One of the lessons I learned early in life is that in order to be able to do things you really want to do, you sometimes have to do things you definitely do not want to do. What I had learned a bit later in life is that every once in a while, you repeatedly have to do the thing you don’t want to do in order to be able to do the thing you really want to do. I can see that this is getting a tad confusing now, so let’s start the story from a different angle. After having done the Grade 5 violin exam and it had gone so surprisingly well, it was clear that I wanted to do Grade 6. However, in order to do Grade 6, you have to take Grade 5 theory. Although I wasn’t exactly keen to sit a theory exam, I was not much bothered either because not only did I do my A-levels in music, but I also have a general tendency to overestimate my musical knowledge. And this time, I paid for it very dearly.
Chilled as I am when it comes to exams, I thought that it would be more than enough to start studying two weeks before. And when I leisurely opened the workbook and did the first page of exercises flawlessly, I knew I needn’t worry. It was only when I glanced at pages three, four, five and all the way up to 69 and did not have the slightest clue what to do that I started to grasp the severity of the situation. Everything I did was wrong. Some things (hello tenor clef!) were so beyond me that I still could not solve the exercises when I did them the third time round. For two weeks I was in a state of complete panic. In between work and preparation for my singing exam, I crammed sentences about my brother drinking coke into my head because I would not be able to remember the circle of fifths if my life depended on it, and spent my lunch breaks transposing music. I only went out once with my friend Bonnie, who is a different calibre altogether. She was also preparing for an exam and thus we spent two and half hours at a café in complete silence studying music theory. When I was close to a breakdown, she bought me an apple and a pack of crisps.
The exam day was a weird affair, primarily because for the first time in my life I felt old. When 99,9% of the other people taking the exam are young enough to be your children, something has gone a bit astray in your life. But I did not fret for long. When I sat down and looked at the exam paper, I knew what all those teachers at grammar school had been completely unable to see: I was a genius. I was so well prepared, nay, I was so brilliant that the answers to the exam came to me with the utmost ease. In fact, they came to me with so much ease that it was as if I had seen them previously. Everything went according to plan. I sat down, drew my makeshift piano keyboard on a piece of paper, jotted down sentences about dogs fishing disks out of water, congratulated myself on having chosen all the right pencils and generally being on top of my game. I was done after an hour. How could I have done so well?
The answer to that question came in an e-mail that informed me that we had accidentally been given last year’s exam papers and needed to re-sit the exam. Within a second I went from the person who has such a good understanding of the material that everything in the test comes to her as easily as if she had already done it before to the dumbass who does not recognize the test she already filled in at home. I was in full self-pity mode, explaining to everyone how I could not face taking that exam again in the near future when Bonnie (this time without food) used a bit of tough love and kicked me back into the exam room. Re-sitting the exam at the earliest possible date was the only thing that made sense, she said, and I still had two weeks to study. I signed up and then did absolutely nothing. Thus, I ended up back in the exam room and emptily started at the paper. I could not even get together the first exercise, the only one I was sure of. Then I thought of something a friend once told me: always produce something. I started to answer the questions, some of them while chuckling to myself because I knew how wrong the answers were, re-checked the answers, changed at least one answer from right to wrong, went home and went to sleep.
The results came through with tremendous speed – probably become all those tiger moms out there were giving the ABRSM hell – and not only had I passed and therefore would not have to do the exam a third time (it would have taken Bonnie and apple, some crisps and some chocolate to get me to do this), but I had also done reasonably well. There are a few things I learned from this experience. First of all, my friend Bonnie is just awesome. Without her, I would not have done the exam again so quickly. Secondly, I might be an old non-genius, but even after being out of school for a couple of years, binge learning still does the trick for me. And thirdly, not only do you sometimes have to do things you don’t want to do in order to be able to do the things you want to do, but you might have to do the things you don’t want to do twice. That, however, only makes the thing you want to do more seem even better. I can’t wait to do Grade 6.
