Every year around this time, I think back to my brief stint in the Empire State Youth Orchestra, and every year I get a little bit closer to appreciating and reconciling myself to that difficult time in my life. Not that anything so very terrible happened then – it was more a confluence of angsty adolescence, growing uncomfortably into myself, figuring out a growing sense of not belonging, and the general malaise of the average 15-year-old. Such a precarious place to perch. Not all my classmates would make it.
You lower your hand, clarinet will play
Raise it back up and it flies away
When you smile violins will soar
When you move your legs timpani will roar
I can hear it, I can hear it, I can hear it, I swear
All the music you’re provoking, filling up the air
It’s getting louder
This is the sound of an orchestra
I can hear it playing everywhere that you are
There is a sound for everything you do
This is the sound of my love for you
Listen to the sound of my lust for you
I didn’t belong in the Empire State Youth Orchestra either. It was the rarity of my instrument – the oboe – that got me in the door. Once there I realized too late that my talent and skill level was on the lower end of things. After excelling at so many other things with relative ease, this shook me and my already-faltering confidence to the core. It was the worst possible time for such an ego-blow, but we don’t usually have control over that kind of timing, and if the possibility of a perfect storm exists, I’ve learned to batten down the hatches.
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
There is a sound for everything you do
Listen to the sound of my love for you
You don’t even know everything I hear
Every move every nod, every time you’re near
If I close my eyes, promise I can see
A hundred people playing and it’s just for me
Being the weakest link in a chain of excellence and talent is the definition of hell for a perfectionist. It wears away at the soul in almost diabolical fashion. I wish I could have learned then to let go of such silliness at that age. I wish I could have embraced the freedom that should have come with being the last, with nothing to lose. I simply couldn’t. It would take decades to understand this, decades of difficulty and foolishness. Failing to see that then, I did the only thing I could: practiced and worked and pulled myself up from the bottom of the talent pool, to a few rungs above it. I improved enough to move up a chair by the end of a few months, but by that time the damage had been done, and the fear and terror I felt at failing had instilled the drive to be perfect at all costs. A lesson was there; I only learned half of it.
This is the sound of an orchestra
I can hear it playing everywhere that you are
There is a sound for everything you do
This is the sound of my love for you
Listen to the sound of my lust for you
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
There is a sound for everything you do
Listen to the sound of my love for you
Before you even say what I know you’re gonna say
That all the sounds I hear are only in my head
Come stand really close, hold me like you do
Then all the music in my head you’ll hear
If you’re truly smart, you assemble your life so that you’re rarely the smartest person in the room. I wish I’d seen that then, and appreciated the wonderful talent and reservoir of musical prodigies that surrounded me. Instead, I felt only the competition, the threat, the shame of not knowing what it seemed everyone else did. In hindsight, extreme hindsight, only a rare few were true prodigies. The rest of us were mostly just kids who displayed some form of musical aptitude – some had natural talent, others like myself had to work all that much harder to reach what came easy to them. For the most part, though, we were remarkably similar, even if we did not see it. Maybe it was better that we didn’t see it.
This is the sound of an orchestra
I can hear it playing everywhere that you are
There is a sound for everything you do
This is the sound of my love for you
Listen to the sound of my lust for you
As we grow up, we take on many instruments, mostly in the figurative sense, trying out different sounds, varying tempos, and playing our way through life from pianissimo to fortissimo. If we allow ourselves to grow, and learn all the different things this world has to show and teach us, we become the conductors of our lives. We speak several languages, we master several jobs, and we orchestrate all the little facets that comprise the simple and expansive skills of getting through the day.
