Day Four Hundred and Forty-Seven

I'm not sure #9 on this list is going to happen.  I wouldn't be too stressed out about this because there are other items on the list that probably aren't going to happen either, but this one has ramifications that make my head pound a bit.

(If you're looking for a funny blog post today, this ain't it.)

I have wanted to go to graduate school for years.  I know which school, and which degree I want.  I know professors there who want me to come (so I can accompany their students), I'm excited about the classes and the practicing, and it would be VERY good for my future job prospects.  But every year for the last five or six years something has gotten rather seriously in the way of applying - finances, schedule, life in general, always something.  I got a little more serious about the concept in the fall of 2008, and started taking private piano lessons at a local university so that I could get a program learned and memorized for my audition to get into the program.  That year was the "life just got so complicated I'm doing good to get my shoes on the right feet" year, and I quit lessons and dropped the graduate school plan entirely for a while.

Even though I hadn't gotten very far into my preparations, though, I had had the nagging sensation that something wasn't quite right about my ability to memorize.  I wrote it off to the fact that I've never been a strong memorizer (good sight-readers often aren't), and that as a professional accompanist, everything I play is with the music.  It was a reasonable enough explanation, and I didn't think much more about it until several months later when I started noticing that music wasn't the only place my memory was slipping.

I'd had one too many conversations where I heard a piece of information for what I thought was the first time, and someone would say, "Seriously?  I just told you that YESTERDAY!"  I would have no memory of the conversation.  Events stay in my head all right, but things I hear don't seem to be sticking very well.  This was distressing, but I wrote it off to stress (also a reasonable enough conclusion over the last couple of years), until a Facebook friend started chronicling her husband's recovery from a head injury, and all of a sudden this sounded very, very familiar.

At the beginning of December 2007, I managed (with my usual grace and style) to slip on the stairs in my house, landing so hard on my backside that I gave myself a concussion.  I didn't know this was even possible, but indeed it is - if you land on your butt hard enough, it jars your spinal cord which joggles your brain which smacks into your skull, and voilà!  Concussion!

I felt a little dizzy and cross-eyed, but went to work that evening anyway.  Work, in this case, was the senior recital of an oboe performance major at the college where I work, so that meant full concert attire, hair, makeup, high heels, and playing three major works in front of an audience.  I figured I'd be fine, and it wasn't until we got backstage and were waiting for our cue when I looked across the darkened backstage area and saw this:

 There is only one exit sign.  It is not normally fuzzy.  We had a problem.

Thankfully, the oboist's position at the end of the piano was just barely within the cut-off point where my vision went double, and we got through the performance with nothing more noticeable than a couple of trills in the Mozart concerto that weren't quite as clean as I'd have liked.

On the good side, I had a reputation for the next two years as "that one accompanist who played Katie Roberts' recital WITH A CONCUSSION!", spoken in awed tones.  (Yeah, OK, I kinda liked that.)  On the bad side ... it was a serious head injury, and almost exactly three years later, I am starting to realize just how serious it must have been.

I don't know what you do, when you're a musician and your memory gets slippery.  My job is nice that way, in that I don't have to memorize things.  But now that I've been paying more attention to this, I've started noticing that it seems like I'm sightreading a LOT these days, even on songs I thought I'd played before.  I had played them before.  I just forgot them.  Much of my free-lance work is due to my slightly uncanny sightreading abilities, so I have managed to keep my work going and do well at it.

But learn and memorize a full audition program, when a simple Chopin Ballade won't stay in my head?  I don't know.

I don't know.

On the bright side, I can read the whole Twilight series again for the first time!  (Or, going by what I've heard, maybe it'd be better to pretend I never read it in the first place?)