Talented Loneliness

Everyone is alone at some point or another. Often times people think of being alone as a bad thing. Like being alone at your wedding or being alone on your birthday, but they never think of the good alone times, like being the only person in your family to graduate, or being the only one who got the answer right on the quiz. Of course it’s nice to be with people but you don’t want to hop on the band wagon if it’s going off a cliff right? I’m an aspiring music major and what I’ve noticed over my four years of High School is that I pick up music a lot faster than anyone else. I noticed I was the only person who wanted to be a music major and college so I was left all by myself as the one person who can and would do almost anything music related. . . besides flute.

I wasn’t serious about music for the longest time. I actually wanted to be a professional gamer. I decided that if I was going to make a career out of something, it would be doing something I really enjoy and games was the first thing I could think of. I learned how hard that was going to be and how unrealistic it was to base my skills as a gamer on my career.

During my years at high school I had taken music classes like chorus and rock band, but I wasn’t crazy about it. Around the beginning of my first semester as a senior I decided to make an abrupt change in career. I wanted to be a musician through and through and grew a desire to learn as much as I could.

I was the only student in my music teachers class who would ask for more to do. I started improving my piano and learned some more scales and exercises, but I also started learning more music theory. If I wanted to go to college for music I was going to have to learn a whole lot of music to pass the entry audition. I learned new instruments and took up the tenor saxophone. I also sacrificed early release and late arrival just so I could add more music classes to my schedule.

Although I only had a year to make up for all the time I missed, I managed to push through every day with the drive to learn more. I still spend hours on end doing something music related without even realizing how much time had passed. It all was worth it in the end because I got accepted into about half the colleges I auditioned to as well as Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Before I had learned all the stuff I know now, I was on the band wagon of students in Rock Band who didn’t know a lick of music and just pushed the right buttons on their instrument at the right time. I realized the vast differences between me and any other average person when I tried teaching them something that I thought was relatively simple. What took my 5 minutes to learn took them an hour to even understand how to do it and another 3 days to actually get done with their hands.

It came to a shock when I realized how many people couldn’t learn stuff as fast as I could. I realized I was alone in the sense that I was one of the only ones who had at least a miniscule understanding of music in my school, but I also came to realize that there are other things that I’m not competent in that other people are. While I may be alone in one subject of my life, I’m most certainly falling off that cliff in the bandwagon a lot more times.

“music” by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

“Musical+notes on Flickr & Viddler Groups: Music Only” by Antonio TwizShiz Edward is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

“Jazz Academy of Music Fall Concert” by woodleywonderworks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.