Peaceful Shrieks and Shrills

Band class.

Shoving the mouthpiece onto my trumpet’s body, I listen to the sounds around me. The choir of woodwinds, their melodies blurring together till they sound like one. The tuba blaring lowly in the back row. The trombone joining him for fun, both of them bubbling with laughter when one misses a partial or hits a wrong note. The french horn, his own melody so soft and unique, the alto sax thundering above everyone else. A rain hanging in the air, the loud kind of power. Followed by a downpour. The percussion section, bringing everything together with a great bang. A million and one different instruments with a million different geniuses behind them.

I smile slightly to myself, listening to the shrieking of the oboe, so high its sound pierces your ears. Earsplitting. What’s a headache like an oboe, I laugh.

Looking down at my own instrument, I take in its brass body, gleaming maliciously. It can either be a weapon or medicine for the soul. I weigh it in my palms, it’s heavier than it looks and the cramps in your hands after class say enough.

Something I learned early on, is if you don’t play your trumpet for a couple days, you lose all the muscle you had before. That’s how you play brass instruments, you build muscle in your face, build stamina in your breath. When I first started, I apparently breathed wrong and had to learn a completely different way to inhale and exhale.

This, I’d thought. Shouldn’t be something I needed to learn. Breathings a habit we form as we leave the warmth of our mother’s stomach, surely I’d been doing it well enough to have survived to 14, right? Wrong. And along with trying to change a 14-year long habit, I had plenty more on my plate to eat. I was still chewing, finishing bite after bite of delicious melodic sounds.

My attention snapped back into place, a rubber band with a tune, as our band director hissed. An odd way to grab our attention, but it worked well enough. He raised his arms and we all prepared our scale sheets.

We swung and climbed up the scales, racing to keep up with the ticking metronome. B-flat to F. G and A-flat. Chromatic. Augmented and diminished chords. The trumpets buzzed happily, even playing triads among each other. By the time we’d finished, we were prepping our concert music and our lips buzzed with a dull numbness and a fizzy-like stir. A strange sensation. Somewhere in between C and E, Mr. Hunt had turned the ticking bomb off.

We marched our way through Bandology, swam through Duke Ellington, and continued with pieces I’d barely heard other than from our barely put together band.

We consisted of few people and I wished, suddenly filled with resentment, that I still lived in New York or Missouri, places where our band was so immense, you felt overwhelmed before we’d even brought the instruments to our mouths. The musical flavor.

We moved to a Gentle Rain, following the soft melody with harmonic choruses and then moved straight into an uproaring and mighty, Into the Storm.

I only messed up a couple times, and while Mr. Hunt lectured the band about being back to square one after the break in playing, I heard our tuba and saxes talk about carrying the band, as if it was a heavy weight.

Reminded me of when I played bass and shared parts with him. I remembered the torture of sitting next to him and listening to the knives he’d throw in his voice. I remembered the hurt of listening to my best friend, who got all the solos and duets, all the hardest, most beautifully painful parts. I remember how I felt then, so filled with anger and hate.

Being brought slowly back to the present, I reminded myself of how I was a different person now.

I loved playing music, once a part of my personality, now, it had merged completely with the soul of who I was. You could hear notes pounding from my heartbeat, music swimming in my stomach, and chords in my lungs, waiting to be released.

Growing up, I’d always struggled to stick to something and with the constant moving that came with the military lifestyle, I almost dropped this too along with the many sports I’d tried to play. With the noticeably large gap in my musical knowledge, I was always embarrassed and asked my parents several times to quit. It didn’t help that people in my class weren’t supporting.

Now? I played more than 5 instruments and knew so much music theory, my head was flooded.

A perfect song came to an end. The curtains drew close.

I sighed. It was only a daydream.

Reality was different, but good nonetheless. I’d only started trumpet, and never playing brass before, it felt like trying to speak Russian with an Italian accent and only ever speaking Spanish previously. 

Things with the tuba were resigned and my best friend still held the spotlight in the band room (with some competition from the horn) and I was cheering her on from on the stage and in the crowd. I was happy now, and loved music. I wasn’t filled with that short-tempered anger anymore.

I'd even started playing piano afresh and let the comments of judgment roll off me, forming a blotchy puddle on the ground. I'd fallen in love with the bass clarinet all over again and started playing my older clarinet too.

Hell, I’d even started fixing instruments, it was an exhilarating feeling, being the only one that understood the body of an instrument well enough to be able to put it back together again, like the folktale, Humpty Dumpty.

The day that daydream becomes my reality, I’ll be jumping with joy, choruses will erupt from my throat and I'll continue practicing thus we don’t end up back at square one again- as Mr. Hunt likes to continuously remind us.

The band is one, especially a small ensemble. If one instrument doesn’t know their part or even doesn’t have that thirst to play and thrive under the director’s glare, then everything’s off. You can tell immediately, something’s wrong.

Luckily, I don’t think I’ll have a long wait for that actuality, I could already see the door behind a line of diverse people. Each one with a different key. One with a satin bow, the blue tie ribboning around their wrist, and another with paint and oily, colored water plastered onto it. Dozens of thousands of keys.

I held my own, it didn't have a definite form, but feeling it gouge my palm when my hand tightened around it, I knew it only took a few steps. I reached the door. Now.

All I had to do:

was open it.