I lied about my age to look more impressive
Throughout my life as a musician I have felt a huge awareness of the scarcity of time. That my ageing was increasing at a negative correlation to my improvement as a cellist.
Many teacher relationships would begin by asking my age. Sometimes it felt like my young age could save their opinion of me, sometimes it made them look weary as they plotted the potential improvement of the next few years and whether it was too late for me to be an impressive representation of their teaching.
Masterclasses too in my undergrad - those I took part in and those I watched - would often begin with a discourse about age. Praising prodigious undergrads and a strange sense of insecurity from those above 23 - masters students expected to perform relative to their age and added years of practice and tuition.
‘How old are you’? Sometimes I would panic and lie. I remember turning 22 and feeling that I couldn’t get away with being young anymore. The next lessons I took after my birthday were in Germany in (very) early 2020. I moved around Dusseldorf and Hannover telling teachers I was 21, as if this could make up for my fatiguing cello technique and strange interpretation of Brahms’ 2nd sonata. In Dusseldorf, a girl from Spain and I were playing to a teacher in a joint lesson. She was also 22, but I lied and pitched my age lower to 21. I was insecure and it was a tactic I'd heard from other musicians before me.
“The more I panicked about time running out in my undergrad, the more dissociated I felt from my playing”
How many concertos and sonatas had I learned? This was a question I was asked at 22. The answer was not enough. I’d dedicated a lot of my last year to learning contemporary music and music by women. Learning the Ethel Smyth Cello Sonata felt like a waste of time, because I was chastised for having not learned Schubert’s ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata yet. I felt like it was a right of passage to complete the standard repertoire before time ran out, so I began to move away from the music that interested me. Everyone was telling me to make the most of music college, and that I wouldn’t have time to practice afterwards.
‘You’re about to move into 3rd year, you should know this by now’. Those words gave me a great insecurity - I wasn’t ready to be a musician because my teacher didn’t think my improvement lined up to the trajectory they had in mind for me. The more I panicked about time running out in my undergrad, the more dissociated I felt from my playing and the less I understood how to correct my own mistakes.
Now I’m 25 and haven’t learned a sonata for 3 years. The pandemic and mental illness within it made me aware of time in a new way. It moved from something that I used to impress people, and into something that gave me greater freedom to explore. Moving away from music college allowed me to drop this expectation.
“Your improvement can’t be linear, so neither should your intensity of practice be”
How late is too late? Improvement isn’t directly related to the amount you push yourself. I wish I could plot my hours practice against the marks I got across my years at college. I received the best performance mark in my final year, barely practicing due to my mental health. I had nothing in the tank, so I performed with less ego.
Is it predictable to say that music is ageless? Let go for a day, a month or a year. Your improvement can’t be linear, so neither should your intensity of practice be. If there’s one thing I wish I could tell myself, it would be to own my age, my maturing musicianship and the strange experiences of my undergrad. To enjoy life moving on and music uncovering itself to me.