Episode 12: Beyond Coping

One hot hot day in July I woke up and realized I couldn’t bear to go through life anymore.

I dropped out of college.

I moved home.

I quit the violin.

I remained boyfriend-less.

Treatment had robbed me of my eating disorder and living at a healthy weight felt too disgusting to be tenable. 

Thus, I swallowed what I believed to be a lethal dose of assorted medications. I penned a terse suicide note, “sorry, but I’m too ugly to be loved so what’s the point,” and lay down on my favorite porch swing to die.

I woke up an hour later as if nothing had happened. Or to be more precise: I woke up and walked into my backyard where my adorable little neighbors were playing with two kittens and a bunny. Actually, for a moment I was certain that I had died and gone to heaven.

This suicide attempt, poorly facilitated as it was, happened four months after I graduated from my treatment program. Now you ask: But Rachel, how could that be? Then you declare:  You learned so many coping mechanisms in treatment! This very blog is even titled “coping box”! 

Sometimes it’s not enough to simply cope. My life was one in which all I did was cope; coping was all I could see myself doing. Coping through life couldn’t inspire me to continue living it.  

Then I found the Harry Potter series. I was quite late to the Harry Potter party. Sure I viewed The Chamber of Secrets in theaters and yes I dressed as Hermione for Halloween, but while my friends and family raved about the series, I never read it. In fact, for a long period I exclusively read only Oscar Wilde plays OR novels that featured a young woman’s descent into eating disorder-ed madness.  

However, in my state of utter ennui I stumbled upon my younger siblings’ copy of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone.

I’m an arts school kid and Hogwarts, a school where teens can be little weirdos who meet other little weirdos and nerd out over their otherwise unbelievable special abilities without any normal kids around to tell them how weird they are, really spoke to me. I devoured Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, and then went back to the first book to cycle through yet again.

My escape into the universe of Hogwarts didn’t stop with the canonic texts themselves. We had the movies to watch, screaming “where have you been!” along with Mrs Weasley. We had Harry Potter recipes to try out, stifling our giggles as we purchased canned spotted dick from the local British shop. We had fan fiction to write (sorry to say but that floppy disk is long gone). We had trivia contests to win and costume parties to attend. And by “we” I mean me and my little sister who was a Gryffindor long before I even knew what a Hippogriff was. These books drew us together, reciting our very niche favorite lines like, “Mars is bright tonight,” at wildly inappropriate times and waiting on the front porch for our owls mail-carrier to deliver books six and seven.  

The Harry Potter series got me out of bed in the morning, kept me awake through the entire day, and put me to sleep at night. Was I happy? No. Did I shower regularly? No. Exercise? No. Get a job? Also no. Practice the violin? Nope. But for the time being, I was living for something.  

One day towards the end of that depression-clouded summer, my mom informed me that we would be driving across the river, into Illinois, to visit a university. The violin instructor there was someone I studied with during a chamber music intensive. My family and my support network thought it would be a nice place for me to get back to school.  

We toured the campus and visited briefly with the violin instructor and orchestra director. At one point I saw my reflection in a door. The illusion of it made me look rail thin and I told my mom: I’ll go to school here because the doors make me look skinny. She rolled her eyes and audibly groaned but, nevertheless, we walked across the campus green to the registrar’s office where I joined the Class of 2007.  

Classes started two days later.  

My whole life I had been a fine, honor roll-type student. That is, of course, up until I dropped out of college with straight F’s to enroll in eating disorder treatment. However, I never got straight A’s or even stressed much about test scores or essay comments. But after reading Harry Potter, something shifted in me. That something was the birth of my inner Hermione Granger. Suddenly, a B+ was no longer acceptable. Skipping class was inadmissible. Missing an assignment deadline was unfathomable. 

I needed to read the required textbooks over the summer before the class met. I needed to write essays that went beyond the word count. I needed to be the one who took obscure and dense books out of the library for “a bit of light reading.” I needed  to lose 5 points for Gryffindor for being an “insufferable know-it-all.” I needed to tell boys right to their faces that they were pronouncing words wrong. As a bonus, I already had the frizzy brown hair and the psychotic cat to match Hermione’s aesthetic to-the-tee.

I was newly driven to excel in my new classes but there was one topic that truly engaged my Hermione-esque academic dedication: Music Theory. 

At my previous University, prior to Hermione Granger becoming my entire personality, I barely engaged with my Music Theory courses: the 8am meeting times, the unbearable and endless part-writing rules, the hours of rote and repetition left me uninspired. I skipped the majority of the class lectures, instead choosing to stay up until 3am watching illegally Napster-ed episodes of South Park while simultaneously AIM-ing the likely-drunk low-brass boys in the undergrad orchestras, then snoozing though my 7:30am alarm for a solid two hours, much to the annoyance of my roommate, I’m sure. By the time I rolled out of bed at 10am class was already dismissed.

But in this new school with my new alter-ego, my routine changed dramatically. Living at home instead of the dorm, I’d wake up with my family at 7am and head out the door at 8am. Next I’d drive about an hour across the state line (all the while listening to Harry Potter on tape of course!) (And yes I do literally mean tape! My 1990 Toyota Corolla did not have a CD player!) I’d park in the most inconveniently-located lot on campus (a down-side to registering a few days before the start of a semester: all the good parking passes were taken). Then I’d walk, violin case on one shoulder and backpack laden with books on the other, clear to the other side of campus to find my seat along with my colleagues in the 9am sophomore theory class. 

I didn’t miss a single lecture.  

The more I attended class and the more I approached learning with a Hermione Granger attitude, the more music theory took a powerful place in my musical soul.

Part of this was due to the fact that at my old university we learned theory through drills, worksheets, lectures, and exams. In my new school, we had a hands-on, practical curriculum. These assignments entranced and enraptured me. I remember near Thanksgiving we were given a Christmas carol assignment to complete during the break. First, we had to transcribe both the melody and harmony of any Holiday tune of our choosing. I chose Silent Night. We then had to play it on the piano. This is where things got exciting: we then had to alter the dominant seventh chords in the tune, then play the reharmonized version on the piano. I fell into a wonderful state of flow working on this assignment. I played the original version and the altered version over and over again, entranced by how cool and exciting the altered dominant chords sounded in the new version. Hours passed in what felt like seconds. I loved my reharmonized version so much that I even gave it a Harry Potter title: Sir Cadogan’s Silent Night. 

Music theory erupted into new classes after my first year and I enrolled in the more specialized branches such as Analysis, Orchestration, and Counterpoint, each of which only intensified my nerdy love of the practice. My Inner-Hermione lured me into the music library. In fact, I am proud to say that, because I spent so much time in those dusty stacks, I became the University Music Library Poster Child. No, literally: the promotional photograph of me studying was widely used to advertise this otherwise under-trafficed corner of the school library.  

My Inner-Hermione also drove me to be maybe just a teensy bit competitive and over-achieving. For instance, I was in a constant battle with my ultimate nemesis, Mean Andy, to set the curve on every Orchestration exam. In Analysis II, a class that wasn’t even required for graduation, I accidentally wrote a sixty page paper, far surpassing the twenty-page maximum, on Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and why it DOESN’T sound like Brahms (except maybe in the first movement). Instead of taking one music literature class, I took three: Opera Literature, Symphonic Literature, and Women Composer Literature. Which means that, yes, a time-turner would have come in handy! 

What music theory and its sister classes brought me was no longer just lectures, exams, and torturous drills; it became a language that allowed me to dissect and understand all the magical things I had always felt from music. 

A few months into that first semester at my new school, I attended my routine therapy appointment. To my very patient counselor, I started explaining all of the super cool music theory things I was learning at school. I fell into one of my nerd-stupors and went completely ted-talk on her, passionately explaining the emotional experiences created by the different types of cadences. When I finished, she said, “I don’t think I’ve heard you speak this passionately about anything except Harry Potter.”  

That was the moment when I knew I was no longer just coping. Music theory took me beyond coping. 

Fifteen years later, I stood in a classroom before a group of musically-gifted high school students. I had been trying to get them to ride the same music-theory-emotional-rollercoaster that I had first ridden over a decade earlier. Digging into my personal music library, I photocopied the Andante from J.S. Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Minor and handed each student a copy. 

Instead of lecturing at the chalkboard, I pulled out my violin and played the first double stop of the piece, asking the students to identify the harmony. We identified the chord as C major, the tonic chord according to the work’s key signature. From there, we followed the harmonic movement into the next measure, arriving on a G dominant seventh chord. At this point I explained how the tension of that chord, created by the tritone, encouraged me to communicate a new emotion to the listener. I demonstrated this intention, adding a little burst of bow speed and vibrato to the “and” of the first beat, emphasizing that moment where the tri-tone sounded. The students, looking at copies of my own scribbled-in sheet music, could see that I had penciled a heart above this spot in the music; my own system for indicating these moments of musical magic. 

A measure later, the harmonic rhythm sped and we moved through C major, A minor, D dominant seventh, and G major chords in a matter of seconds. The arrival of the G major chord was our first moment of music theory conflict. To some of the students, the G major chord sounded like a true arrival, indicating a modulation to a new key! Other students argued that the piece was written in C major and wouldn’t dare abandon the home key so early in the form. 

“It’s music theory, not music law!” I reminded them. “Our job as artists is to make a decision and convince the listener!” For the students who believed the G major chord was an authentic cadence, a conclusive period at the end of the musical sentence, I performed a slowing tempo, broadly rolling the chord and allowing my sound to fade away as I approached the second beat of the measure.

The other students believed the G major chord was still functioning as the dominant of the home key, thus creating a half cadence (think of a sentence that ends with a question mark rather than a period). I demonstrated this option on my violin as well; I maintained a steady tempo and dynamic, pushing the music forward until its arrival at the C major chord in the eighth measure of the movement.  

But once arriving on this C major chord in the eighth measure, the debate continued as we felt this moment to be mysterious and conflicting as well. Seeing the confusion on my students' faces, I explained that it sounded unstable because the root of the chord was not doubled in the melody. I re-arranged the chord (please don’t tell Bach!) to create a Perfect Authentic Cadence, replacing the composer’s highest note with a C-natural. I then played it again as Bach intended, with an E as the highest note. Instantly, the students heard how unresolved and unsettled Bach’s version sounded. I asked them what I could do with my dynamics, my vibrato, and my pacing to communicate this unsettled emotion. Together, we interpreted a performance that communicated the emotional journey of the piece based on the music theory fundamentals of its construction. 

Music theory, this seemingly academic, sterile, objective, mathematical side of music drew me back to the creative, expressive, passionate practice of music performance.  Since then, the two have lived side-by-side with me, both in my approach to my own violin-playing and in the way I teach my students.  And, most importantly, in the way I live beyond coping.