Cycling

Before I joined the Army, I believed myself to be insecure, shy, and fairly weak. I also believed that surviving basic training and an enlistment period would automatically bestow some sense of accomplishment and satisfaction and would certainly make me stronger mentally and physically. I did not expect to have to deal with the trauma of warfare, and these expectations were fortunately true though not well-founded. It would only be the rigors of training and discipline that I would have to face, and I looked forward to the strength I would find in these things. What I never imagined was that I would find myself on my departure from the army nearly crippled from the conditioning of helplessness, pointlessness, and uselessness. The litany runs something like: "You are not good enough and will never be good enough until you have the rank to tell those below you that they are worse." Certainly I was not so naive as to believe that I would receive much positive reinforcement during basic training. I mean, the movies are really not that far off from reality. The recruits are scum (female recruits being the worst and weakest of them all), they cannot do anything right, and there is no correct answer other than a resounding "YES DRILL SERGEANT!". I really started to come apart at advanced training however, when I found the mindless litany in a context that I should have been most proficient and most comfortable in: music. I had always been considered a bright student with my piano instructors and visiting master instructors, maybe even a star student. Yet, at the military school of music, my advanced degree became a badge of shame and a target for the insecure elite in charge of me. My piano lessons were an exercise in proving how little my classical training meant and how little I was prepared to fulfill my job as a pop pianist, rather than actual instruction in dealing with the substantial challenges of jazz piano. My instructor would ask me, "You know this tune?" and begin playing tune after tune that I would admit, and that he had presumed, I did not know. Never did he attempt to guide me through one of the tunes or teach me techniques to tackle them on my own. Just an hour of humiliation and then a threat to remember my practice hour logs or else. Week after week, and what was I to practice? I knew only scales and exercises and written pieces. Where could I access this grand enigma of improvisation? There were no answers for me in those six months to these questions. Every time I pushed for an answer, I was met with either "You just feel it," or "You're a professional army musician, you should know this already." Redundancies and irrelavancies abounding. Alongside this, every student was required to attend daily theory and ear-training classes, which theoretically made sense but was practically a nightmare. The school of music was comprised of musicians from three different branches of the military and of all ages. Many of the army musicians had advanced degrees like myself, but the other two branches tended to have more people straight out of high school and very little formal musical training outside of marching band. Imagine previously teaching college-level piano and theory classes and then enduring six months of militarized (i.e. over-simplified and sometimes completely wrong) music theory training, taught by someone with no qualifications other than performing "well" on his or her instrument. All four of the army personnel in my class with me had higher degrees in music, and it was only the bond of outrage that kept any of us sane. Constantly we had to correct the teacher as he made mistakes that even the flaws of our navy-written text would not allow. We were used as tutors for the poor souls who had never constructed scales on staff paper before and were terrified by the real possibility that they could get kicked out over this foolishness. And, oh how the instructors resented even when we pursued these helpful rather than scornful approaches. Every hint of higher education was despised, and we found rank more and more forcefully thrust in our face as the only proof of competence that was necessary. Certainly I had imagined that rank would be irrelevant once I began the musical part of training, because it is clearly senseless. Even my professors in college never once used their credentials to lay claim to proficiency. It was all performance based. How well do you teach, how well do you play your instrument? These are the only questions that are relevant. Learning that this was not true in the army band was the beginnings of real psychological dissolution for me. I suddenly realized that it would be four years of hierarchical nonsense, in which I must try to find a way to perform in a style that I had no training in while surrounded by the hostilities of superiority complexes and abusive tendencies. You see, it is the people that thrive in these unhealthy structures that are promoted and put in the powerful positions of leader and instructor. I don't know how many times I heard "You are a Soldier first and a musician second!", which seemed grossly redundant. It was perhaps even misleading since the type of musician being "trained" in this place had very little to do with proficient music performance.