Step by Step

I sit in the chair in front of the music stand with my clarinet case on my lap. Slowly, I piece together the instrument. First, the mouthpiece. Then the barrel. Then the two middle joints. And finally, the bell. I fasten the ligature around the reed on the mouthpiece.

Next, I pull out a sheet of music. It’s the song I’m preparing for the upcoming concerto competition in my orchestra. I play through the first page with no problem. The second page has a wider range of rhythm, more notes. My fingers start to fly off the charts. When I have to do faster rhythms, they have a mind of their own. They move too fast, but my tongue moves too slow. In the end, the notes end up sounding muddled and disconnected. The legato is hacked up into short, choppy bars of gasping for air and uncontrollable movement.

I stop playing and pause for a moment, looking at the page with frustration. I play through slower and then move on to the third page. It’s even harder than the last. Lines and lines of sixteenth notes strung together and swirling like the landscape outside of a train window. At some parts of the song, my fingers play too fast. My breath can’t keep up. When I try to slow down, my fingers almost stop moving. When the pulse of the music I am playing is actually stable, I run out of breath and have to gasp for air.

I pause again. I start over on the page. I begin slower, making an effort to blow all of the notes out at the same rhythm. I imagine the beat of the tempo pulsing in my head and control my fingers so they don’t fly ahead.

I realize that I am actually playing a stable tempo now. Even though it’s slow, the victory still means progress.

At the end of the song, I listen for the echo of the last note that I played as it slowly fades into the air.