To the Class “The Symphony” My Senior Year Of College

I admit, I thought you would be an easy A. A class where we listen to music? Piece of cake.

Beethoven's 6th score

By the second week, I knew I was wrong. I sat in the third row, but I could have been sitting on Mars for all I was able to understand. The professor was a serious and very round woman who I imagine ended her days in her office, shaking her head, asking, “Why am I doing this?”

Yet every day she was there. She would, with one great move, turn to the board and lift her arm as high as should could and begin writing: “Mozart: The Jupiter Symphony.” She would simultaneously tell the origin story of the piece as she explicated the movements all the while the music playing in the background so that at times she would interrupt her self to point out a change or a theme: “Here,” she says, pointing at nothing, “listen to the strings, the strings, picking up the theme from the beginning. Hear it? Hear it?”

I never heard it. I could never ever figure out why, if the composers wanted to tell the story of love or loss or whatever, why they didn’t use words. Clearly, I’m not a musician, and I could never understand it the way she did. This was not for lack of trying. Between and after classes, I went to the library where I could check out the records on hold and sit with headphones and listen to movements over and over. Not just listening, studying, without words. I tried so hard to give myself a way to understand it, to connect the movements together. I would rather be in calculus.

Mozart

Test day was unbearable. She would walk in, distribute the exams and begin. She dropped the needle onto a record and we had about 10 seconds to identify the composer, the symphony and the movement. We had to write about each. She would not play them twice.

I passed, but it was the lowest grade I ever received in college. And I was angry, thinking she was asking too much of non-music majors. But today, I am grateful because I must have learned more than I thought. I know enough to know I love Brahms and Chopin and Bach and Mozart. I know how to listen to the layers, how to hear when instruments enter and leave. I have the luxury of enjoying it without the fear of being tested. I am moved by the music. I still don’t understand why they just didn’t write the story down in words, but I am glad they didn’t.