A Moment of Insight

As a child, I was a really, really intense bookworm. Classics adapted for children, the Babysitter's Club, fairy tales, fantasy series...there's about five boxes in my family's basement packed full of children's literature. I didn't know, as I read away, that I was doing something that would alter the course of my life, and which, blessedly, would make mandatory high school/university English courses very, very easy. I just loved stories, and the worlds they created.

As a result of fifteen years of voracious reading, I can take a book apart; analyze language and characters and plots with roughly the same level of comfort I feel when talking with my friends about what we did last weekend. But it wasn't always easy - I was one of the last kids in my Grade 1 class to start reading, and I was nine before I could structure a solid age-appropriate essay (this does seem an appropriate moment to thank my mother, ten years later, for forcing me to write an essay a week one summer. I may have hated it then, but good Lord, do I ever love her for it now!).

I'm realizing, as I study and prepare for my Theory 2133 midterm, that music is the same way. I love music for the stories it tells, the worlds it can create. When I started learning to play the piano at age 16, I didn't know I was doing something that would change my life - I just loved classical music, and what it did for me - much like, as a child, I loved being read to and told stories before I learned to read.

But music, like books, is formed of a language. Learning that language is an ongoing, at times almost overwhelming challenge for me, and, as with reading, I did come to it a little later in life than most of my peers. But this is that moment, that breakthrough, where I'm starting to understand (continuing my reading metaphor) sentences and patterns instead of individual words. I'm on the cusp of musical literacy, where I can analyze for myself instead of reading about analysis.

So, yes: right now, it's challenging. There's times when I feel stupid for all I don't know, times when I want to curl up and cry and give up on it. But, like my little six-year-old self, there's also moments when I see things I recognize; when I realize that there's this massive, exciting (because, yes, I think music theory is exciting!) world opening up for me.

And fifteen years from now? I'm willing to bet I'll be talking about themes and movements and chords the same way I can talk about a book today.

So, for all my friends who are also panicking about theory: courage! We can all read the text in our textbooks. In time the scores will come just as easy.