Back to Music… at least for now.

I made a lot of mistakes at music school, but I’m starting to think that maybe GOING to music school wasn’t one of them after all. Sure, if I could go back and rewrite my life I probably would’ve only minored in music and majored in something a bit more marketable, but I’m willing to consider the possibility that things happened this way for a reason. I’m also considering the possibility that my main motivation for abandoning music and planning to join the military was anger stemming from the circumstances that forced me to leave California. As painful as it all was, I wouldn’t undo any of it, because it remade me into a better, more responsible, thankful and humble person. Working at the hotel these six months has humbled me quite a bit more, and helped me get over my shyness, it’s also reaffirmed some of my confidence in my creative gifting. My first year since getting my degree has been more informative than I could have imagined, and I’m ready for more.

So anyway, last Friday I was hired to be a music teacher again, though I was a bit reluctant at first. I was still clinging to the idea of taking charge of my life and making something better out of it. I don’t have too many solid answers as to why I feel different now, but there are a few snippets that could form an explanation.

1) I was right that I had been irresponsible. During my angry post-California life re-evaluation I was shocked and disgusted at my lack of responsibility, not providing for myself and expecting other people to pick up the slack. I was right to be disgusted by this, because that’s an awful, prideful and boneheaded way to live. What I neglected to realize is that I can be responsible and be a musician. It is possible to make a living in the business, usually by teaching, but there are also other ways. Hope and faith are not the same thing as irresponsibility, even though irresponsibility can disguise itself as faith.

2) My plan to retake my life, though theoretically sound, wasn’t necessarily God’s ultimate plan for my life, nor the happiest. Now neither was sitting around watching Netflix in California, but that wasn’t doing music either.

3) Re-tooling a life can really take the steam out of it. Sometimes, even if a plan doesn’t look perfect, sticking with it can get you a lot further than redoing years of work. That’s not to say I’m just settling on what I’m already doing, but I do think there’s a reason I’ve taken these roads that led to music school and it would be a waste of time to completely change careers.

I don’t know, I’m not sure. I may keep this teaching gig for awhile and still decide to go to the military. There still seems to be no better way to pay off my loans.

Piano

I’ve been playing some jazz piano the last two nights, and it’s stirring up a lot of thoughts and memories, so I thought I’d write about them.

Two things are important to know though, Jazz Piano is not something you learn overnight, and I’m not very good at it… yet.

Last year, as my graduate school / California experience was beginning, I made the decision (at the recommendation of my Comp professor) to essentially switch my primary instrument to piano. It was the best fit for his composition method and the best medium for learning new material, and I agreed with his assessment on the matter. Even now when I’m considering pursuing a non-musical career my desire to retain at least one instrument drifts back to the piano.

So anyway, I was going to make the switch. I made many of the initial efforts, playing the exercises he recommended, and I had a good time doing it, but the transformation didn’t stick. Though that may not be saying much as the graduate school thing didn’t stick either (because of the debt situation, I didn’t want to go bury myself in debt the way our government does) and with all the crises involved with ending my stay in Cali I didn’t have much desire to practice and so it never really kept happening.

Above all though, what I’ve lacked in the process is patience and perseverance. One thing that’s always been a stumbling block for me is how long it takes the body to learn a new skill. One’s brain can pick up new ideas in a snap, almost instantly sometimes, but the body takes months of repetition to build new muscle memories. Thank God it also takes forever for it to forget them, or I’d be much worse off than I am.

When I was in the highly structured and well-organized band program at Cypress Falls, I was never much aware of the process of creating muscle memory. I knew that we did certain exercises everyday, and I knew they were beneficial in some way, but I didn’t realize that I was drilling in muscle patterns that would last a life time. I wasn’t in charge of the process. Even moving into college I had private teachers on my back and frequent band classes that allowed me to develop these memories without completely understanding just how long, and just how much consistency it takes to make them.

Even now, I sit down to play Jazz Piano, and I think “I understand these chords perfectly, why do my fingers react so slow, I guess I must just be a bad piano player” it took me several minutes to really put two and two together and remember how slow the body is to learn new things. Thankfully my experience in California did put a lot of good memory into my hands to play most of these chords, albeit a bit awkwardly, at sight.

I realized another thing that may have held me back from really giving myself the kind of physical drill and repetition that’s necessary to play an instrument. Fear. I’ve been largely unaware that there has always been a fear in the back of my mind that I would invest years learning this one physical skill, playing an instrument and one tiny injury or misuse could take it away in a moment. I think that’s kept me somewhat aloof and guarded about intense practice. It didn’t help that I struggled with hand pain while I was in California. I think this must’ve subconsciously kept me from really seriously investing the long term practice hours it takes to truly learn the skill of playing an instrument. I didn’t mind learning about it music mentally, but my fear and misconceptions about the necessary time kept me from fully developing my skills. It’s hard to believe I was so off about such a basic concept of music. My teachers and peers and even third party media told me that music takes practice, and I thought I knew what they meant, but somehow it never fully fit into my brain that it takes hours, over the course of months, to make those sort of improvements.

That’s not to say I never practiced or developed muscle memories, I was just not fully aware or in control of the process, and I suffered for it. It’s so funny because that is literally THE. PRIMARY. PROCESS. of learning to make music. No wonder something always seemed off. I rode by on mental talent (which is good enough to make good grades in music classes) without grasping this thing that’s at the core of making music. I treated music like any other class, but math doesn’t take a lifetime of drilling because the brain learns so much faster than the body. But now I more fully understand this process, or at least I’ve made some sort of new connection that will help me be more patient.

And now, I feel like I want to become a piano player, and it feels like the first time.

P.S. Yes, I’m still considering a non-musical career. I’m not sure I would enjoy the lifestyle that most musicians live, but I have an open mind.

Things I’ve Learned

I learned a lot with my crash-and-burn California graduate school experience. In particular were life skills in general like “you need a job” and “no one’s going to take care of everything for you.” I also learned a bit about what it takes to “make it” in the music industry. That would be luck, talent and friends.

But anyway, that’s not most of what this post is about.

One of the greatest stresses I carried on my shoulders in California was trying to turn make music that would make me a living, and it just about ruined it for me. I’ve always been pretty crazy with my music, putting stuff together that no one group in particular is going to want to buy. Even though everything about the commercial music business enchanted me, there’s nothing in my music as-is that’s terribly sellable, and knowing made me endlessly stress out about how I could make a living. I don’t want to be a teacher, so I sort of melted down.

But this is how I feel now, and I apologize if I’m skipping around, but I am writing this post for my self, so whatever. I am pretty good at writing music, and I’m going to continue writing music. And to quote an army recruiter, the general public “isn’t signing my checks, and I’m not married to [it]” so it doesn’t really have to matter to me if people buy it or not. Usually people have gained artistic freedom from a wealthy patron or a university job. I think I can gain it by getting a normal job (maybe the military, I don’t know, it sounds like a good option) so I don’t have to depend on music for my survival. After all, I have $30,000 in student loans to pay back, which is going to take some serious income. Entry-level “professional” musicians are lucky if they even get to eat some days and I can tolerate that, so at least for now I do need a real job. And who knows, maybe someday I’ll make enough money with my wacky video game music to quit my day job, but if not, whatever. I’m not holding my breath like I was in California.

I’ve been seeing the military as a chance to gain financial independence, develop myself as a leader and a person, learn some awesome job skills and travel the world. Though there were a few times over the past few months when I would admit to myself that the only thing I might prefer over the military would be if I could be a touring musician. The music I’m writing now probably won’t lead to that, but no one knows the future.

I do know that I need to stop looking for handouts and actually work for my living. Who would’ve thought?

A Good Thing

Maybe it’d be a good thing for me to blog when I’m not depressed? It’s funny how quickly I can change my mind about something. It’s like for me to make a major life decision I have to allow myself to change my mind dozens of times over a period of several months just to see what sticks. Right when things start to seem really clear (like thinking I should go to Navy OCS) I start feeling sad about leaving my instruments (some of which I could probably bring with me anyway, but it’s nice that I’m thinking about that again) and I start freaking out about my car again, which shouldn’t make me nervous, even though I do need to take action. I feel like I can’t afford to maintain my car, but I haven’t even run the numbers to see.

Oh the difficult sting of inexperience…

Some more random reasons to join the military…

“Students in other fields are not proving so lucky, with liberal arts majors faring worst.”

“A bachelor’s degree now fetches nearly $10,000 less than two years ago…”

“Still worse are the graduates of the past two years who have failed to find the all-important entry level job in their chosen field, a loss that can take decades to overcome.”

“It is very costly for young people to have trouble getting started on their careers,” said Nobel laureate Peter Diamond, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor.

See, one thing I’m going for with the military idea is a fast start to my career, rather than the awfully slow one that would otherwise be the case…

Why does someone with a bachelor’s degree in music never touch his instruments?

That’s a great question, one that hopefully will get mulled over for some time. See, I went through 5.5 years of music education. In the first five I earned a bachelor’s degree, then I went into grad school for one semester. Then it all just stopped. I went into debt somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000, which is shockingly low these days. Now I work the front desk at a hotel for $8.50 an hour, and I can’t bring myself to write or practice any form of music. I barely even eek out a whisper when I sing at church, and I used to be a pretty decent small-time worship leader.

While I was going to school, I was pretty hardcore, I was all over the place. At various times I played flute in the band, sang in the choir, taught music lessons, played bass guitar in the jazz band and lead worship at my church. Sometimes I was doing 3-4 of these at the same time. I aced my classes (graduated with a 3.62) and everyone knew I had great talent, but I think it was only my private instructors who noticed the lurking problem with me. My compositional output (my major!) and instrument practice time where abysmally low. No doubt I have some kind of truly unique talent, because I still scored well, and I was occasionally able to put out quite a bit of music (enough to fill o 50+ minute student recital) but I knew something was wrong.

I wasn’t applying myself, I wasn’t working as I felt a disciplined person should, and I wasn’t achieving at nearly the level of which I knew I was capable. The main indicator of this was time. It has been said that what people spend most of their time doing is what they truly care about, and I never spent time practicing music.

Looking back on this, the phrase “what they truly care about” is what really stands out there. I did not, I must repeat this, I absolutely DID NOT go into music because it was something I truly care about. When I was in 8th grade, during a french class discussion, I was asked (in french) what kind of music I enjoyed listening to, and my response was “I don’t listen to music” or, “I don’t enjoy listening to music.” Everyone thought I was extremely weird, probably especially because I was in band.

I would say that it wasn’t until I dropped out of graduate music school (for financial, debt-related reasons) that I really started listening to music regularly. Before that, everything had to be forced. I thought I was just disciplining myself, but now I realize that the idea that music could be my primary career field was mostly, if not totally, artificial.

So why did I go into music as a primary area of study? Arrogance. Arrogance, laziness and short-sightedness. I noticed that I had greater degree of technical understanding of music than anyone at my high school. I felt like teaching at a public school would be a minimum-effort job where my natural talent would automatically float me to the top. And lastly, it somehow didn’t occur to me that I would ever really have to work for a living, so I never studied a marketable trade in college. Maybe I should have realized that technical knowledge and curiosity of music is natural for very technical people, and that it leads to an awesome college music career, but it doesn’t set you up to be a true artist, because true artists somehow seem to deal with fewer absolutes.

Frankly, I wish I had known that I was never the right person to pursue a career in music, or probably any art.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love music, and I hope someday I will pick up my instruments again (this time without having to force myself) and I hope I’ll achieve some of my musical ambitions that still haven’t left me. I want to write and orchestrate chamber music for worship, I want to produce electronic music, and I want to actively play. But it’s up to me to provide for myself, and to be financially independent of my siblings, and putting that much stress on music made it stop being fun for me.

Yay. Bye.