Bored of the Board

Music saved my life. Not literally, of course, but in a real way. The town I grew up in was really like Mordor, only less interesting.  The only thing I did which seemed to be out of the gray dead norm was play the piano. And that was at the insistence of my mother, a pianist who gave up a spot in a conservatory to get married and have a low-paying job.

For the 7 years I took lessons, I equated the piano with hell. My teacher was a decent, but undemonstrative, guy who I now know was pretty technically solid, at one point studying briefly with Godowsky. I was sent to him because he was known, locally, as the best, but my Mom was always a little worried that he wasn’t enough of a perfectionist. So she tried to instill perfection at home and the resulting push me-pull was ugly. Screaming, crying and yelling are pretty much what I associated with the instrument, and the biggest compliment I got at a lesson was: okay, next piece. I assumed I sucked. I didn’t know that not every 11 year old was playing Bach two-part inventions.

Anyway, in the third grade I started taking violin lessons in a class. Since I could already read music and had a pretty good ear, I got better quickly. Though I never had any independent study, by the time I was in junior high, I was in the local orchestra (which was run by the same people who taught in the schools).  I made friends. I listened to music. I smoked dope.  

By the time I was a senior in high school I was the concertmaster of the local orchestra and the school orchestra. This is truly meaningless, since both ensembles were execrable, but hey, it’s true.  We rehearsed frequently, so I was out of the house away from the crazy people a lot on a perfectly acceptable excuse.  I discovered that I had a different personality when playing in the orchestra.  I was powerful — all those bows had to go my way.  I was talented — people had to imitate me.  I became sexy.  I can’t tell you how this changed my life.  Power and glory was mine in this postage-stamp world and it gave me hope that I might actually escape it.  Little slivers of a world outside emerged.

I dated older men and younger men in the group, mostly trumpet players (love those lips). I auditioned for and got in the district, regional and state orchestras as a senior, where I developed a new circle of friends with even better drugs. Which I needed. State orchestra was frightening. These kids hadn’t grown up badly instructed in Podunk. They went to something called Settlement Music Schools or had extensive private training and about half the group played in the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra (which is roughly the equivalent of most small cities’ professional groups). A quarter played in the Pittsburgh Youth Orchestra. The rest of us rubes were brought in from the hinterlands to prove that even people with corn and coal in their ears could be taught something.

The conductor was the first woman to get a doctorate in conducting from Julliard. She introduced herself by asking the oboe to sound an “A” for us to tune, and then told the player that she  hadn’t put her reed in correctly — the A was not 440. She sang the right note and told the oboe to match it. My standmate (she and I knew each other from our own district, and she had great dope) looked at each other and said: we’re fucked. 

We had two things going for us: first, we sat 5th stand, second violin. Roughly middle of that pack, but towards the back mostly out of the scary woman’s sight and right in front of the percussionists. Second, I was a spectacular faker. I can look interested and intense and I had watched enough orchestras on PBS to know how energetic the bowing should look.  As a result we largely escaped attention, though when we played “Night On Bald Mountain” (which, if you don’t know it, is something you hear all the time at Halloween) after a really long session with a big bong and the chimes began ringing in our ears, both of us shot out of the seats. To the conductor’s lack of amusement. “Oh, sorry,” my standmate said to Her Perfect Pitchness later. “We just got so excited. ” The nerdy exceptional players around us laughed, a little nervously. All far more talented, and not one of them were ever going to make as much money or have as much fun as we did (so we told each other).

That was the year I met kids with $100,000 instruments. I was quite sure that was a sum of money that could buy my hous and our cars.  One of those belonged to a sardonic tall skinny kid with a bad bowl haircut I met at districts. His prized viola was stolen from the stage at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh where we played.  He had a backup factory jobber and the pilfered one was insured, but he’d lost a superb instrument and he cried for days.  I told him not to worry, he wasn’t that good anyway. (true).  I then taught him how to use a bong. 

The final concert in Pittsburgh was trippy.  We stayed sober for it, as we knew we’d have to do. Walking backstage we passed Andre Previn’s door and rubbed it for good luck. We played NOBM and the Moldau from Ma Vlast and something else I forget. It sounded unbelievably good to me, and remains the ultimate musical experience of my life — the only time I’d ever be associated with something of that quality. I smooched my new friends, promised to write (never did) and went back to crappy town.  Everything was the same, but different.

I won a local music competition in the anthracite city at the end of that year, playing I don’t even remember what and beating a really arrogant jerk who played the French horn.  He considered himself a real musician and me a poseur. He wasn’t wrong, but I was a better performer. He was really angry and I made it a point to rub it in and then we stopped dating.  There’s a horn player by the same name in the Philadelphia Orchestra now. I nearly choked when I saw it, but I have to think that it can’t be him.  He couldn’t have improved that much.

I was never deluded about music. I was truly mediocre — I needed to practice all the time just to stay mediocre.  And I lacked the desire and energy to practice enough to actually be, well, good. Plus I knew that I wanted to be able to shop without great difficulty. All the professional musicians I knew, and I knew a few, could play rings around me, but they weren’t living so high off the hog. I liked the hog. I’d had enough of living low on it, and I wanted more.  Music just made me confident enough to go get it.

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