October 4, 2024

On starting something too late

I'm the adult idiot at the stables and it's amazing

Getting into horseback riding as a classical pianist is like opening a hidden door and slipping sideways into a parallel reality where certain things have been swapped out but the systems are all the same. The 1-ton grand piano has been exchanged for a 1-ton horse; the strict piano teacher waving a pencil and barking out the beat (“one, two! one, two!”) has been replaced by a strict trainer waving a whip and barking out the beat (“up, down! up, down!”); in both you have to keep your back straight and work your feet while keeping your heels down.

Certain mundane things are the same. The weekly drive to the lesson. The small astonished victory of being able to do something this week that you couldn’t do last week. Practicing at home. (Because you are, for some reason, not allowed to keep a horse in a two-bedroom apartment, I practice by doing undignified squats and lunges and leg-lifts to build up my core and leg muscles, and jog in place to get my heart rate up. Glamorous stuff.) For all the newness of starting an intimidating sport that involves giant skittish animals, there is something incredibly comforting about the familiarity of the process.

Me posting the trot and also going "Wow, this is just like playing the piano!"

It’s both surprising and not-surprising, then, to find that riding and piano share the same philosophy regarding youth and training: in both, it’s commonly accepted that you have to start young if you’re to have any hope of accomplishing anything serious—otherwise, it’s [ominous violin tremolos] too late.

I started formal piano lessons right after turning 5, which is considered pretty standard in classical training. (Some people start earlier, at 3 or 4; I know some people who started “late,” between 7 and 10, and have met two people in my life who managed to get into music school for piano studies despite starting piano lessons after the age of 10, but they’re considered improbable outliers, and one of them was still matter-of-factly told to quit music because they weren’t going any further.) Similarly, the stable I’m at offers pony introduction lessons (awww!!!) for 1-4 year-olds, and at my first lesson, the trainer informed me that the full-grown adult horse I was on had just been taken out by a 5-year-old. (!)

So the idea that you have to get all the training and muscle memory in before adolescence: it’s very real, and pretty normal in the parallel worlds of music and sports.

As a pianist, I frequently encounter people (okay, I say “people,” but it’s always men) who for some reason dump their glum complaints on me that their parents didn’t get them music lessons when they were young so they never had a chance to learn an instrument and get good at it and now their life sucks and they’re sad and it’s all their parents’ fault and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re like if Eeyore was real and weirdly fixated on music and human-shaped and not remotely cute, so basically not like Eeyore at all.

If only this was who I was talking to (Source)

My usual response is to tell them that it’s never too late to start learning anything new (horse people agree). However! There is a tiny mean Sharon inside of me who really wants to say, “Oh my god, get over yourself. With a woe-is-me attitude like that, you never would have gotten anywhere with an instrument anyway. You wouldn’t survive critical feedback in a lesson or the first couple of failed auditions, and you wouldn’t have the discipline and self-motivation it takes to put in hours of practicing every single day. You’re blaming this weird emotional void on your parents when clearly the problem is you.”

(You can see why, instead of saying all that, I just bite my tongue and encourage them to sign up for piano lessons and that I believe in them, rah rah rah.)

Because yes, it’s totally true that for some disciplines, you can miss the age cutoff for “greatness,” and please know that I am using very heavy air-quotes around that word. But here’s the secret: starting something you’re “too old” (again, heavy air-quotes) to get “great” (ditto) at is GREAT (sincere, no air-quotes) and I cannot recommend it highly enough!!!

Maybe this is just because it’s me, a person so predisposed to optimism that my pre-calculus teacher called a meeting with my mom to tell her that I was “too happy” and it was a problem. (True story.) But my few scant weeks of riding lessons have been a joyous revelation that it is SO! FREEING! to get into something knowing full well that there is no payoff coming. I will never earn money, compete, or rack up any brag-worthy accomplishments in riding, no matter how much I put into it. It’s never going on my resume, because it’s got no relevance whatsoever to the work I do. I’m a naturally fast learner and I thrive in environments where an authority figure shouts criticism at me (thanks, piano lessons!), and because of that I’ve picked up things quickly enough that the trainers have commented on it, and absolutely nothing will come of it. That may sound depressing but I swear it’s the least depressing thing in the world.

Because I’m decades too late to have big dreams here, there is zero burden of expectation, the kind that until now has been placed on everything else I’ve ever done in life. It doesn’t matter if I have talent or not, it doesn’t matter how fast I progress, it doesn’t matter how good I ever get. The only thing I can get out of this whole endeavor is personal joy and satisfaction, oh no! Here my hands are tied: I have no choice but to be selfish with my joy, to fail at capitalistic hustle culture so flagrantly, and it is a wicked delight to know this. It’s an entirely different flavor of joy—not better, not worse, just different—from anything I’ve ever felt in music.

The worst amateur adult pianists—and I don’t mean “worst” as in how they play, but in how much I like them as human beings—are the ones who are insecure about their amateur status and want so very badly to be considered experts. (They’re whatever the musical equivalent is of the temporarily embarrassed millionaire.) Through eager reading and concert-going and maybe a music appreciation or theory class here and there, they’ve picked up legitimate knowledge but wield it like a force field around their very fragile egos, and are hostile to new information out of fear that something being new to them will expose them for the non-experts they are. The absolute best amateurs are the ones who, regardless of how much they know (and they’re very sneaky: they always know way more than they let on), never lose their sense of childlike openness.

I am the only adult at the stables who has no idea what they’re doing. Every time I go, I’m surrounded by literal children effortlessly tacking up, cantering, and jumping in the arena. Then there’s me, a fully grown adult with a college degree and a mortgage, getting yelled at because I tried, like a dumbass, to attach cross-ties to a bridle. I could feel shame about this whole situation, but I have cheerfully and wholeheartedly embraced my new identity as the stable idiot. After being a highly accomplished young person my whole life, I am finally that which I’ve been taught to fear: the too-big beginner, the adult student who knows nothing, and it’s fantastic. 10/10 would recommend.

Bear news

It brings me great pleasure to inform you that California bears can open doors now. From Nathan Solis at the LA Times:

“Something interesting happened in the past two years. And like Jurassic Park, the bears have learned how to open doors. I don’t know how they learned it. I don’t know how they’re teaching each other, but they’re opening car doors, too.”

Meanwhile, "Fat Bear Week postponed due to bear-on-bear murder" is a headline I saw this week (courtesy of Emma Keates at A.V. Club), so, uh.

“Earlier today, a bear killed another bear on the river. It was caught live on the webcams and we thought, well, we can’t go ahead with our Fat Bear Week bracket reveal without addressing this situation first,” Mike Fritz, the resident naturalist at webcam host Explore.org, said in a conversation held in place of the unveiling.

Bears! They can open doors and murder each other! They're just like us!

Impressions of Impressionism

I'm currently working on learning Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Mel Bonis' Omphale, both of which are gorgeous "fingers-go-brrrr" pieces. It's going well but sounds terrible.

Oh I’d forgotten how when you’re first learning impressionist music and drilling the notes slowly it sounds like ass

— 🎹sharon su 🎹 (@doodlyroses.bsky.social) September 25, 2024 at 4:33 PM

Impressionist music one note at a time: ❌🆗🔕⁉️🚮🆘 Impressionist music at tempo with the pedal floored:✨💫

— 🎹sharon su 🎹 (@doodlyroses.bsky.social) September 25, 2024 at 4:42 PM

(I have been meaning to record a little video demonstrating the ugly-hot energy of Impressionist music, and I swear I'll get around to doing it someday.)

Miscellany

say what you will about gustav holst that mother fucker knew exactly what planets sound like

— pee wee herman-palladino (@markpopham.bsky.social) September 27, 2024 at 5:53 PM

"How do I impress my soulmate? I think gymnastics on her staircase in front of her children" - Johannes Brahms for some reason, 1854

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— Emily E Hogstad (@song-of-lark.bsky.social) September 30, 2024 at 5:30 PM

Art is amazing because even across more than a century you can tell this guy was annoying

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— Daniel Kay Hertz (@danielkayhertz.bsky.social) September 22, 2024 at 11:43 AM

unlike all these attention seekers, i'm on social media for the incredible mental health benefits

— michael lutz (@ztul.bsky.social) October 1, 2024 at 10:16 AM