The commonly held belief is that former music students at the very least become the backbone of an educated audience. The remarkably awful thing, though, is that the majority also never play their instruments again.
Our cities are littered with homes where an abandoned upright piano leans forlornly against a dining-room wall, or where a violin hides at the back of sister’s closet, entombed in its oblong case.
These dusty, slowly disintegrating instruments are mute witnesses to all the inner turmoil that accompanies childhood music lessons. Their locks and clasps become metaphors of how these memories are tamped down to make way for happier times.
The degree of emotional turmoil and weight of expectation increases in direct proportion with the talents of the child — and the ambitions of a parent.
There’s a long, intense description of the whole messy emotional timeline from first music lesson to ultimate redemption as an adult audience member in this month’s Granta. It’s a moving story that deserves to be told more often, so that we can better understand the strange sort of emotional sadism as well as masochism that too frequently underlies what we so proudly proclaim as the height of civilization.
Read it here.
John Terauds