylan: it would be appropriately Shakespearean to describe the current phase of his career not as a third act but as a fifth.