simonlife

This summer, around early June, I picked up my French horn for the first time in four years. It had, until then, been collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom at home in California, where I first left it behind as I embarked for college and a life of supposedly more important things. That year, my senior year of high school, was a time in my life characterized by the abandonment of responsibility and withdrawal from commitment, two imperatives of basic musicianship.

Restoration

Deciding to play my horn again was motivated by a few reasons, the first being simply that it is sad when there is something you once did (relatively well) but no longer do because you essentially quit without good reason. This is the basis for what I consider to be guilt-driven self-restitution.

Also, I think I was compelled by a more general principle that often nags my conscience, which is that I am more useful as a human being if I am producing things rather than just consuming them. I could spend my whole life just going to concerts or listening to music on my iPod, but really, I can do all those things and at the same time learn to play an instrument and join an ensemble and contribute to a performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8! Imagine that!

Perhaps most importantly though, my last two years as an undergraduate coincided with a revival of classical music in my life, which began naively during my junior year when, in hopes of balancing my mostly technical curriculum with something artsy, I enrolled in a music history class. It was then that I took note of what works the Cornell Symphony Orchestra (CSO) had performed since my arrival as a freshman, and it didn’t take much subsequent reasoning to realize that these were works I would have had the opportunity to play had I not in fact gone and done something so imbecilic as quitting the horn. In particular, I missed out on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7, Respighi’s Pines of Rome, and the Grieg piano concerto, just to name a few that will haunt me forever.

These factors made my return to the horn a likely undertaking, but I wasn’t convinced that I’d be able to make time for another extracurricular activity. What finally set the wheels in motion was what I discovered in early June when Chris Kim, CSO director and conductor, posted a tentative concert program for the 2007-2008 season on the orchestra’s blog. There on the brochure, listed under the December 2nd concert, was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, the composer’s last opus. The first movement contains one of the Romantic era’s most beautiful and programmatically significant musical quotations (although written several decades after the pedagogical end of the Romantic era, ironically).

I must be a part of this.

Three Months Later

So I practiced. A lot. I logged more hours on my horn this summer than the younger, dumber, teenage version of myself would have ever considered. I found a private teacher in Cambridge who helped me regain what I had lost, for I had to be audition-ready in two months.

It’s been three months since I made that resolution, and I’m still just trying to wrap my head around the fact that enough dedication can really get things done. I mean, they always beat that idea to death in nice-sounding, rhetorical proverbs and children’s tales, but its truth is so frequently obscured by cliché. And yet here I am. I made it. I found myself a seat in a row of brass, with percussion behind me, woodwinds before me, and strings beyond them. There is a localization of sound specific to my very spot in the orchestra, and it is a sensory experience I have been too long without.

It will still take some time and dedicated work to get all of my playing back, as my chops are still struggling to regain four years of lost playing. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t want to be using my time in any other way. This is what I set out to do, and I managed to pull it off in a quirky, spontaneous kind of way. It’s nice to be back.