Disclaimer: This piece is entirely a joke.

 

27/09

Hey, it’s been a while. 

(Is Ivory high again?)

Not much has happened really. A good chunk of my older friends just had their mock exams or whatever. But honestly, I’m just having fun playing my instrument. Steven’s currently in dire death after that statistics paper—G F# F E to him. I mean, even Naomi looks like she’s about to punch another mirror and cut herself from the glass shards, and then come complain to me over text afterwards…

Anyhow, I’ve picked up an instrument! Honestly, the alto saxophone is fun, but I get pretty annoyed when my reed breaks every four weeks… Why is a piece of wood so expensive? 

Even though playing my instrument is quite fun by itself, being in a group is better! But at the same time, not… 

You see, Tuna decided it would be a good idea to convince me to join the Melodic Band—basically the band that requires no audition (mainly for the new kids). You see, that would’ve been fine, dandy, and all. But instead, it’s been pretty crazy.

I’ve made a couple of new friends at band, one being the second flautist, Joyce Kim. She plays the flute. (I have some issues with the flutes.) The other friend is Axel Chen, the tenor saxophonist. I mean, he’s pretty alright—quite silly at times, but he can basically sight-read whatever piece you throw at him. He squeaks his reed a lot though, then wonders why it breaks… I also have a first flautist friend, Azalea Wang. She’s been playing the flute for a while now.

See, band is fun. I enjoy performing. But, there are some things that happen during band that make me want to grovel and fall onto the floor.

For example, other than Axel, there’s another tenor saxophone. He seems pretty annoying, but I don’t really talk to him. (I kind of don’t want to either.) He ruins a lot of solos for people. Not to be mean, but there’s a reason Axel and I look at each other in deep disgust whenever he messes a note up.

A usual band rehearsal goes like this:

I make my way into the spare room and place down my instrument, tune a bit, and mess around. I mean, you can’t really talk with your friends in the actual rehearsal, right? The conductor would smite the two of us on the spot. So really, when we’re in the spare room, everyone’s stealing each other’s instruments. 

However, when we get into the actual rehearsal—that’s a completely different story.

When I sit down in my cramped chair with the door shut and warm air circulating around me, I feel both jittery and excited to be there. For a moment, I feel like I’m going to have a good time. But every single time, I am wrong.

My conductor, Miss Jens, goes through each section, tuning them and making sure we’re all playing in the right pitch. She always starts with the flutes, and always gets disappointed. See, I personally would not like to comment on other people’s performances, as I am not very talented myself, but… not being overly sharp when asked to play a Concert B flat surely cannot be that hard… right?

Enough about the flute section. What about the clarinets? 

You can’t even hear them. They don’t even show up to sectionals. Come on man.

Afterwards, the saxophones get tuned. I’m usually in tune, but sometimes I need to twist in or out a bit more. But it’s not that big of a deal. Miss Jens takes less than ten seconds to tune me. And the other alto saxophones… they’re fine—when they show up. But when they don’t, I feel like an infant crying again.

The brass section is usually fine. The trumpets get a disapproving look from Miss Jen sometimes for not practising enough, but we can work with it.

When we actually begin to play a piece of music, it goes okay… for the first two bars. Then everyone loses count. Including me. Whenever I lose count, a looming despair and fear overcomes me and troubles me deeply. It’s quite hard to “gain” your count back after you’ve lost it, especially when you don’t know the piece that well. Counting, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one… is much harder than the average person anticipates. I try to see where Miss Jens is trying to direct us to, but then I look down at my music and I’m even more lost. My brain is being fried by both the band and the chaos. 

I feel like a bug from Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Miss Jens stops everyone from playing and looks just as confused as I am. She darts her eyes around the entire room, looking from left to right, almost purposely bending her pupils to see who played an entire octave wrong. Her eyes dart towards the saxophone section. I gulp. My instrument shakes with my hand. I panic. Please, don’t do this to me, miss. I am absolutely trying my best here. The suspense begins to rise, and I can almost feel the percussion section rolling their cymbals, reaching fortississimo and maybe an additional two fs on the sheet music.

“Flutes, did you play the A flat?”

Oh it wasn’t me.

Good! I live another day.

Azalea looks down in shame, then turns around and looks at me with a depressing and sluggish face. This is not the first time it has happened, and most likely not the last. The flute section is definitely… something, to say the least. I wipe the sweat off my forehead, both from the boiling room with its top-tier heaters, and from the relief that I am not picked on once again to have to play by myself in front of the entire band. It’s like those Wii Tennis matches where all the little avatars turn their heads toward you like owls, only now with instruments in their hands. 

We play the same bar again for a couple of times while Miss Jens gets more and more tired of the flutes. I doubt some of them even know their fingering for this piece. To be honest, I don’t either. But at least I improvise hard enough so that no one knows.

“Ivory, can you play your part for me please?”

What do you mean you want me to play my part??

I widen my eyes out of fear and look at her, before slowly nodding and facing my sheet music. D, E flat, A, D. Not so hard, right? I confidently play the following as I should have, happy that it sounds good.

“Oh, so you were the one sounding off? It’s three keys on your left hand, plus your pinky.” Miss Jens calmly responds, but with a hint of a sigh.

I do as she says, but I’m now under stress like a pressure cooker. There’s no more silliness in playing Careless Whisper in the spare room now, is there? 

I forgot how to finger A flat. I try to play a note, but it still sounds too off for an A flat.

“No Ivory, you don’t do anything with your right hand.”

Still trembling, I leave my right hand free and finally play the correct note. She nods, and everyone continues. 

The rest of the rehearsal goes by pretty uneventfully, until I get back into the spare room. Azalea and Axel both look at me with smugness in their eyes. 

Thanks guys.

Writer – Emma Li
Editor – Josephine Sim
Artist – Amelia Hu

–September 2024–