Facing the Music

by Jennifer Knapp

  I successfully voiced a low tone: Whhuuaaaahh!

  Then, as I was instructed, pursed tighter and with more air: Whheeeeee!

  Despite having no real clue as to what I was doing, the match seemed ordained. “It looks like we have a winner,” declared the keeper. “So, whaddya think?” he said, turning to my stepmother, ready to make the sale.

  Minutes later I was walking out the door with my very own Conn Director. It wasn’t a brand new horn, she came preloved, but she was mine now. A striking beauty she was, too. Unlike other trumpets, which were usually uniformly plated with the familiar golden brass, she had a rose-colored copper bell to help her stand out from the crowd. With a little practice, we were going to make wonderful music together.

  Once I got her home, I put my head down and got to work. I had twelve weeks before school started. I didn’t want to embarrass myself when I got to band class, so I tore into my books. I challenged my poor, tender lips to keep pace with what I wanted to accomplish. I played every minute of the day that I could physically handle.

  After only a couple of weeks of practicing alone, I tripped into my first lesson. My practice had apparently paid off.

  My instructor assumed that I had been playing for a couple of years, similar to the course that was expected of my peers. When I told him that I had just started, he seemed confused. He tested my honesty. In his mind, there was no way I could be playing as well as I was in only a few weeks.

  “You mean to tell me you just started playing? You didn’t start in fifth grade with the other kids?”

  “No,” I maintained. I was equally surprised that he found it questionable.

  After a momentary pause, he moved on. “Well then, let’s find something to challenge you.”

  For the rest of the summer, he introduced and tested me with all manner of taxing exercises. Etudes, articulation drills, and slurring assignments. I ate it all up. I worked tirelessly at perfecting my skills and adored the work. It didn’t hurt that my instructor said that I had talent. I relished the fact that I had a kind of gift that made me feel worthwhile. His endorsement encouraged me to press on. I couldn’t wait to put my newfound skills to the test when school started again. At long last, I was going to be a member of the school band!

  The end of that summer felt triumphant. There was so much to be happy about.

  Though life in our home had been difficult at times, this summer had developed a different tone. My stepmother seemed more relaxed and less prone to anger. We were getting along, almost bonding even. The support that she had offered in helping me find my way to music seemed to open the door to a new understanding between us. For the first time in a very long time, it seemed like we all might be able to live in harmony.

  I looked forward to my sister’s return to the fold. I couldn’t wait for her to share in what seemed a positive shift in our home. It had seemed that, in recent years, she and I had been struggling to stay connected to one another. Our past family struggles came to affect us in different ways. I had found my hope through the lean times in reaching out through creative expression of writing and music. It wouldn’t be until she came back home that I would learn about where she kept her own hope.

  Our time apart had seemed to veer us in two distinctly different paths of survival. It turned out that my sister had kept her hopes stored in moving to Mom’s once she was old enough to enforce her choice in the court system. During my last visit of the summer, together again at my mother’s, I learned of it. Mom was clear that I, too, could make a similar choice, but she was also careful to make certain that I felt no pressure to arrive at the same conclusion.

  “Your sister has decided that she wants to move here, with me. I want you to know that you can do the same, if you choose. But I want you to know, that I will love you no matter what. Whatever you decide, I will love you and support you.”

  I couldn’t imagine what life apart from my sister would look like, nor could I imagine altering my current vision of following music. Through the years, I had often dreamed of running away, and had attempted to do so on more than one occasion. I had spent countless hours imagining that life would be better, more pleasant, more openly loving in my mother’s world, but now that I was faced with the reality of actually making it happen, I couldn’t get over the idea that I was in some way forced to choose between the music that had become my safety net and a life with her that I didn’t seem to have the courage to test.

  In the years to come, I would be haunted by the picture of my sister coming home and packing her things from the room where everything had always been ours. I would struggle with the strange conflicting feelings of being abandoned by her and the frivolous teenage joy of finally having a bedroom to myself. The idea that I had, for the first time in my life, made a clearly individual decision, independent of our collective personality, was empowering and, at the same time, a choice that made me feel a fool. I saw myself as lacking in courage in comparison to her. I couldn’t help but feel that my choice was an act of betrayal to her love and to my mother’s, but in the end I chose to stay in the place I had always called home, in my father’s world.

  five

  Life, as it always seems to do, moved callously forward, oblivious to my need to regain my breath. There seemed to be a hole in my universe. My sister was gone now, and I was on my own. I was brokenhearted and trying to make sense of it all.

  The idyllic summer of eased tensions with my stepmother came to an end, only to ramp back up to our usual cycle of emotional turmoil. We did not know how to comfort one another. We did not know how to love. Once again, every conflict of our home pressed on the bruise that was our family brokenness. We were either in all-out war or locked in icy silence. Whatever my family had been was crumbling.

  I felt I could no longer rely on my father to bridge the gap of our family tensions. He began to express his sorrow about my sister’s absence by hiding out in the barn, busying himself with this task and that. Like my sister, he seemed to disappear, leaving me feeling all the more isolated. I was stunned at feeling so alone, unable to find any way to connect with and communicate what I was going through. If it weren’t for music, I don’t know how I would have survived it all.

  For the first time in my life, I hopped the bus to school alone. I was in junior high now, facing a new school and a whole new way of going to class. The sound and feel of it all was so foreign. It was all so noisy and alive compared to grade school. The hallways were teeming with teenagers, some of them seemingly twice my size. The school bell that alerted us of the changing hours rang through the building, along with the banging and bustle of all the students rummaging through the metal lockers that lined the hallways. Every new hour meant a new class, and with it a new teacher to lead the way. It was all so overwhelming, until, at last, I walked into the band room.

  That was where I met Carol. The tall, lanky ginger of a woman that stood in front of the room hardly looked old enough to be a teacher, but here she was, our band director.

  All the anticipation I had had for this day did not go un­rewarded. She was a ball of enthusiasm, welcoming us to sit down, each to our sections, flutes in front, saxes and clarinets in the next row, and brass in the back. Most of the other kids seemed to know their place, making their way to seats in front of music stands already laid out with sheet music. I fought through my fear of the newness of it all and followed suit, taking a seat alongside all the other trumpeters.

  Carol took her place atop her conductor’s pedestal, raised her long, spindly arms wide and declared, “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got!” With that, every student put their horns to their mouths and began to play under her direction.

  I was shocked. I had never before played in a band, but I went with it. One note after the next. I couldn’t believe it! I was in the band! I had always played my music alone, or maybe in a duet with my private instructor, but now I was playing, in harmony, alongside
the other students.

  Periodically, I would peek up from the page to see this widely gesticulating figure of a skinny, red-headed woman, flapping her arms to the beat. When she wanted us to play more softly, she would shrink to smaller gestures. When she demanded force, she would widen and wave with a gusto unlike anything I had ever seen. To my amazement, the whole room had no choice but to respond to her spell. I thought she was so brave and wild in how she seemed to move with such abandon. I couldn’t imagine being so free, but I could tell, she loved music. I did, too, and I wanted her to teach it all to me.

  I loved band class, but there were times when the music we played as a group seemed less than challenging. I would get bored, feeling like I was being held back by the rest of the class. So, I began asking Carol for more. I began showing up at her classroom outside our prescribed hours. Even when I wasn’t looking for music, there were times when I was just looking for a friend. I must have been a pest of a kid, always bugging her apart from class, but I was serious about my instrument and she, above all people in the world, seemed to appreciate that. In an act of kindness, she took me under her wing.

  She tested me a bit at first, giving me music that was usually reserved for older high school students, but I gobbled it up. I was young, and lacking in finesse, for sure, but I was plucky. There wasn’t any music that she put in front of me that I didn’t work on playing to the best of my ability. Though it wasn’t part of the school curriculum, Carol began to make a way for me to prepare music for solo competitions similar to those of the high school students ahead of me. Somehow, Carol had managed get my ­parents’ permission to sign me up and make a way for me to perform at music competitions throughout the state. At her own expense, she would drive me around Kansas on the weekends to universities in Wichita, Emporia, and Pittsburg so that I could play all the challenging pieces of music that she had put in front of me. Every competition that I entered, I walked away with a gold medal.

  I had a lot of natural talent as a trumpet player, but I still needed instruction to grow. Carol was an excellent flutist and conductor, but she knew that I needed a proper trumpet teacher to help me move forward.

  In my freshman year, Carol reached out to Dr. Gary Corcoran, who was then the acting band director at Pittsburg State University. Dr. Corcoran was the trumpet instructor for PSU students and, thanks to Carol’s urging, agreed to give me lessons pro bono. The only problem with accepting such a gracious gift was that I had to figure out a way to get there. Pittsburg was sixty miles away, I wasn’t old enough to drive, and my parents weren’t prepared to make the commitment themselves. Once again, Carol found a way. She somehow managed to garner my parents’ permission for the whole affair, agreeing that she would drive me the distance, two hours round trip.

  I was stunned that Carol thought I was a decent enough player to warrant such an undertaking. But, even more, I was deeply blessed by her act of kindness in believing in me. It was the kind of outward encouragement that was empowering to me as a teenager struggling to maintain a sense of personal worth. Her generosity of time and inspiration was more than simply giving me an opportunity to do something fun; it was an investment in my dignity. It felt good to have a mentor who believed in my potential. The impact of that support gave me hope that I could be someone who was meaningful. I began to be aware of the necessary value of finding, within myself, a gift worthy of celebrating. At home I felt like a mistake, an afterthought, a burden, but when I closed my eyes, picked up my horn and played, I could breathe into life every dream and hope that was trapped, unspoken inside my heart. Music wasn’t just something I found outside of myself, but rather, it was a song that was, and had always been, living inside me. To me, music was the voice of our inner spirit, that when we call out, answers our deepest longings.

  What Carol did, both as mentor and friend, was give me permission to set that inner voice free. Through the countless hours of driving, we talked about falling into the gift that music had been for us. How it was the language in which we hear the call to be alive. She inspired in me the idea that in the things that we do, we do them not to just be excellent at skill for skill’s sake, or even for talent’s sake, but that we are in the process of reaching out into those places that give our lives meaning and hope. She often reminded me that I could play every note on the page with technical precision, but that all of life is more than just the execution.

  “You can play with all the skill in the world, Jennifer,” she would say, “but if you don’t put your heart into it, it’s just noise.” Usually, a comment like this came after I performed a piece without flaw, but with no feeling. I’d want to perform without error so as to be praised for perfection, but I’d hold back the emotion, selfishly saving it for the times when I wasn’t on stage.

  As my friend, Carol knew that I had found an inner voice. What she was trying to teach me was that practicing wasn’t just about making my fingers and lips do as I commanded. Music was also a journey into self-discovery that took courage.

  “You can play every note right, but if you don’t bring the joy out of the piece, you’ve missed the true purpose. You have to find that joy and let it live,” she would say. The idea was terrifying, but alluring. I wanted joy, but what if I couldn’t find it? To Carol, that was just as much a part of practicing music, facing the emotions, knowing them, then communicating them.

  “I know you’re a woman of depth. I can see it and it’s a beautiful thing when you let it out,” she said one day. “The gift isn’t that you can make that trumpet sound good, it’s that you know—you know how music feels. That isn’t talent, honey, that’s a gift. One that I hope you will always be willing to share.”

  Those words would stay with me for the rest of my life. Whatever I would experience in life, however deeply I felt my emotions, none of these were meant to be wholly absorbed and end with me. I wasn’t meant to simply act as a sponge and keep it all to myself where it might fester. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was giving me a lesson about life. None of us are at the end of what we experience. It may feel like we are at times the target of sorrow or of anger, but these things must pass through us if we want to survive them. We cannot keep joy to ourselves or love hidden away. Nor can we harbor pain so deep that it takes root. We can set the love we have inside our hearts free to be enjoyed by those we hold dear. We have in us the power to reshape the anger we experience into acts of forgiveness.

  I was lucky that I found music and a compassionate teacher to help me see it as a form of lived grace. Music would be a gift that would help me understand that life is made up of all manner of serenity and despair, but that it is in how we choose to let those things pass through us that speak of our true character. I didn’t yet know what kind of person I was going to become, but I hoped that in my journey toward adulthood, I could honor the person Carol had believed me capable of being.

  BY THE TIME I got to high school, Carol had to move away, but she left with me the legacy of her kindness and a passion to dedicate my studies to music. Like her, I was going to be a music teacher, maybe even a conductor of an orchestra. Knowing that, school and academics took on a new significance. I had always been a good student, but now that I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was determined to not just go to school. I wanted an education. I wanted to go to college for music.

  I put my head down and got to work. Everything I did—every class, every elective, every afterschool activity that I gave my time to—was done with an eye toward gaining experience in fine arts. I was fearless.

  Though I had never thought much about singing before, I enrolled in the choir. I talked our resident choir pianist to help me prepare and perform solo vocal pieces so that I could compete, as I did with my trumpet, at state competitions. In band, I took it upon myself to learn at least a little something about every instrument. With a little coercion, I got my new band director to give me at least a cursory lesson on each major instrument in the
band. I understood that in college, I would have to learn how to play all of them at least to some kind of passing level, so I wanted to get a head start.

  Though our school had limited resources, there were a few unused instruments kicking around. I found a dusty, brass baritone horn in the storage room, a heavily dented French horn, a trombone, and a soprano sax. I pestered my band director to instruct me about every one. Though he insisted that I keep my chair as a trumpeter during school hours, I eventually managed to convince him to let me play trombone during basketball games, baritone for state solo competition, and French horn when an odd score may have called for it. In exchange, I promised to never play saxophone in public. (Apparently, whatever musical gifts I have don’t extend to reed instruments!)

  Now, more than ever, I needed to find a way to afford the piano lessons, and the more complex music theory that came with them. I needed to find a way to stay after school and stay involved in all the fine art activities that were preparing me for college without the relentless, and usually disappointing, bartering with my parents.

  To them, this music thing didn’t seem all that important. They had invested in buying me a horn, but that was about the limit. I had hoped they would share in my enjoyment by coming to my various concerts and performances, but my parents didn’t seem to recognize the significance that music was having in my life. There were times when I wondered if they even noticed just how much their absence left me feeling empty and disregarded.

  I tried to explain to my father that all these things weren’t just busywork for me. I had shared with him my vision of going to college.

  “Dad, this isn’t just something I want to do,” I shared, “It’s my future. It’s what I want to be.”

  His response was more practical than emotional. “Well, if that’s the case, then, you’ll have to take responsibility for it. You want piano lessons? You need to find a way to pay for it. More than that, you’ll need to get yourself there.”