In time, yes, things settled down.
Towards the end of the fall semester of 2016, I had a very honest talk with my professor. I went into my lesson ready to play a few Kopprasch etudes and the tail end of “En Foret”, a horn solo with rollicking licks I was looking to play on my junior recital.
Instead, I asked him how I was doing.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, like, how am I doing with the horn?” I hadn’t been practicing as much lately, and although I felt like I was still making progress, I was worried that it had slowed. I confessed all of this to him.
Part of me wanted him to tell me I was doing fine, that I was improving. But another part of me craved honesty, a real answer to my question that wasn’t sugar-coated. I told him that I felt like a completely different person than who I was when I started school two Septembers previous. I told him how I didn’t like freshman year.
“I mean, it was terrible. But I made it that way. Every aspect of my life revolved around how I was playing that day. And that’s no way to live.”
My professor surprised me when he said that he had felt similarly when he had been my age. He struggled with execution on the horn and, like me, he’d wanted to quit in his earlier years. He told me how he studied other things in undergrad too, things he’d always been interested.
“I think, in some ways, you’ve seen the writing on the wall,” he told me. He was referring to the frightening statistic we’d all been made aware of since freshman year: only five percent of University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance students get a full-time job performing. He was essentially telling me that I’d taken that frightening fact to heart and had since been preparing another career path.
I told him that I’d almost quit the previous year. I told him I was glad that I didn’t.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “There’s pretty much no one I know who looks back on their music degree, doing now whatever it is they’re doing, and regrets it. It teaches you so much: time management, communication skills, prioritizing.”
I nodded. I understood.
He told me that I would do just fine.