Today after band I was walking home with Rebecca and we were talking about how happy we are to be music majors. I'm not actually a music major--I have to make it into the School of Music--but I am trying my very hardest to get there. It's kind of a scary prospect since the BYU School of Music is extremely competitive, but I've realized over the past few days that there is nowhere else I would rather be. Nothing makes me as happy and joyful as music does (and being a music major gives me a great excuse to be as enthusiastic as I want to be about nerdy things like horn concertos). Band is by far my favorite class, although my horn lessons and my D&C class run close seconds, and I have never come out of there unhappy. It's impossible not to be happy. I get to spend two hours playing my horn with great people who are fast becoming my good friends and becoming part of something so much bigger than myself. We are all working towards the same goal, and even though we are very focused, we have a ton of fun. These are great, great people I get to be with. And that's why I am dense. For a long time, I said that I would never go into music. I felt that I didn't have the skill or the knowledge or the talent to make it in the music world. But now that I've made the decision to be a music major, I look back at my life and I have to laugh. I've always gravitated to the band people. I've always admired them and always felt most comfortable in that group. The people who are involved in music have always been my closest friends and had the greatest impact on my life. Even though I know I could go into almost any field and do well in it academically, what it really comes down to is the kind of people you work with. There are very nice people in my other classes, and I've made some good friends. But I don't fit in there like I do in my music classes. Music is my world. Music people are my people.
And even more than that, I realized one day in Nauvoo that I couldn't live without music in my life. I thought about the prospect of never being part of an ensemble again, of putting down my horn for the last time, and my mind shied away from the very idea. That kind of bleak existence isn't life. That, to me, would be like losing a part of your soul. I knew I just couldn't do it. So I made the decision to do what I had said I would never do, and found my way back to the world that I have always lived in even though I didn't realize it. For years I've told people in a semi-joking manner that music is my life--now I finally understand how true that is, and how true it has been all along. It is my life, and I couldn't ask for anything better.
2 comments:
You spoke the very words I feel everyday. I always say I would rather be blind than deaf, because without music...how would I express who I am? Although I am not quite as active with it as you are (that's where my writing comes in), I still feel that great sensation when I sit down at the piano, that sensation that all the world has stopped just to hear me speak.
jenny, my thoughts exactly. Well, on the fact that music creates the friends that become your world, not on the fact that you are dense. =)
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