June 19, 2004

This week, I started playing my flute again for the first time in more than 10 years. But hopefully, this entry isn't going to be as twee as that first sentence might predict.

I started taking piano lessons when I was 5 and flute when I was 8. My parents made me practice every day. I always liked to play, but I never much liked to practice. In fact, I think it would be more accurate to say that when I was a kid, I hated practicing. But I played in the band, the orchestra, in a chamber music ensemble with my friends, and I loved that part of it. We played at parties and weddings and made hundreds of dollars, which at the time seemed to us a ridiculously huge amount of money for something we would have just done for fun anyway.

I cut way back on my playing when I went to college, although I was still always in an orchestra of some sort. And then I graduated and I pretty much stopped playing at all. I always had my flute with me, though, and occasionally I would pull it out and see exactly how much I'd forgotten. The last time I'd tried to play before this, it had been so long since I'd played that my flute didn't even really work anymore. The keys would stick and the valves made noise. So, I sent my flute to my old flute teacher to be repaired. She overhauled it and gave it back and then it sat on my shelf for another year.

I'm not really sure exactly what it was this time. Maybe seeing how much Iggy enjoys being in a band and playing music with his friends reminded me of how much I used to like playing with a group (although the kind of music he plays is pretty much the polar opposite of what I play). Maybe the fact that a bunch of the symphony concerts I've been to lately have featured pieces I myself played at one time or another. And then someone posted flyers on campus saying that they were looking for musicians to form chamber music groups. So, I picked up my flute to see if I could still kind of play, and I still kind of can, so I e-mailed the guy, and now I'm having lunch on Monday with a bunch of strangers to talk about getting together to play music.

I think the oddest thing about playing now is how exactly the same I am as a musician (except worse) as I was when I was 17. I still hate doing exercises and working through difficult passages. My left ring finger is still my laziest. I'm still pretty good at sight-reading, although anything with a lot of sharps or flats messes me up. My old calluses came back after just a few days of playing. And my musical instincts are the same--every time I see a note in the music in my flute teacher's handwriting saying "don't rush" or "don't overblow" inevitably, I realize that I have made just those mistakes.

So, I've made a committment of sorts to playing again on a regular basis, even though another leisure activity is just about the last thing I need. But hey, it'll look good on my college applications, right?