Who were you before life made you?

There's a beautiful poetry anthology edited by Maz Hedgehog called Tell Me Who We Were Before Life Made Us. It gathers together the work of thirty poets inspired by fairy tales, folklore, urban legends, creation myths, founding myths, and explorations of "what ifs", and I think of both this sentiment and this thought-provoking title at least once a week. 

I have made a career, mostly, of teaching young adults who have already begun telling themselves who they are, what they can do, and how they do it. I find this to be profoundly limiting and I spend years trying to help them break down the walls of the little boxes they've built around themselves. 

Here's a simple example: let's say I have a student who comes in having decided that the best way to change their dynamics is to simply change the speed of their air. So, blow less for a quieter dynamic, blow harder to get louder. If you have ever played the flute, you know what an intonation disaster this directive is; if you've ever taught flute, you also know how common this myth is, sadly. So now you must work with this 18-year-old, who has ingrained this habit for maybe eight years into their playing, to retrain both muscles and brain to replace the concept of more-or-less-air with adjusting the angle of the airstream in relation to the head joint instead. This is hard. Super hard. It's a huge pain in the rear end every day in the practice room, it's humiliating to take what feels like a huge step backwards and sound like a beginner again, and it requires unquestioning trust in me, some bossy middle-aged lady they've just met and hitched their wagons to for the next four years. And yet this is what must be done in order to succeed. You thought you were a person who changed dynamics by blowing harder or softer, and you thought you were done learning how to change dynamics; now you are an adult who is learning for the first time how to play dynamic changes in tune by using an entirely different set of muscles than you ever imagined using. Can you be this new person you never before imagined? Yes, if you choose to try. 

This happens in bigger, more forest-for-the-trees sorts of ways, too. A student, who has been in All-State all four years of high school (huzzah!), thinks they are a person who will only ever play Romantic era music in a professional orchestra after school. But the first time they hear one of their older classmates perform something with extended techniques, they are intrigued. And the first time I put one of those pieces on the stand in front of them in a lesson, they think they couldn't possibly, how do you even read these ink splotches on the page? But they do it, and then they keep doing it, and then one day become a person known for their interpretations of modern music. Another student who thinks they should major in music performance because they don't want to be a band director but is actually terrified of performing, and can't seem to get over it, discovers that they are fascinated by the mechanics of the flute in their hands. They are compelled to hang out with the flute repair specialist at Flute Day almost to the exclusion of attending any of the performance workshops. And so on. 

In this era of asking "why go to college if I can find a steady job without a degree?" I think this is a compelling set of anecdotes. You go to find yourself. You go to learn from others' experiences and wisdom, others who have lived different lives than you and might have some ideas to share. You go to learn information and develop ideas you never even dreamed existed when you were in high school. And we, as faculty, have been through it--well, some version of it. So beyond teaching you better fundamental skills and running you through your paces on scales and standard repertoire every semester, we watch you grow. We listen to you try to express your thoughts, keep an eye on your progress, answer your questions that take us both down rabbit holes of curiosity. And hopefully you learn who you are and what you really want to do with your life. You know, before you were taught these limiting notions and tried to adapt to the wrong script. 

I start every Careers in Music class with this simple questionnaire to help students try to shake off the labels and limiting rules as they embark upon their adult lives as musicians. Then we do it again in the last week of classes. I'm quietly taking inventory in each flute lesson and administering a more surreptitious version of this quiz with each private student as the years progress. What creation myths have you been living by? What imposed folklore is holding back your mentees? It's such a difficult but satisfying process to work through this inquiry at any stage of life. And then you lather again, rinse and repeat!