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December 3, 2005
Juilliard Essay
Between thesis, papers, and conservatory applications, I've been doing a lot of writing, so I haven't had any energy to blog. Nevertheless, my desk is now clear (in preparation for the next wave of work) and I thought I would post my Juilliard essay, which is about the path I took in deciding that I want to play the bassoon professionally.
Classical music was my teenage rebellion.
My parents put me in keyboard class when I was three, but I never found myself particularly drawn to the piano. I played too loudly and too percussively. I didn't actually listen to much music at all. But my piano abilities were still good enough to differentiate me from my schoolmates, and for a young sixth grader, that was enough for me to want to sign up for beginning band. I started with the clarinet.
I wasn't very good. Worse still, everyone and anyone seemed to play the clarinet. I wanted to stand out. I wanted to be different, because, just like every other middle schooler, I felt different. Misunderstood. When my parents and band director suggested the bassoon, I had to ask: what's a bassoon? But an instrument was obtained and I found the strangeness of it appealing and fascinating. Then I heard the bassoon section of the Oregon Symphony, calling themselves the "Bassoon Brothers," play in concert. I think I had been playing for six weeks, at most. But they were having more fun on stage than I had ever seen anyone ever have, and certainly more than I had ever had in my entire life. I was intrigued.
The funny thing about being a bassoonist is that, early on, doors open for you just because nobody else wants to go through them. When I applied to the Interlochen Arts Camp on bassoon after the eighth grade, I wasn't a very good bassoonist. I wasn't a very good musician, either. But I got in anyway. I had never played in an orchestra. Truth be told, I had never really listened to an orchestra. The camp was fun. I had a good time. I made good friends. I was happy that summer.
Towards the end of my first four week session at Interlochen, in the waning twilight of a warm Sunday in August, I heard the World Youth Symphony Orchestra, the top student group, play the Eleventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich. And sitting quite far away from the right side of the stage, I felt something stir inside me that I had never felt before. Emotion and passion gripped me like the Revolution the Eleventh Symphony ostensibly depicts. At that moment, I became irrevocably addicted to anything beautiful. Especially beautiful music.
When I got home, I started high school. And I began to listen to the most passionate music I could find. Barber. Mahler. Tchaikovsky. I could put this music on my stereo and lie back on my bed and let myself feel all the confusing things you feel when you're fifteen. My parents listened to Tchaikovsky and liked it a lot, or even loved it. But I knew - in the self-sure way that only a teenager can know - they didn't feel the way I did when I listened to it. The music became a secret refuge for me, like a secret code. A Rosetta stone for my adolescence.
If life were a script, what should have happened next is that I found that same intensity and power through my own playing. But life's not a script. I had some amazing and powerful moments on stage playing with orchestras in high school. And I was driven to seek those moments wherever I could. But any real artist will tell you that passion is not sufficient to succeed in music, or any art. It has to become a craft. And I was never very good at crafts. School came easily. The bassoon, too, came easily, at least when measured against other high schoolers. I never really worked at anything.
Here too, then, I should have followed a script. I went to Harvard because I had made the painful and difficult decision that bassoon could not be a craft for me. And so I should have outgrown my teenage rebellion, became an amateur performer and auditory connoisseur, and gone and studied something else. But a funny thing happened on the way to "something else": music caught my intellectual imagination as nothing else ever had. As I began thinking about music and not just "feeling" it, a basic, self-reflective question occupied my thoughts: why do I love this music so much?
This essay is part of the answer to these questions. So is much of my academic work here at Harvard. I have asked my professors, my colleagues, and myself this questions, directly and indirectly. I have probed and searched for a better definition of what, exactly, "this music" that I love actually is. Does it have to be passionate? Does it have to seem to consider itself art? Does it have to be "classical"?
In the process I have learned that I cannot answer those questions without a bassoon in my hands. Partly this is because, in playing, I explore that which I love from the inside out. It is also because of the defiance implied by the subject I in the question, "why do I love this music so much?" The implication: does everyone love this music? If not, why not?
What began as a way to differentiate myself has become, now that I am older, a process of searching for similarity instead. If I feel something on stage when I am playing, I want the audience to feel the same thing. If the audience doesn't get it, I want to learn to do better, to communicate more effectively with my audience. I want to make an audience feel what I feel, love what I love, and sing what I sing.
Bassoon, in other words, has become, quite unexpectedly, my craft.
That is why I am applying to Juilliard. I want to hone my craft, so that I can say the things I want to say, and feel the things I want to feel. And so that I can perform them for others, so that they, too, might be moved to ask that very same question, the answer to which I will be seeking for the rest of my life. I want them to wonder: "Why do I love this music so much?"
Posted by David Richmond at December 3, 2005 5:45 PM EST
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Comments
I remember that Shostakovich concert, it made me cry.
Posted by: Deena Rosenberg at December 6, 2005 5:43 PM