A rift

Photo by Olivia Da Costa

I’m known as a trumpet player, but my backup plan was to be a harpist. At times my backup was to be a trumpet player - I wanted to be an elegant harpist, the exotic breed of musician that, when you mention what you do to a stranger, makes their eyes light up and demands a “wow! That’s amazing!”. Even when I told my parents I wanted to play the harp, it was from a place of deciding which instrument I could learn at school that was the most ‘out-there’ (which, in hindsight, was a bizarre burst of egocentrism from an incredibly shy 7 year-old). The harp ended up turning into a bit of a refuge for me, away from the bullying at my single-sex school about being ‘the Trumpet Girl who goes red in the face when she plays’, and away from being loud, which didn’t come naturally to me at all. Harp was a sanctuary of flowery music, long dresses and peaceful time alone in a practice room. But when I joined youth orchestra, I wasn’t the odd one out anymore and there were suddenly loads of funnier, cooler, older people playing brass and I latched onto them. I didn’t want to go to harp sectionals (which consisted of individual practice or occasionally chilling out with the other harpist who sometimes showed up) and I was afraid of missing out on the famous ‘brass banter’, but also the new person that I was becoming. When I say ‘new person’, I mean it literally. Throughout discovering myself as a brass player, I found myself gravitating towards clothes, music, and books that felt more me. My humour started developing into the dry-surreal thing that it is today, and I wasn’t Trumpet Girl anymore, I was just Rebecca.

It seemed like a matter of minutes before I was at Wells Cathedral School and I was firmly established in my trumpetry. But now I was new and although I felt like it was an opportunity to reinvent myself as not-a-nerd, what if I became a form of red-faced Trumpet Girl again? My fears dissipated when the brass crowd took me in and my identity merged with my (primary) instrument more socially rather than pejoratively. Harp was now my Second Study and to be honest, a bit of a drag. It couldn’t provide me with the social connection that I so greatly needed at such a vulnerable time. Even the harp room itself was in a different building; it was damp and dark, with low ceilings and no phone signal. I started dragging my feet, and it seemed to have no impact on my life outside of that harp room. I was also getting involved in the school symphony orchestra, but sitting on the periphery of the orchestra behind a harp and a part made up of mostly bars rest seemed such a world away from the jokes and the teamwork of the trumpet section.

As my time at Wells developed, so did the crevasse between my instrumental techniques. I’d formed a flute, viola and harp trio and I’d entered into the occasional world of background harp music, but I didn’t feel immersed in the harp culture at all. Getting to know famous harpists and recordings and the harp community in general felt so hard compared to the brass culture of shoving tinny iPod earphones at each other and expectantly stating “this is so cool, listen to this.” To further the divide, I joined the trumpet section of National Youth Orchestra, but scandalously only after I’d been offered a place on harp, turned it down, and waited on my reserve trumpet place to come good. I went on to take my grade 8 harp, sure, but I was onto my trumpet diploma by then. Yes, I’d somewhat awkwardly gone to the Guildhall harp open day with the other solitary harpists, but I’d also gone for a mega-tour of all the London brass departments, fangirled over the old Wellensians now living The Life in the City, and chaotically Boris-biked the streets of Central London with the other hormonal, future-obsessed sixth formers. My mental health was shockingly bad by this point and any sense of external validation or peer support was utterly intoxicating.

Needless to say, I accepted my place at Guildhall on trumpet. I was disappointed and embarrassed that I’d ‘only’ received a reserve place from the Royal Academy of Music, but equally keen to be part of the Guildhall-Wells crew. London seemed unbearably exciting, with the opportunity to reinvent myself as a healthy, cool, popular, independent trumpet player and the reassurance that the majority of people there wouldn’t know about all the chaos of my secondary school years. Of course, this promise of a fresh start was akin to flipping a mattress and realising that the other side is just as bad. I felt I had more space to explore my independence, but I was more isolated than before and unsurprisingly, serious mental health problems don’t just go away by relocating to the city. My depression and bulimia sucked me right back in, and along with returning to Wells to visit my then-boyfriend, it felt oh so comforting to return to the this previous identity. You can imagine that when I met another trumpeter-harpist in my year at Guildhall that was doing joint first study, the allure of revisiting yet another former part of myself was strong. “Maybe if I throw myself into more study, I won’t have time to be sad or throwing up,” I lied to myself.

There was an additional aspect: I still wanted to be thin and delicate and airy and beautiful, and playing the harp fitted right in with that aesthetic. It feels mortifying to admit that, but when I seemingly had a choice between instruments and my appearance was taking up so much of my headspace, I suppose it was inevitable. I pulled through my first year of joint first study, but the demands of doing two simultaneous degrees got too much. There were huge holes in my harp knowledge too, emphasised by how much more I seemed to know about the world of trumpet. I didn’t know who the visiting professors were, and I definitely didn’t recognise the names they referred to when talking about certain recordings or orchestras.

Playing from memory was also very much expected, and this was something that I’d accumulated an intense phobia of. Every time I saw one of the other harpists get up to perform, sheet music-less, all I could think about was this one concert at school in which I’d been encouraged to play from memory and, with my teacher sitting in the front row, had circled round the same few bars of La Source at least 6 times before making up an ending. At Guildhall, I had the opportunity to make more memories of memory slips in performance classes and exams, partly because of not being able to put the hours into memorising pieces more thoroughly than via muscle-memory, but more so because there was no room for the music in such an anxious mind. Godefroid and Handel had no chance against the noise of my own self-doubt.

At the end of first year, it became obvious that playing harp wasn’t fixing all of my problems and was more halving my identity than transforming it. I demoted myself to second study and went on with reforging myself as a trumpet player. The harp became sort of a joke I’d make in passing. I’d say “well, whatever you play, it sounds good”, knowing that actually whatever I was playing didn’t sound good, and my technique still needed first-study levels of attention. From there on out, harp practice was crammed in during the couple of weeks before an assessment, in which I’d feel the Head of Strings’ eyes burning holes in my hands. I sustained my track record of having memory slips in my exams; reading back over my mark sheets, they never failed to mention it, as if they thought I might not have realised, as if I didn’t obsess about it for weeks after.

I finished my degree (by what felt like the skin of my teeth) and blindly stumbled into a Masters on the trumpet. I had planned to get in touch with the harp department to continue second study status, but the thought of playing to these new, revered harp professors chilled me to my core. I thought about how much work there was to do on my technique, how I just couldn’t play from memory and the gaping holes in my general harp knowledge, and funnily enough, I never got round to sending that email.

The harp I had in London was accumulating dust, only to be occasionally shoved into an Addison Lee and reluctantly played for hours on end at a stranger’s wedding reception. I cannot count the number of times I played Pachebel’s Canon or The Shape of You. Actually, I don’t want to think about it. I felt so incredibly guilty that I’d be blessed with this beautiful instrument, years of tuition and the chance to make someone’s day even more memorable, but yet I wanted more than anything not to be there. Guests would come up to me and tell me how amazing my life must be, and I’d smile sweetly, sitting there in my ballgown, makeup and heels, nodding in the hope that maybe things would be amazing. These people didn’t know what good technique looked like and they weren’t expecting me to play memorised concerti, but apparently now I was seeking neither internal nor external validation.

At both the Academy and Guildhall, I was encouraged to keep my two identities a secret, in case one muddied the other. My professors told me that audiences and panels would presume that my separate abilities and schedules were compromising each other, and that I wasn’t worth their time as a trumpeter or a harpist. So I proceeded to have different websites, Instagrams, biographies, headshots, business cards…essentially two very distanced identities living under the same roof and in the same friendship circles. I didn’t see myself as an all-emcompassed artist but as somebody trying to make it on two parallel paths, seeing which would lead to success first.

Once the end of my degree was in sight, the pandemic came up over the horizon and into our homes. Yet the harp stayed in the corner, watching me make friends and then enemies with the Dualingo owl, watching me learn how to knit and garden and bake bread, and how to live without things I hadn’t realised I needed. I wasn’t really playing trumpet much but, much to my own disappointment, this didn’t mean I was thirsting for a creative outlet like the harp either. The lockdowns were a lesson in goodbyes for all of us, whether that be to the world we once knew, the music career we were just clinging onto, or more literally to relationships and loved ones. When the world started opening up again, I slowly came to realise that the thread between me and my harp had been severed completely. We’d lived together through one of the most traumatic events of our lifetimes and still hadn’t leant on one another for comfort, so maybe this really was it. We mutually agreed that if there was ever a time for rekindling our relationship, that had been our chance.

Friends and family (and people I barely knew) kept asking how I was feeling about saying goodbye to such a big part of my life but I wasn’t sad. I’d been feeling guilty for so long that such a gorgeous instrument was being held captive in my living room, not being acknowledged, let alone played. I couldn’t imagine anything better than my harp going onto to somebody who would love it, somebody who could cultivate a less toxic relationship with it. It had been one of the longest goodbyes, but one of the most relieving. The part of me that had been a harpist had given up a long time ago, and so I was now only saying goodbye to the instrument, not a part of me. Naturally, I hear a lot of “oh, what a shame that you’re giving such a beautiful instrument up!”, but it doesn’t feel like a shame to have learnt so much about who I expected myself to be, and who I actually ended up existing as.