I started on the cello at five. My father was a professional musician, my mother sang in the church choir, and Chopin and Bach were the sound of the house before I knew what they were. From the outside, it looked like the ideal start.
It wasn’t, entirely. I was eight, in an ensemble run by a conductor who got results through fear — the kind of adult a child doesn’t question, let alone interrupt. A request to use the bathroom got a barked no. I stood there for ninety minutes and wet myself rather than ask again. It’s not an unusual story. Conducting has produced more than a few reputations like that — results fill seats, results draw praise, and praise buys power. The person behind the performance rarely gets seen. Later, at school, arrogant teachers and casual bullying did the rest. Theory, taught as a rulebook to obey rather than a language to use, closed a door I didn’t reopen for years.
What brought it back wasn’t more discipline. It was leaving the syllabus behind: improvising, playing with musicians who didn’t care about my grades, scoring for film instead of performing for an exam board.
None of that makes theory worthless. But the thing that hooked me was never the rulebook — it was making a sound that did something to someone. Abbey Road with the LSO, scoring for planetariums and museums since — all of it traces back to that, not to the years spent memorizing the common-practice period.
If your own relationship with music soured somewhere, I’d guess it’s rarely the music. More often it’s rules-first teaching that never got around to the sound.