Core Theory

…there are so many kinds of failure.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

I have virtually no formal training in music, and it shows, although I can nominally sight read music to sing - a skill acquired almost purely through practice, with the barest bones grasp of musical notation underneath.  I don’t really get keys or scales, I am a mediocre guitar player and play no other instrument even passably.  I played the clarinet for a few years in junior high school and muddled through with my substandard grasp of musical notation, falling steadily down the seating until I came to rest as the second of two bass clarinets, otherwise known as the worst clarinet player in the band.  I think I was a disappointment to my band teacher, whose name now escapes me: boys didn’t play the flute or clarinet in the provincial town I grew up in (and I received merciless shit for years for my choice of instrument), and I suspect he had high hopes for me.  I had good aptitude: I just didn’t practice.  Towards the end I actually made a tape of myself playing and ran it in my room to fool my parents while I lay in my bed and read crap science fiction and fantasy paperbacks.

The guitar was a bribe and supposed aid to quitting smoking I gave myself in college: it didn’t work.  I stuck with the guitar gamely for a good few years though, and played it intermittently thereafter: these days I almost never pick it up.  I change the strings from time to time, let another set corrode on the stand in slightly damp basement air, not a nice way to treat a guitar, but then it’s not that nice a guitar.  Singing is something I do every day without real thought or effort, though I haven’t really worked on my voice in a long time.  My singing is okay, it is nothing really special.

I made one genuine attempt to mount the hill of my formal musical ignorance.  In college I signed up for a beginning music theory class.  If memory serves (and it well may not) the name of the class was Core Theory I.   It started to worry me pretty shortly after registration.  Potential students were advised that they should be reasonably conversant with reading music, and I had momentarily talked myself into the position that my years behind the clarinet would do.  I had, after all, sat there many hours, with sheets of music on the stand before me, toodling out more or less the correct notes.  I might not have been particularly good at it, but I had certainly read music.  The closer the start of class came the more absurd this seemed, that my billet as second bass clarinet in the eighth grade remotely qualified as the ability to read music.  The whole scenario was uncharacteristic for me: I wasn’t academically brave about my choices in college, and I rarely took a class primarily based on my belief that it would edify me (my decisions were more predominantly driven by, in rough order, fulfilling the requirements of my major, fulfilling the fairly complex liberal arts requirements of my college to graduate in four years, avoiding excessive difficulty in my non major classes - in my defense, almost all of my major coursework in chemistry was excessively difficult, at least for me - and maintaining an easier time schedule).  I was a little over midway through my sojourn in the ivory tower, though, growing discontent with my chosen field of study, and thinking maybe there was something in my initial experiments in songwriting and performance.  Temper the uncertainties of a career in science by establishing a foundation as a rock and roll singer to fall back on.  Or something; I’m inferring, I don’t really remember my reasoning in taking the class very well, just that I was worrying I would not be able to hack it.  But I stuck to it, deciding I think that I would try to get a fix on the territory, maybe ask the professor for his perspective.

The first day of class the professor announced that while the course was open to all students and he could not give preference to music majors, there were in fact an insufficient number of seats for the number of music majors needing to take the course and that delaying it would for these students involve interference with the pursuit of their major program of studies.  And SO, if any non-majors might find it in their hearts to elect to drop the course, etc.

I didn’t pay particularly close attention to the rest of the class, and when it was done proceeded directly to the front with this big, ready made and irrepproachable cop out.  And that was that, I had a little bit of a credit gap, I believe it was on this occasion that a friend talked me into joining her in square dancing, which it turned out posed no sort of challenge whatsoever (it was pass/fail based solely on attendance.  I actually remember square dancing pretty well.  There was also a line dancing section).

How do you feel about a right decision made for perhaps the wrong reasons?  From the outside it looked like the choice was altruistic: from within I know that it was fundamentally cowardly, while potentially objectively reasonable as well.  This isn’t a piece of history I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on, right, I don’t wake up grasping for it in the dark reaches of night.  I can’t say it would have probably made a whole lot of difference in my life if I’d kept with it, whether I succeeded or failed.  But it stands as a moment, ambiguous, unsatisfying, part of some larger design of what is ill fitting, incomplete still in my life.  I bring it up only as preamble, a little context for a new series of essays I’m about to launch (the subject of religion remains on the table, and will return in time).  More to come.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com April 1, 2009 at 1:26 AM