His freshman roommate, a poli-sci major with blond hair, blue eyes, and absolutely no interest in being friends, would smile and somehow quickly drift out of the room whenever Ray came in. Ray barely noticed. The music department consumed him.
The first time he sat down in Music Theory 101, which Dr. Stevens was teaching, he realized how far behind he was. He didn’t know how to name intervals or relative minors. All the other kids rattled them off without thinking. Never having taken private lessons, he’d missed basic techniques—double-stops, playing in seventh position, and reading different clefs.
As that first class ended, he wondered if he could get a full refund on his textbooks—they’d set him back $250.
“Ray, can you wait a minute?” Dr. Stevens had called from the lectern that day.
The rest of the class had filed out, the door closed behind them. He stood before her, the seats spreading behind him like abandoned cars in a parking lot. Now it would come: now she’d tell him that she’d made a mistake, that he had to leave.
And then she’d smiled—warm, friendly, welcoming. “I know you’re feeling way behind,” she told him, smiling that smile. How did she know? “It will take a while to get adjusted. But I’m here to help. You can do this.”
He could feel his misery unknot in his throat.
“Don’t get caught up in all the technical stuff,” she said, looking up at him. “You’ll learn it. I have every faith that you will. This is what you’re not seeing—there’s something special about your playing, and that’s why you’re here. It’s called musicality.”
“What do you mean?” Hope soared in him.
“Precision and technique can be learned,” she told him. “That’s just practice. A lot of practice, but it’s still just practice. What we can’t teach is how to make a musician actually connect—emotionally connect—with the pieces he’s playing. To really care about the music, and let the music tell its story.”
“And I do?”
“You do,” she said. “You can’t fake it. It’s like always looking at a reflection of the sun in a puddle, and then all of a sudden seeing the sun itself. You’re that sun, Ray.”
He laughed. “Uh, yeah,” he said, “sure.”
Her smile vanished. “I’m very serious,” she said, holding his gaze. “You have a lot of hard work ahead of you, but if you want this, you can absolutely do it. Do you want it bad enough?”
You’re eighteen years old. You’re trying to be callous, trying to be cool, trying to show that you don’t care because, after all, that’s the point, isn’t it—to be detached, to be above it all? You can’t let your guard down because then someone might mock you, might call you a moron. And it’s even worse when you’re Black, right? The only Black music major, already only half as good as everyone else. So above all else: Be cool, be nonchalant. Don’t care.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I want this.” He meant it, body and soul.
She nodded slowly. “I know. So own it. Do it. You can make it happen. You have it in you.”
“Okay,” he breathed.
“Good. Now go practice your double-stops in the Bach. Tomorrow I want them sounding perfect.”
He went to the practice room and practiced double-stops for the next four hours.
That first year of school, he stuck out uncomfortably. “He sucks,” he once overheard two other music majors say. “He only got in because he’s Black.” The first time Ray had to play in front of his studio, he was so nervous that he missed every high F, flubbed every run of the Kabalevsky Violin Concerto.
One Thursday afternoon in mid-February, life felt particularly tough. In his lesson he’d played Monti’s Czardas especially poorly. The sweeping minor chords, the pining lift into hope, into desperation, into joy, catapulting into that quick, fast, danceable celebration of light and the wind across the water—it was all there. But its false harmonics just wouldn’t come out. His left hand stopped working. He’d played the double-stops terribly out of tune, and he’d played the rhythm in the adagio section incorrectly every time. Finally, the spiccato and sautillé bowing wouldn’t bounce at all.
He threw his violin back into its case, stomped out of the studio.
Dr. Stevens caught him on the stairs going down to the exit. “Hold on,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even disappointed. She just smiled as if this were a private joke between them. “Give me your violin for a sec. I’ll show you how I used to practice this.”