When I look back over my life, there are things that I wish had done differently. But I am proud of one thing that I did, and I never wish to change it.
I am proud of the fact that I went to music conservatory. In fact, I didn't go to one music conservatory. I went to two of them. Two of the best music conservatories in North America.
Sometimes people ask me whether I wish I had studied something other than music. They point out that I have earned my living as a writer, not a musician. Of course, they are right. But still, I wouldn't exchange that experience for anything else.
And it isn't only the exposure to great music that makes me feel that way. Because I think that the kind of education you get in conservatory leads to a different way of thinking than, say, a liberal-arts education does.
The Socratic stuff doesn't exist when you are trying to master an instrument or, as in my case, singing. The dialectical arguments don't exist either. Nobody in a music conservatory discusses whether music is good or bad. People don't take part in that kind of discussion - at least not about the central issue of music itself. You can say that a particular piece of music pleases you, But the real question is, are you good enough to perform it? If not, you have not earned your right to opine. Music is, and ever is, good. The question is, how do you stack up against it?
Sure, I took exams in subjects like music history and music theory. But so much of the overall study centered on whether or not I could do things. Could I learn music quickly and accurately? Could I sing credibly in French, German, Italian and Russian? Could I learn stage blocking quickly and act reasonably well? If somebody played a melody, could I write it down? Did I understand the harmonic structure of a piano part or an orchestral score, so I could start singing on the correct pitch? If somebody handed my a sheet of music, could I sing it off accurately without access to a piano? Could I read an open orchestral score well enough to know that I could get, say, the pitch for an entrance I had to make from the clarinet, which ahd just played the same pitch?
Then of course, there was the issue of range. As a singer, did I have a big enough range to qualify me as a professional singer? I remember that during my second year at conservatory, I reserved the same practice room at lunchtime every day and I went there, every day, trying to add just one additional note to the top part of my range. Day after day, the same worthwhile effort to achieve just another semitone. One day I seemed to be making progress, the next day it disappeared.
The next year, when I entered the school's opera workshop, the wonderful man who ran it seemed to be a great fan of mine, although he didn't know me too well. Two years later, in my last year, he told me that he respected me because from his office, he had heard me going to that practice room at the same time, day after day, trying to add that one additional note to my range.
So I think you can see that there is so much self-discovery and so much of value in that kind of process. It is, in the end, a curriculum that teaches you as much about your own limitations as it does about your own strengths. It is, and ever is, about testing yourself against the hard, ummutable stuff of the world. In that sense, not unlike being a mason who learns about stones and mortar, or the carpenter who learns about wood.
Going up against reality teaches truths that cannot be discerned by thinking alone.
