I have become brilliant.
For years I took music classes. Grant it, they were forced upon me in my primary education. It wasn’t something I was prepared for at the time. It was part of first grade, second grade, third grade, etc… education. I fondly remember music teachers and singing. I remember enjoying drawing the treble cleff. Clef? Clif? What ever it is, I enjoyed drawing it.
But for all my years of intensive music training (dripping sarcasm, or humor) I could never figure out the reading of music. I was musically illiterate. I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t play it. The sound track to my life, heavy sigh, was music created by others.
Enter in to my life my xylophone:
It may be a child’s instrument. It certainly isn’t fancy. But it has music in it. How do I know? Because I found it! The music! I taught myself, in one single sitting, to play it.
I have mastered it.
All of these years I was a musical genius and didn’t know it.
Then, this morning, my friend taught me in two minutes how to read music. In full disclosure I can’t quite yet read music. But I know the two basic concepts that years of my musical education could not teach me.
You put together something like this:
____________________
____________________
____________________
____________________
____________________
With things that look remarkably similar to: q’s and p’s and o’s and some other stuff.
And wah-lah!
You can read and write music.
I know. Too easy to believe I didn’t understand it as a child.
Put together they are like letters to make words. But it makes music.
I’ll probably start writing some pretty fabulous music in the next couple of weeks.
I don’t know what happened during all of those years of my musical education. Either I was an idiot then, or the teacher just couldn’t connect with me, or I picked up genius level ability somewhere in my adulthood. I’m sorry I didn’t try this earlier in my life. But then again, I don’t really know at what point I picked up the genius level ability. So waiting until now may have been exactly what I needed to do.
I’m not kidding you. I taught myself this in ONE morning. And not to brag or anything… But I taught myself this while I was riding a bicycle. No joke.
Okay, maybe “mastered it” and genius aren’t quite the truth.
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