Thursday, February 5, 2009

Open Question: What do you think that she was doing?

I attend a music school. The girl in question and I have perfect pitch. Ever since I attended the school, people have always compared us. However, everyone always talked about how I'm such "a great pianist". I never did anything to fuel these conversations, I simply practice and perform at concerts. Once, I had to perform at a concert before she played her instrument, and she rolled her eyes before taking the stage. The girl, usually and quite often, treated me cold the whole time. One semester, we were both taking a composition course and the girl asked me to play the piano part to one of her pieces. I was surprised, but I thought that she had simply decided to be friendly. I agreed to play. She gave me the score and it contained lots of sixteenth notes and grace notes that do not lie under the fingers well (she was not a pianist). I asked her about the tempo of the piece and she said that it was very slow and that I didn't have to worry. Because we were using many of the same instrumentalists, she also requested that we hold our practice at the same time and take turns working on each of our pieces. I agreed to this also. During the rehearsal, she started out conducting at a breakneck speed. I noticed that all of the other instrumentalists had whole notes and I was the only one with faster notes. I could barely keep up, and I'm usually a competent pianist. Every time that I would make a mistake, she would look at me with an evil look and then look at her friends with a smirk. She then began to conduct even faster, almost to the point where it fell apart. She would call out every note that I missed (as if she had perfect pitch and I didn't - we BOTH do.) Her presence and her attitude made me so nervous that I missed even more notes because she stood extremely close to me and look over my shoulder as I practiced and announced my mistakes before taking her score away. In addition, she used up all of the rehearsal time, which she said that we would share, so that none of the instrumentalists had time to practice my piece. Afterward, she sneaked and told the teacher of the class that I did not do well in rehearsal and that she couldn't use me as a pianist. On top of that, she boldly stood in the practice room and called out every note that I missed and then asked for her piece back. As a competent musician, I have never been through such an ordeal. What do you think that she was trying to prove by purposefully making me appear to be incompetent?

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