Sarah Valadez

80518735
Professor Gina Lawrence
7/06/2014
Mind Over Music
Anxious people are often the ones wearing the dunce hats sitting on a stool in the corner.
Anxiousness is often bred by some awful mixture of a very draining and sterile environment and
some sort of pressure that is contained within and pulsates, beating like a drum against the walls
of the room and your ribcage. I am the proud dunce-ette in the corner. I sit there on my stool with
a strand of stinging pride, with the sweat squeezing out of my temples like tears, and that lump in
my throat choking me with an impending sob. I wear the badge of stupidity. I sit there in the
thinker position (to hide the rash red blush thats spreading like a plague across my face) reveling
in the stares. THEY judge me. But I cloak my utter sense of stupidity as best as I can with the
shred of a veil that is the miniscule belief that maybe Im not as mediocre as I think I am.
When you sit in the back of an orchestra for a long time, your seat becomes saturated with the
association of My God she is terrible. When you start to work your way so as to further
yourself from that seat as much as possible, you start to shed the skin that is your label. You
move away from an identity that has been imposed on you because you were hindered by the
inability to speak the language of your occupation. I couldnt speak music, for many years. I was
like the one international student who never speaks because theyre afraid to try after being
labeled for not being able to speak in the first place. I learned to play a cello by association. I
may as well have been reading a novel by associating the appearance of every word with a few
select sounds I did know. I was capped from the beginning. I eventually got better at associating
sounds with placing my fingertips at random on the soundboard through practice. It was my
loophole to learning how to read music. It felt a bit like a dirty secret.
The vastness of my musical ignorance was soon exposed to a classroom of what were prodigies
compared to me. To continue the trend of making this anecdote rain metaphors, I will compare
the plight I thrust myself into, to waltzing into a salon in 19
th
century France, with zero reading
and writing skills whatsoever, and boldly stepping atop a table in answer to a challenge to argue
the lack of philosophical merits of Flauberts latest novel.
The differing musical clefts were lost on my ignorance, reading what is the musical equivalent
of cat, dog , run, walk required an exhausting amount of brain power that I began to
believed I lacked. Loopholes were sent to damnation, my shield of 7 years of cello was flung
out the window. Seven years of loop-holed cello, seven years of squandered talent? I didnt think
I had any at all on the day that the man who embodied order and brilliance decided to play
Russian roulette with us. Walking into a classroom fronted by Angerstein was treading into a
dangerous game, his perfectionist tendencies, eloquence, and delightfully conniving sense of
humor made music theory wonderful and made me feel all the more like a bumbling idiot
whenever I answered (mostly wrongly so) Urrrrm, this is a Dorian scale? as well as a sense of
dejectedness at being the worst student of perhaps one of the greatest teachers I have ever had.
On this particular day, Angerstein began the dangerous game of all of you stand up, you
answer correctly you can sit down.you answer wrong (he paused) and you have to keep
standing for another round, he said with a smirk. I would of enjoyed as someone watching from
the side, and of course, I and the rest of the class dunces were left standing. I would like to take
a moment here to proudly express that I believe (or would like to believe rather), that I was the
prince among fools in this case. It was times like these, when I stared at the projected alto scale
on the wall and struggled to name five little notes that I felt that hot rash red blush drench my
face with embarrassment. It was after moments upon moments like these meshed with a similar
past of shamefully sitting through those awful years as the worst cellist in school, that fully
bloomed into already looming feelings of mediocrity.
Every day of attempting to decipher instructions written in plain English was proof to feed my
paranoia that I was destined to a life just below the line of mediocrity, The majority of the
people around you understand and play better than you, this thought resonated and fed my
anxiousness over my teetering identity. My supposed lack of musical talent had always been a
sore spot for me, because it had been a manifestation of an insecurity bred by the fact that I had
always been slow to pick up on anything. Slow to speak, slow to take action, fearful to plunge
into anything, afraid of my own potential. It was a weakness that tugged at me, that capped my
mind from an eagerness to grasp the language of anything for fear of failure.
As this was my senior year of high school, an epiphany was in order, and it came to me in the
form of composition. It was time to apply what we had learned (or not in my case) to the
construction of our own melodies and because of this my sore spot was prodded at more so than
ever. It was a reminder of the feeling that I had untapped potential in something I had always
lovedI recall thinking in that moment what a shame it all was, to love something and not be
able to express it because I had no understanding of the language, no vessel for my passion. I
couldnt compose the seamless melody that was dancing about in my head or play cello with
articulateness. I had shut myself off to a language, one that could express emotion and sublimity
more so than words themselves. My failures were not rooted in mediocrity, no one was pushing
me into a grave; I was digging it for myself.
The remainder of the year saw some advancement on my part in regards to music theory. Most
importantly, my previous presumptions in regards to myself were beginning to be uprooted.
I had always been laughably weak in music and it was made all the more laughable by my
devotion to it. There had always been a yearning to be good at something, anything, to be a part
of something seamless as music. I dont know if I will ever be good enough of a cellist or
musician for people to laud over upon hearing me play, but I have a grasp on the key to being a
part of the seamlessness of music and not the discord that disrupts it.