My sister said, “Wait—didn’t you already have a viola?”
Yes, I did. I donated it to a high school orchestra program before I went to Ecuador this last time, because I wasn’t planning to come back.
I came back. It’s been three months. So I got another viola.
It’s a student instrument, and I’m a student again. I have to get my hands and ears back in shape; I’m going to be spending a lot of time with a tuner app, swearing at the fingertips of my left hand and moving my right arm very, very slowly.
I am, however, a student who was once a professional. And with a new instrument—one with no history—I get to let go of the professional part and go back to enjoying making noise with an expensively carved piece of wood. I get to marvel at muscle memory and actually enjoy something that once gave me great meaning for a long time.
Music is patterns. I reached a point once where I didn’t need to count rests anymore; I just listened for what came next. I heard cues instead of notes. I felt goosebumps instead of anxiety. When I closed my eyes, I saw colored light. I breathed in largo or allegretto. I read strange markings on a page—generations of pencil smudges, completely meaningless to mere mortals—and turned them into sound.
I sat with groups of people sweating under stage lights, or hidden in the shadows of an orchestra pit, and together we turned the unintelligible into something gorgeous.
I miss that part.
I don’t miss the pressure.
(I certainly don’t miss Interlochen, but that’s another tale.)
For now, I move a bow over strings. I listen with all the parts of the insides of my ears, trying to make sounds correct. Trying to make all the aspects of the patterns work together to create something beautiful—in the dead of a Michigan winter, everything outside covered in ice.
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