taking on a new skill after 40.
can it even be done? this year, i'm going to find out.
My musician stepmom had this great sticker on the front door of her apartment. It was a musical notation complete with a complicated series of notes and all sorts of musical imagery we’re all familiar with and on the top it read: If you can read this, thank your music teacher. Never having had a music teacher, I could not read it. But my younger brother who I was walking into the apartment with could and at 13-years-old, he sang the melody back to me. I called him a prodigy (which I still think he is) and he laughed saying it was basic music theory.
That moment has stayed with me, well, always because I’m still thinking about it now almost twenty years later.
I’ve always wanted to learn music. Not just learn how to play it because I can campfire strum my guitar and manage my way around simple cover songs. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’ve always wanted to know how it works. (As David Byrne’s How Music Works book shuffles in from stage right; a book I just know will go over my head.) But I do want to know not just the how but the why it works. Like, what are all the little mechanics behind a song that make our ears go, “Oh, that sounds nice. I want to hear more of that.”
For someone who spends as much time as she does listening to music, thinking about music, and writing about it, embarrassingly I cannot answer this question. Hell, I even wrote characters in my first novel who understand how it freaking works (I worked with aforementioned prodigy little brother and other trained musicians to verify the lingo, so it all checks out) but me…I don’t know much more than the basic chords and how to progress from one to the other, which always makes band practice tricky when I’m given direction because I don’t understand. It’s also in French. So, there’s also that…
Whenever I find myself thinking too much about it, I stop myself because I decided a long time ago that I was too old to learn something as complicated as music. I’m not sure which Huberman podcast I was listening, perhaps the one about productivity or simply how our brain works, but one of them (maybe both) he says that after the age of 25 our brain is less sponge-like in retaining information. I see that every day with my 8-year-old who impresses me with how easy he picks up new skills. For example, during the 2020 lockdown, for “fun” we decided to learn German. We practiced a little every day using the Babbel app (not an ad) and after a few weeks I sounded like I was doing an Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-up routine while Georges did not.
I’m not an agist, I just think I have Science working against me and then there’s emotional side that’s protecting myself from the heartbreak of failure. But failure from what exactly? The stakes couldn’t be any lower. So, I don’t discover the secret to how music works. BFD, right?
So, why not try?
Why not try? I’ve asked myself for ten years now.
So this year, I’ve decided to say yes (or oui to keep it in local parlance) to trying and at the town’s annual hobbies and arts fair, I signed up for music theory (solfège en français) at the local music conservatory (oh hey, there fancy pants.)
(And while I’m at it, allow me to cut in victorious music. I like Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ even if I’m nowhere near champion status but that’s okay because I took the first step.)
And…I’m in a class with a bunch of ten-year-olds forced to take solfège by their parents.
I remember in college, there was an older student named Lydia in our class. And when I say older, she couldn’t have been older than 30 and while she was cool, she was still older which made us 18-year-olds suspicious for some dumb reason that made sense to us at the time.
Now I’m Lydia. With my crisp notebook. My hand up asking the questions. And then re-asking to make sure I understood. And then having my “old” husband pick me up after who said the other night when he picked me up, “The soup is heating on warm so it’ll be ready to eat when we get home.” You know, just in case we didn’t sound old enough.
I even think the teacher is younger than me.
I have no idea what will come of this but I’m going undercover to see if it can be done. Science step aside! Can I learn a new skill after 40? Fuck if I know but I’m going to embarrass myself trying.
