I remember learning proper posture. With both feet flat on the floor, my back straight and held an inch or two from the chair, I would breathe as instructed. The instrument—a woodwind initially curved and tempered by Adolphe Sax. The first lessons confirmed my infancy…the only student unable to push a note through the alto. Against the mouthpiece my lips became tender and bruised. Frustrated and willing, day after day I returned to the padded brass, the bitter reed.
There were no strangers to welcome the tones I urged and opened with my breath and fingers. My notes wavered with dust in the air, before birds at the window and spiders positioned high along the wall. In music I braced particulars, a strange compelling, while beginning to fit.
Later someone showed me, first by score, spirited chromatics and grace notes and trills and time signatures varying by measure. In my room I practiced, pretending a hundred concerts featured me, projecting as if a thousand worshiped as I did—forward in their seats, leaning into the present wind.
Sight-reading is the grace of musicians, with everything at once immediate and improvised.
All order glows with the familiar. I stood in sharp rows and rounded corners with short, stiff steps, marching on Halloween and Thanksgiving, at home football games for cold crowds…or sat awkwardly in dark halls before parents and board members. The younger players must covet the first chair (rate of succession) before they can arrange the perfect plan: escape.
Every composition ushers at least one ghost: even Sousa himself still beckons in simple time. That history enabling each note I needed to engage on my own. I started typically, venturing mildly, eagerly absorbent, anticipating the weekly countdown after church on Sundays. Soon I grew, quickly stretching until most lintels threatened safe passage. Late at night, unaccompanied, I sampled forbidden rhythm and speed: metal. Death became the word to amplify, increasingly inseparable from the sounds crossing my senses. On and on, I matched voices with The Damned, The Misfits, observed with Stravinsky a rapid ritual, dashed after a youthful Mozart through a major reckoning—and thrillingly caught the unclouded concerto: Wallace Stevens, 1935.
What if numbers kept up a substantial lead? Students would radiate: ample disputants, advanced, valid. Why deprive them? As crowning fiction reprieves them from lessons (rosaries) lining the decades. Messengers and legends arrive for the morning waltz, to privilege each novice. Children know how many games and riddles haunt a book. Why ask them to sit and guard the blackboard?
No posture is adequate for reading. I inhale the dust of seashells, crouch to sift for new fossils along the road even where likely to find none. Language saves the recluse. I address the inherent mystery and patterning of each locality. I indulge, entertaining the pulse in my throat, names and theories bound to the perfect cadence, authentic. And strain the tonic, the comfort of refrain. For the off-balancing figure, the giant bending his ear—Exercise in Retrodiction.
Supposing those budding lessons had not been determinately bound by a grade…I could only imagine learning to love the work I perform, for nothing else but delight.
Nathan E. White is a writer and musician. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from N.Y.U. His first book of poetry, Apparent Magnitude, was a finalist in the 2012 Jacar Press Book Contest and is now available from Aldrich Press. His work (poems and essays) has appeared in various literary magazines throughout the US, Canada, and the UK, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Publications include Ascent, Assisi, Bellingham Review, The Bitter Oleander, Blood Lotus, Broad River Review, California Quarterly, Chaffin Journal, Existere, Grasslimb, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hiram Poetry Review, J Journal, James Dickey Review, Lake Effect, The Los Angeles Review, Magma, The Monongahela Review, The Oklahoma Review, Owen Wister Review, Psychic Meatloaf, Quiddity, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, Redactions, Roanoke Review, Rock & Sling, South Dakota Review, Southern Indiana Review, Spot Literary Magazine, Tulane Review, Willard & Maple.