blacklisted:

This post is actually about my cello teacher and not the famous artist, but I will hereinafter refer to him as “Jay-Z.” I had a total of two lessons with him and then decided to drop out of the music college I enrolled at and find someone new. The nickname comes from the fact that he is so busy and important that he needs to be reminded of who you are over the phone every single time you call (and he still calls me by the wrong name even though he saved my name in his phone). The reason Jay-Z needs to be called so often is because for some reason he cannot commit to a specific time to meet on a weekly basis, and so he needs a personal invitation for each lesson.

On the day of the first lesson, someone at the college directed me to where he was on the campus. He was talking to a woman and when I approached them, he looked at me and said “just a minute.” No “good morning!” No “nice to meet you!” No “so it’s you who was behind all those phone calls, I have been looking forward to meeting you, the only cello student in the whole college, what a pleasure to put a face to the name!” The conversation awkwardly continued for a good 15 to 20 minutes while I stood there shifting and wondering whether I was invisible.

It turned out that I was, because after they finished, he just started walking toward his office, so I assumed I was supposed to follow him. He began greeting people on the way to his office and having short chats with them on the way. He still had not greeted me by this point, let alone acknowledged me. I picked up my phone to make a fake phone call so that I could be sure that when I reappeared from my invisible state and he tried to talk to me, my response would be “just a minute.” When he did finally say something, he didn’t seem to catch it and just kept talking as if I wasn’t even on the phone making a fake call.

Eventually he learned my name, and then promptly forgot it, and he asked me where I work. His response was, “The United Nations? Where is that?” His idea of a joke.

He gave me an excerpt from a children’s book about how to learn to play a stringed instrument with a picture of a cello and a bow and their parts labeled, which looked similar to this:

Below the picture it said:

“It will take you some time to learn to tune your cello. At first, try to match the sound of each string to the sound on the piano or a cello tuner (4 pitch pipes, C-G-D-A), and match your cello strings to the right pitch. Ask your teacher for tuning help.”

He left the room while I read these three sentences. I finished the reading in the first eight seconds of his absence. He chatted with some people outside and smoked a cigarette. Not knowing when he would come back, I got up, moved around the room, and began pointing out the different parts of the cello and bow labeled on the page on my real cello and bow. When I finished doing that, I did it again. Then I sat back down and decided to keep reading the book and see how far I got before he came back. I did a “pencil exercise” where I held a pencil the way one would properly hold a cello bow and moved it up and down. I read about how to hold the actual bow properly and then how to hold the cello. When he came back, it was about 20 minutes later, and he told me that he gave me that book to read, not to zone out in front of it.

He looked at my cello, tuned it, and then told me not to play it until I know how to read music. He drew a picture of an orange on a piece of paper and divided it into quarters in order to make some kind of point about rhythm. My “homework” was to read some music. I asked him whether he wanted me to try to play it, and he said no.

When I came the next week, I had come with the music he told me to read. I had written the letters of the notes that correspond to some of the notes in pencil above the notes until I was able to memorize their location on the bass clef. He chastised me for committing this infantile act, telling me that none of the children he has taught have ever stooped so low as to write the note names next to the notes. “You did this while you were sitting in front of the television, didn’t you?” he asked, and began erasing the page furiously. Then he gave me the eraser to finish the job. I think that was my punishment.

I told him I don’t see what the problem with writing to learn something is. I learned it, didn’t I? He snorted, “let’s just see how much you learned. Read this.” And he gave me an arbitrary line of music to read. Not really sure what he wanted me to do, I looked at it and read. Then he told me to read it out loud. So I said, “F, G, D, A–”

He interrupted me, triumphant that I did it wrong, and told me that I have to do it with the beat. I asked him, if he wanted me to do it with the beat, then why didn’t he tell me to do it with the beat? He said that he said that last week. I told him that he didn’t, he said to read it, and that all week I have been wondering what he meant by “read it.” I said “witness” and looked to the only other person who had been in the room when Jay-Z assigned the homework the previous week and he told Jay-Z, “you really didn’t say anything about reading the music with the beat.” Jay-Z responded with an expression basically meaning that since the witness is in love with me, he will intrinsically be on my side.

He proceeded to read the notes aloud without changing pitch for the different ones for the length of each one on the page, hovering his voice for each beat: “A-aa-aa-ay” for a whole note, “B-ee-ee-ee” for another whole note at the same pitch as the A, and so on. He reassigned the “music reading” homework for the following week.

With that, he gave up on teaching me how to read music and decided to show me how to hold the cello and bow. While shifting in my chair to get in a position where I could hold it, he stomped on my foot, shouting “keep your feet flat on the floor!” I wiped the dirt track he left from the bottom of his trainers off my shoe and sock and he pretended not to notice.

In order to explain that bowing is all in the wrist, he drew a blue circle on my wrist with a ball-point pen, with two small lines and an arbitrary number “12″ inside. “This is a wrist watch,” he informed me, indicating that when I down-bow, I should bend my wrist until the watch disappears, and when I up-bow, the watch should reappear.

Then he played some stuff on my cello to show that he knows how to play cello, which he does, and which has not been doubted. He beat the dead horse of the point he made earlier about rhythm (which is that things have rhythm) and said some crap about how the beat of your heart has rhythm and you can feel it or whatever. He played some Arabic and classical music and did some flashy tricks with the bow. I was mostly watching his face wondering whether he was serious when he contorted it as if to “feel” the music, like he was having some kind of uncomfortable orgasm, but it was more like he wanted to look like he was having some kind of uncomfortable orgasm because that is what you are supposed to do while playing a musical instrument?