Music School: Part Three

And then there was the job itself. Jamiel and Berenice and I worked the shift after classes had ended, but this didn't mean that the building was empty. Homework, for music students, meant practice. And the music building was filled with practice rooms down in the basement. Each one had a piano, and each billed-as-soundproof little room would have a student in it, banging away, as often as not on Beethoven's Pathetique sonata, the mastery of which was required for first year students. It was quite a draconian proposition: If they didn't master the Pathetique, they would not be majoring in music when they advanced past their sophomore year, which was when majors were declared, so they absolutely had to get it right. They spent all year working on it.

Listen to this for a little while. It’s not so hard at the beginning, if you have any music ability, but listen to what happens at 1:35:



That’s where it starts to get dicey, and where most students went from music-making to hash-chopping. As I moved around, sweeping from room from room, listening to the audible spillage from the little rooms, there was little doubt in my mind that, for most of these students, stumbling their way up the keyboard attempting that majestic run, majoring in music was not in the offing. But they kept at it, especially that one section. It was their dream, if not necessarily their reality. Being a piano player myself, I felt for them.

Needless to say, not everyone in the music school played the piano. Wind and string instrument folk certainly practiced alone, but they also got together in small groups, sometimes in the classrooms upstairs, which was not allowed but nobody really cared, and for that matter, who was going to enforce this at night? The custodian, AKA me? Hardly likely. One of the things the non-pianists complained about was that their instrument, unlike the piano, didn't have the same wealth of solo pieces. In fact, they sort of hated the pianists for this (and maybe also because the pianists all seemed to always be playing that one song). One guy I befriended played the bass trombone, for which of course there are probably zero solo works in the repertoire, but one of the reasons he had picked this instrument was its very unpopularity. When the time came for him to find a job in the outside world, he had reasoned, bass or second trombone players would be a valuable rarity. For him it was not art for art's sake, but a job. I've often wondered if he went on to play bass trombone at a major orchestra somewhere. Or a minor orchestra, for that matter. I’d watch him play every now and then, and let me tell you, there’s not much you can do with a bass trombone. He was good at it though, all things considered. I remember him as a physically prepossessing, hairy-in-all-the-wrong-places kind of guy. At the age of twenty or so he resembled Fred Flintstone heading into his retirement years. I’ve associated the bass trombone with lunking hirsute types ever since.

(to be concluded)
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