Today, I wanted to write a little about my history with playing a musical instrument. I began playing the piano when I was five years old, which was far too young and I quickly grew frustrated and disappointed and quit, but only for a brief period. I started playing the piano again when I was six, with a different teacher. I’m sad to say that I can’t remember my second piano teacher’s name, because she was the nicest lady. She never lost her patience, she was always gentle, and she rewarded me with stickers. (I was a very sticker motivated child. Whenever I went to the pediatrician’s, I would always ask for a shot because they’d give me a sticker afterwards.)
When I was eight years old, we moved from Colorado to Missouri and I switched piano teachers. My new piano teacher – whose name I appear to have blocked from my memory banks – was a mean old man. He wanted me to be a prodigy. I had to get every note, every beat spot on, before he would let me start learning a new piece. He crushed the love of playing the piano right out of me and after a couple years of his tutelage, I could no longer stand being his student and so I quit piano.
I next took up the violin, which is a devilishly hard instrument to play. I learned through an after-school strings lesson taught by one of the professors from the nearby university. On Mondays, we’d have a big group lesson taught by the professor and then later in the week, we’d meet with our small groups. The small groups were taught my music education majors. My small group teacher the first year I played the violin, was a lovely young woman, who was kind and knew how to teach elementary school students without driving us to tears. She gave me a beanie baby bee at the end of the year as a reward for being a good student.
The second year, my first teacher had graduated and my second teacher had no idea how to nurture young children. She’d yell at us and call us stupid and blame us for not learning a piece. I frequently left her lessons on the verge of tears. After months of abuse, I quit the violin. I sometimes wish I hadn’t, because I did enjoy playing it, and I often wonder if I ever would have gotten the hang of it if I’d kept playing.
In fifth grade, we all had to learn to play the recorder. I think we learned jingle bells and hot cross buns, nothing too fancy. It was to see if any of us wanted to join band once we got to middle school. I did not join band. I’d had enough of abusive teachers and the middle school band teacher looked scary to me, so once I got to middle school, I focused my efforts of chorus. I think, what I liked so much about chorus, was that it was a group effort and no one was ever singled out for individual criticism. I sang in both school and community choruses all through middle and high school and never really thought about playing another musical instrument.
Then, when I came home early from my first semester at college to recover from a reemergence of Lyme’s disease, my parents bought a mandolin and a beginners mandolin book. They bought it because the music store was going out of business and it was a good little instrument for not a bad price. I started going through the book and teaching myself some chords. I liked it, I thought maybe the mandolin could be my instrument. I took some lessons, but my teacher was not good at progressing from point A to point B, he kept skipping around, one week teaching me the beginning of one song and then the next week moving on to something completely different. Needless to say, this was not the most conducive method for actually learning to play an instrument. I continued trying to play with the four chords I knew and was still struggling when my mother had the idea to form her band.
When mom first formed her band, it consisted of herself on guitar, my dad on banjo, and our friend Jesse on mandolin. I was not needed. I was content with that. I’d never aspired to be in a band. Mom tried to find a bass player, but everyone wanted to be paid. As a new band, playing primarily at nursing homes, there was no way anyone was getting paid, so a month before their premiere performance, my mother looked at me and said, “Emily, you have big hands. You’re a bass player now.” I stared at her like a dear in headlights.
My mom taught me the very basics, I floundered through the first few performances, frequently coming to tears, because I wasn’t very good, I kept missing notes, it was all too fast. I don’t know why I didn’t quit, or maybe I do. I think that before it occurred to me to quit, I’d started to catch up to the band. I no longer felt like every song was a race and I was the only one lagging behind. And even though I hadn’t really wanted to play the bass to begin with, I began to love it.
I’ve been playing the bass since September 2013 and only started playing the upright bass in March of this year. I’m still a beginner, but for the first time in my life, I feel like I understand my instrument and no one is yelling at me for a single missed note or for getting the rhythm slightly off. I’ve finally learned that I learn an instrument best by playing with other people, by striving to play on a level with those around me. For me, music is a team sport, which is probably why I’ve always liked singing in choruses.
Thank you for reading
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