It Might Not Be True

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:

____________________

____________________

____________________

____________________

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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.