Ambition

I was an ambitious teenager. I was also a very hard worker. As a high school flutist I used to set my alarm for 5:00 a.m. and practice scales for an hour in the basement. Then I would have breakfast and get on the 7:10 school bus.

I would use my free periods in school to practice (we had two practice rooms in the music office). I must have spent some after school time doing schoolwork, and I must have spent time with friends (playing duets, no doubt). After dinner I would often get on the trolley and go to concerts at the New England Conservatory or Boston University. Then I would practice until 11:00, listen to a record (usually a piece of Brahms chamber music), and would go to sleep immediately after the tone arm on my record player returned to its resting place, which turned the whole machine off.

I never let more than six hours of time pass between practice sessions. And I listened to a lot of Brahms chamber music.

My ambition got me into Juilliard. My ambition found me friends who worked as diligently and consistently as I did. My ambition made me fearless in the presence of the accomplished musicians I met in Europe, particularly people who specialized in early music, and it made me unafraid to work in radio, as a reviewer, and even as a kind of a scholar, even though I had absolutely no training in musical scholarship. 

But it wasn’t ambition that fueled my return to playing violin in my early thirties, after nearly twenty years away. It was pure need. I had run into an expressive wall, and needed to find a way to move forward. 

I needed to be able to play a stringed instrument so that I could play the kind of chamber music that was never available to me as a flutist. I needed Schumann in my life, and Brahms, and Beethoven beyond the Serenade.

I knew that at my age there was no path to the kind of a career I imagined I would have as a flutist. I was quite demoralized after every path to “success” (or even employment) as a flutist came to an abrupt and bitter end, but I achieved competence as a string player rather quickly, and found that I had a knack for making string quartet arrangements.

Arranging gave me the courage to write my own music, and I found my old ambition returning. I started studying composition, and then essentially chain wrote piece after piece. I loved the hard work. I loved the rhythm of getting up very early and writing. I loved the thrill of hearing something I wrote played or sung beautifully. I particularly loved having the opportunity to express myself without the need to be judged by others. I have always been my fiercest critic, and organizing the notes and rhythms of a piece successfully is always gratifying.

I fell into the “class” of a “woman composer,” whether I thought of myself as one (different, in some way than a “man composer,” I suppose?) or not, and found that I was treated less seriously than my peers, regardless of the quality of my work. I had to fight simply to be taken seriously.

But then I found a few people who did take me and my work seriously. And then there were more.

I have a body of work that I am proud of. I know what I can do, and I know what my limitations are. I have never measured success in monetary terms; I measure it in terms of the usefulness of what I have written. 

I could use monetized social media to property promote my work, but I have no ambition to do so. If somebody wants a piece of music, they know where to find it. I don’t want to adjust my biography to make myself worthy of someone’s attention. I prefer to let my work speak for itself.

I want to be able to play more difficult music on the piano, and I want to (finally) get a chance to play the Brahms piano quintets (all of them), on either violin or viola. Maybe I will write something new. Or not.

But I am calling on all my experience with ambition to make it through my cancer treatment, which continues through the end of July. And then it is only a few months until November, when the fate of the world has a chance of moving towards something resembling sanity.