The Adventure of the Musical Mistakes
Some people are born with an in-built talent for music. They can learn how to play multiple instruments, read musical notation like it's a language and hear a musical note and be able to identify it. I am not one of those people.
I was about eight when I decided I wanted to play an instrument. I'm not sure quite why I made that decision but I suspect it was because some of my friends did it. It didn't seem to matter which instrument and for reasons I've long since forgotten I selected the clarinet. It's really hard for a small child to play the clarinet because you need reasonably sized fingers so I started with the treble recorder.
The treble recorder is essentially just a bigger version of the recorder primary school children have been playing badly for generations. It's size means it gives a slightly deeper sound so isn't quite so unbearably squeaky. Initially things went fairly well as I learnt the first three notes and was able to play Hot Cross Buns as it conveniently only requires three notes.
The climax of my recorder career came when I ended up joining the school's recorder band, mainly because my best friend was in it. Few things sound worse than a group of primary school children attempting to play the recorder. One hot summer day we performed the theme to 'Titanic' My Heart Will Go On to the parents brave enough to come and listen to it. It's hardly an enjoyable song at the best of times but squeaked through on recorders it sounds utterly dreadful. I knew that the chances of me producing an unexpected squeak were high so I pretended to play my way through the tune- it was probably the best performance I ever did.
When I moved up to secondary school it was time to move up to the clarinet. I had a very slow start with lessons through the county music service at school. The clarinet teacher seemed to regularly be ill and because I'd had to leave my normal lessons to go to the clarinet lessons I forgot to go half the time. In the end my Dad decided it wasn't worth paying for and sought out private tuition.
What a tutor he found. My new clarinet teacher was one of the best jazz musicians in the country. A virtuoso on the clarinet and of a similar level on the saxophone, he spent his career playing with the world's top jazz musicians and now taught the instruments alongside still performing. Hearing him play was an absolute privilege. If anyone could teach me it was this guy.
I certainly made progress. Over the next few years I reached a stage where I could play the majority of the notes and could play fairly simple pieces quite well. But it never came naturally to me. Being dyspraxic (though I didn't know it back then), precise finger work was really not my thing. It turned out that the clarinet is quite a complicated instrument with all it's holes and keys and many notes requiring a combination of them. I struggled to be able to play the notes and then quickly move my fingers onto the next note. Reading music didn't come naturally to me either. Perhaps worst of all was the fact that I had no rhythm whatsoever.
Still, history repeated itself and one of my friends convinced me to join another music group. He was an excellent trombone player and went on to do a music degree whilst I felt hopelessly out of my depth in the group. One Christmas I found myself performing carols with the group. My skill had moved on since my recorder days and I was actually reasonably confident with some of the notes. So I happily played the notes I was good at and just pretended to play the ones I wasn't so confident out. This was probably worse than not playing at all but at least it felt like I was vaguely part of it.
When it came to selecting my GCSEs I was struggling to fill in the technology slot. I was terrible at all the options from food technology and textiles to electronics and woodwork. For some reason my school gave you the option to do music in the technology slot. I remember speaking to a teacher at an open evening for the GCSE choices and was specifically told you do not need to play an instrument to do GCSE music. This was not correct.
Fast forward two years and there I was sat in a music classroom listening to my talented peers perform pieces that people would genuinely pay to hear and then it was my turn. My clarinet teacher had concluded that the best piece I could perform was ABBA's Super Trouper. I had managed to do a decent job of it a few times at home but even if I performed it perfectly it was still not going to sound great compared to the works of Mozart and co. Inevitably I did perform it well, messing up quite a few notes and just doing my best to get through it. To give them credit my peers applauded politely at the end and no-one ever commented on it but it remains one of the single most embarrassing moments of my life.
At some point around the same time my clarinet teacher announced he couldn't teach me anymore because he was spending more time performing on cruise ships. Part of me wonders if he just reached a point where he was wasting time on trying to teach me. Either way, it was about time I just gave up on the idea of being able to play an instrument. As much as I love listening to music, performing it is a thing I was never built to do.
I was about eight when I decided I wanted to play an instrument. I'm not sure quite why I made that decision but I suspect it was because some of my friends did it. It didn't seem to matter which instrument and for reasons I've long since forgotten I selected the clarinet. It's really hard for a small child to play the clarinet because you need reasonably sized fingers so I started with the treble recorder.
The treble recorder is essentially just a bigger version of the recorder primary school children have been playing badly for generations. It's size means it gives a slightly deeper sound so isn't quite so unbearably squeaky. Initially things went fairly well as I learnt the first three notes and was able to play Hot Cross Buns as it conveniently only requires three notes.
The climax of my recorder career came when I ended up joining the school's recorder band, mainly because my best friend was in it. Few things sound worse than a group of primary school children attempting to play the recorder. One hot summer day we performed the theme to 'Titanic' My Heart Will Go On to the parents brave enough to come and listen to it. It's hardly an enjoyable song at the best of times but squeaked through on recorders it sounds utterly dreadful. I knew that the chances of me producing an unexpected squeak were high so I pretended to play my way through the tune- it was probably the best performance I ever did.
What a tutor he found. My new clarinet teacher was one of the best jazz musicians in the country. A virtuoso on the clarinet and of a similar level on the saxophone, he spent his career playing with the world's top jazz musicians and now taught the instruments alongside still performing. Hearing him play was an absolute privilege. If anyone could teach me it was this guy.
I certainly made progress. Over the next few years I reached a stage where I could play the majority of the notes and could play fairly simple pieces quite well. But it never came naturally to me. Being dyspraxic (though I didn't know it back then), precise finger work was really not my thing. It turned out that the clarinet is quite a complicated instrument with all it's holes and keys and many notes requiring a combination of them. I struggled to be able to play the notes and then quickly move my fingers onto the next note. Reading music didn't come naturally to me either. Perhaps worst of all was the fact that I had no rhythm whatsoever.
Still, history repeated itself and one of my friends convinced me to join another music group. He was an excellent trombone player and went on to do a music degree whilst I felt hopelessly out of my depth in the group. One Christmas I found myself performing carols with the group. My skill had moved on since my recorder days and I was actually reasonably confident with some of the notes. So I happily played the notes I was good at and just pretended to play the ones I wasn't so confident out. This was probably worse than not playing at all but at least it felt like I was vaguely part of it.
When it came to selecting my GCSEs I was struggling to fill in the technology slot. I was terrible at all the options from food technology and textiles to electronics and woodwork. For some reason my school gave you the option to do music in the technology slot. I remember speaking to a teacher at an open evening for the GCSE choices and was specifically told you do not need to play an instrument to do GCSE music. This was not correct.
Fast forward two years and there I was sat in a music classroom listening to my talented peers perform pieces that people would genuinely pay to hear and then it was my turn. My clarinet teacher had concluded that the best piece I could perform was ABBA's Super Trouper. I had managed to do a decent job of it a few times at home but even if I performed it perfectly it was still not going to sound great compared to the works of Mozart and co. Inevitably I did perform it well, messing up quite a few notes and just doing my best to get through it. To give them credit my peers applauded politely at the end and no-one ever commented on it but it remains one of the single most embarrassing moments of my life.
At some point around the same time my clarinet teacher announced he couldn't teach me anymore because he was spending more time performing on cruise ships. Part of me wonders if he just reached a point where he was wasting time on trying to teach me. Either way, it was about time I just gave up on the idea of being able to play an instrument. As much as I love listening to music, performing it is a thing I was never built to do.
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