Sloughing Off the Yoke of Classical Culture

In my psychotherapy practice, given my focus of working with artists, I often find myself engaged with patients who were in gifted and talented programs in school.  These folks commonly report that, rather than being opportunities for growth, the programs left them feeling burdened and disempowered, that teachers, mentors, and parents communicated -- often explicitly -- that the G&T students, being gifted, were therefore obligated to do great things.  This is tragic; despite whatever gifts they may have, participants in G&T programs are not necessarily any more likely than other children to have any real sense of what they want to do when they grow up -- and so frequently conclude that there is something wrong with them if they can't meet the expectations of the adults who keep telling them how special they are.  Far too often, G&T programs create a cult of prodigy, adultifying children who excel in specific, socially desirable domains and then fetishing them, robbing these young people of the chance to play, to experiment, to fail and recover, which is necessary to developing an identity and a sense of direction in life.  Too, our culture presumes that one will -- or at least should -- love a thing that one excels at, but excellence and passion are not the same thing and collapsing them when talking to young people is confusing at best and dooming at worst.  In the end, the children we identify as gifted often come to believe the opposite of what is intended by the programs:  that they are failures.*  

When I was in school (I'm a late Boomer), G&T programs per se had not yet reached the ubiquity that more recent generations have experienced.  However, a recent conversation with a patient prompted me to make a connection between the above G&T experience and my own adolescence, specifically, the years in which I took up and actively studied viola.  Anyone who knows me, or who has read much of this blog, knows that I've struggled greatly for more than forty years, trying to make peace with this instrument that I both adore and abhor and with the confusion of my early life as a violist.  The insight that arose from this conversation struck me like I was sucker-punched, forming a kind of perfect psychic tetromino and causing decades of emotional coprolite unexpectedly to fall away, leaving me clear about my musical life in ways I feel I have never been.  This post is both a share about and an attempt to make sense of that insight.  

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I don't remember my first awareness of the effect music had on me, but I know it goes back at least to age five or six and memories of my parents playing old Louis Armstrong LPs or the latest Beatles album on my dad's HiFi.  Music lifted me, sometimes transcendently, and it seemed perfectly natural that it should and it didn't occur to me that not everyone responded to it that way.  My parents were musical -- Mom sang constantly in a wonderful voice and played organ and piano, while Dad played trumpet beautifully and could mess about on a keyboard -- and music, whether on the radio or HiFi or played by my parents, was more or less omnipresent in our house, a magic that was unspoken, assumed, a "just so" part of daily life.  As I grew up, my dad sometimes came home from trips abroad with unfamiliar instruments -- various bells and gongs, an unnamed Japanese bamboo wind instrument I've seen or heard only one other place, and other oddities.  As part of my elementary school education, I had a fairly typical exposure to music, participating in children's choirs and learning the names, sounds, and placements of the instruments comprising the Western symphony orchestra.  Through sixth grade I cycled through multiple, repeated, and brief love affairs with piano, organ, my father's brass instruments (mostly mellophone, but also coronet), an ocarina, a fife I picked up on a family visit to Colonial Williamsburg, and a bevy of toy-ish instruments.  I knew I wanted to engage in music actively in some way, but, as with most children, it was just all so interesting and my attention wandered, so no single expression really stuck.  

Triggered by I don't now recall what, during the summer between sixth and seventh grades, I developed a strong desire to learn violin.  At the time, we were about to transition from living in the Californian Mojave to Albuquerque, so the plan was that I'd start in the fall at my new middle school, which, it turned out, had a surprisingly robust orchestra program.  My new music teacher effectively voluntold me to play viola rather than violin -- nominally a result of my large-ish hands, but I also suspect in response to her dearth of violists -- and so, understanding that a) it was more or less the same as violin for the purposes of my interests and b) playing it instead of violin would give me greater opportunity (violin being very competitive due to its popularity), I said okay.  

I quickly showed an aptitude, at least in the eyes of my orchestra teacher, and she encouraged me to audition for one of the extracurricular honor orchestras that Albuquerque is now well-known for.  By the end of seventh grade, I had been accepted and every year after that I advanced to the next level orchestra until, as a sophomore in high school, I was playing in the most advanced symphony program in the city.  By the end of high school, I had twice qualified for and participated in statewide symphony orchestras, one of which was New Mexico's most elite young person's orchestra.  

I enjoyed this very much (although my pleasure was not unadulterated; more on that below).  Most of my best friends, relationships I still maintain and cherish, I met through the youth symphonies I played in, often people like me who felt out of place in other contexts, who had tastes and passions that I later came to understand were unique to the path of the young artist.  Sitting in the midst of a hundred musicians all playing in synchrony to create a cyclonic galaxy of sound was a transcendent experience within the transcendent -- and to have friends who shared that experience with me was unlike anything I'd ever imagined possible.  Those years contained many of the peak moments of my life.  

The aptitude that granted me access to those moments also led my parents to seek private tutelage for me under respected viola pedagogues and, almost every year, I was transferred to more prestigious mentors.  This didactical hopscotch, however, was less a function of any prodigy on my part and more an artifact of each teacher eventually refusing to work with me:  despite my love of music and enjoyment of playing viola, I was far from disposed to practice.  Teachers would initially be enthusiastic about what they perceived as talent but, before long, would get frustrated with me and refer me on.  Commensurately, through high school, the rate of my progress decelerated, leaving me feeling increasingly discouraged and left behind.  In my senior year, I watched with dejected envy as my friends auditioned for and won scholarships to world-class conservatories, while I failed even to try out for any music school and fell into a part-time music major at the local state university.  The old pattern of working with new teachers who were initially encouraging but eventually threw up their hands continued in college until, at age 21 and a bit more than half-way through a BFA in viola performance, utterly demoralized, I quit school and, within a few years, gave up the instrument entirely.  

I quit because I believed myself to be a failure.  I believed this because it was essentially what these teachers, whom I universally respected and mostly admired, repeatedly told me:  I was talented -- even exceptionally talented, by some reports -- but I "wasted" that talent because I refused to practice.  Teachers implored, cajoled, encouraged, demanded -- once even violently and publicly shamed me -- in their attempts to get me to practice, always on the premise that something must be wrong with me for not practicing, that it was inconceivable and tragic that someone as (nominally) talented as I was should fritter away their gift, especially given that others, not so blessed, were forced to work much harder to achieve less.  I could only conclude that, because of my persistent struggles with practice, I was a failure as a violist and a musician and, as such, I must inevitably disappoint my teachers.  

That's the story I lived with until just the other day.  

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Prompted by the recent conversation about how expectations embedded in G&T programs end up leading children to perceive themselves as failures, I began a few weeks ago to re-examine this story I've told about myself for decades.  What I am coming to see as a result is that, in those critical developmental years, few people, if any, were listening to me.  Music called to me and, if I was to play viola -- or any instrument -- I needed to be able to hear its siren.  The repetitious practice that I know is required to play any musical instrument competently is nonetheless, for me, crushingly bereft of any hint of music and empty of joy -- and thus of sustaining motivation.  Seriously, practicing scales is aggressively aversive.  Simply awful.  Add to them dry exercises and etudes -- Schradieck, Ševčík, Wohlfahrt and seemingly endless others -- and practice, for me, becomes about as appealing as eating waterlogged cardboard for breakfast while hungover.  

My complaints about this were consistently met by my teachers with some version of, "Well, if you want to get good at viola, you have to do this."  That's entirely fair, of course, but it missed the point.  I needed someone to sit down with me, put a hand on my shoulder, face me, and say, "Look, you don't have to do this.  There are lots of ways to make music and lots of kinds of music to make.  You're not required to make this music this way.  Why don't you take your viola home and just mess around with it?  Explore it and your muse; don't try to fit yourself into this classical mold:  find your own shape.  Spend some weeks or even months doing that and then let's talk."  I don't know if I would have been capable of hearing that message then, but, in retrospect, it is what I needed.  Instead, I had columns of adults ostensibly helping me, guiding me to stay the course of the classical music moving sidewalk to a conservatory-based career as an orchestral musician.  

Looking back on this now, I think part of what was confusing was that I really did love classical music.  One of my earliest memories of musical inspiration was dancing around our living room to Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (oh, those French colors!).  I recall being electrified the first time I heard the Preludio from Bach's Partita No. 3 for unaccompanied violin.  The Slavic Romantics were big in our household, too -- Tchaikovsky (of course), Rachmaninov, Dvorak, all covered me with goosebumps -- and the first album I ever bought (fifth grade? sixth?) was Beethoven's 7th Symphony, a work that still thrills me to my core.  The problem I had as a viola student was that a lot of music written for viola is boring and awful:  solo music was nearly nonexistent prior to the 20th century and orchestral parts were, with rare exception, endless "pas" in the "oom-pas" of orchestral rhythm-keeping or harmonies that were meaningless by themselves and typically got lost in the orchestra anyway.  (This changed somewhat in the 20th century, as the instrument's virtues seemed finally to be discovered by new composers, but that's another conversation.)  Too, I completely lacked the confidence then to admit it to myself -- let alone anyone else -- but I wanted to create music, to compose and improvise, to give voice to the sirens that sang in my skull.  So, despite my love of the instrument and of the Western symphonic tradition that created it, classical viola music mostly was not for me -- but I couldn't see it, nor, apparently, could the adults around me.  

I now understand the trajectory of my musical career thus:  a twelve-year-old kid suddenly and more-or-less arbitrarily decides -- as twelve-year-olds do -- that he wants to play violin, but an adult determines he should instead play viola; later, when the kid displays some knack for the thing, the adults declare he should be placed on a career track; the kid doesn't know any better and is getting kudos for doing something he enjoys and so buys in; from there on out, the kid is related to as if a) he understands the trajectory he's on, b) experiences having some agency regarding being on it, and c) loves it.  The problem is that the first two premises are untrue and the third is oversimple.  There's no way I could have known what I was saying yes to (any more than any adolescent grasps adulting) and the grossly underdeveloped identity I struggled with at that age rendered me effectively incapable of any agentic choice, let alone choosing a career.  

I got sucked into the culture of classical music, which piously declares itself to be the only "real" or "serious" music.**  I was ripe for it, too:  the hollowness I felt, the powerful deficit of self-sense I experienced as a youth led me to hunger for the certainty and promise of belonging that elite classical musicians flaunted.  No matter that any given person's self-righteous opinions were as likely to flay me as enfold me, here was a community that claimed meritocracy and welcomed me, that said that I was good enough and offered me entry into exclusive circles.  Even a tease of validation like that was the stuff of addiction for a teen like me with zero self-worth.  Of course, entry was only proffered as long as my performance skills were up to snuff.  Peers whom I and others perceived as technically adept but musically plain progressed and continued to gain access to ever-more-rarified chambers and stages, while I, declared musically sensitive but technically unremarkable, found myself increasingly isolated.  Such is the culture of the orchestral music scene, in which musicians are often relegated to being mere technicians in service of more revered creators, the composers.  Thus, the ability to play what another directs one to is prized before generative or even interpretive capacity.  

And the whole "disappointing my teachers" narrative doesn't even belong to me:  I'm not (and wasn't) responsible for my mentors' disappointment.  I was just a kid doing my best, trying to navigate rivers of others' expectations.  I stumbled by dumb luck upon an instrument that allowed me opportunities to participate in all kinds of cool stuff that I never would have found on my own, but I had no idea what I was doing.  All I knew was that I enjoyed making music on the viola and hated the kind of gear-grinding, temporal-lobe necrotizing, anti-musical exercises that presumably would give me more facility with expressing myself through my instrument; I understood the trade-off, but just couldn't buy into it.  My teachers' expectations that I would practice was not unreasonable, but neither did they belong to me.  I wasn't a failure; I was set up.  I was a teenage victim of a G&T program -- in this case, one called "classical music training."  

It sounds like I'm blaming my teachers here, but I really don't blame them; like all of us, they were doing their best.  In fact, I sympathize:  there is very little more frustrating than an ambivalent student.  I know that I was privileged to work with the city's most talented violists and viola teachers.  What's important, though, is that what I needed was someone to check in with me instead of declaring me a problem child for not crossing off all the boxes for prodigy.  If there had been some adult who could break that invisible, strictured premise and help me explore myself, I might not have achieved what I did as a symphonic violist, but I might have felt less like a failure, been more self-expressed, and actually folded music-making into my life in a sustainable way.  

I know I sound bitter.  I am; I believe I have good reason to be.  It's not merely the bitterness of the passed-over, though.  I understand why my high school and college peers continued on and I didn't.  Strip the elitism from classical music and you still have excellence; indeed, I agree that the striving for excellence is -- and should be -- at the heart of all great art.  And it's not like I think myself incapable of excellence in other domains; I believe and am told by respected peers that I have laudable skills in some aspects of my psychotherapy practice.  Neither am I bitter for lacking the skill or knack required for iterative practice; I appreciate that talent alone (to whatever degree I had it) is insufficient to become a competent and effective musician.  Friends, teachers, writers, and others have touted to me the tranquil, meditative states they access through such practice and I believe them, but years of struggle with it has led me to conclude that my brain is just not set up that way.  No, my bitterness comes from being told that something was wrong with me when nothing was wrong:  I just didn't fit where I was told I fit.  I'm bitter for being misidentified; I was and remain a lover of music and a maker of music (I still struggle with the designation "musician"), but I was and remain a shape fundamentally different from that of classical violist.  

And that is the insight that is freeing:  that I'm right to be bitter about these experiences.  Sometimes anger is the path to reclaiming agency.  Said another way, seeing that there wasn't -- and isn't -- anything wrong with me, but rather that I was stuffed into a mold and suffered injury as a result grants me the space to make peace with myself.  Everyone can do their best and people still get hurt.  Happens all the time.  Reminding myself of that gives me the freedom to be angry -- knowing that no one was trying to hurt me and yet I got hurt anyway -- and I can grieve and heal and start over.  For decades I focused on my injuries, believing I deserved them, but now I can see them as no more (and no less) than the sort of slings and arrows one suffers while tangled in this mortal coil and, as such, I can turn my attention from lamenting the mold I believed I should have fit to discovering the shape that I actually am.  

So, today, freshly free of responsibility for others' expectations of me, I'm asking an old question newly:  What do I want musically?  From here out, I endeavor to recognize and let go of introjected narratives from when I was a child student of classical music and to listen for the music that bubbles up within me and to give it voice.  I will explore how much I want to play viola and the manner in which I want to do it, unburdening myself of the shoulds and presumptions of the finger-waggers of my adolescence.  I will make musical instruments of my own invention and search out the sound of music in the world around me.  I declare music to be a voyage of discovery, the journey that my soul yearned for as a child, but could only begin now, in my maturity.  

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* I don't wish to suggest that G&T programs are bad or not worthwhile.  It's important to note that my patients are, by definition, folks who have had difficult experiences with which they need help processing.  People who go through G&T programs which they found empowering are less likely to complain about those programs in therapy (even if they may have unrelated reasons to seek treatment).  By definition, my caseload is not a representative sample of graduates of G&T programs; I leave it up to the reader to seek what I'm sure is ample research on G&T program outcomes, should they desire such evidence.  

** This isn't unique to classical music, of course; indeed few musical cultures are entirely immune to it.