December found Brett quite at ease with the violin. He'd been practicing quite a lot, had gone quickly through most of the repertoire Chen had given him, and he was finally starting to feel at home with the instrument. The teacher itself seemed to have lost a bit of his temper these past months, and, though not any closer to nice, at least he had toned down the roasting a bit.
Yes, things were going swiftly with the violin, finally.
Why was today's class going so wrong, then?
"I can't do it."
Brett fumbled with his glasses. It was his third attempt at playing this week's new piece, Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in A minor , first movement, and so far he hadn't made it past the first eight bars. He gave the sheet music in front of him a dirty look.
Eddy sighed.
"You've been only playing this piece for a week. It'll take some time for you to warm up to it."
"I can't do it! It's too hard!"
"Yes, you can do it. You just have to practice. Let's start from the beginning again."
Brett put his violin on his shoulder and started to play.
"Stop. Your bow is crooked, that's why you're not making a good sound on the A string. Try to keep it parallel to the bridge."
Brett tried again.
"No. Look at your bow, Yang. Does it look like it's parallel to the bridge?".
"I don't know," he answered sulkily.
Eddy rolled his eyes. "Well, spoiler alert, it is not. Try again. Wrist coming towards your nose when you get closer to the frog. And raise your elbow a bit when you go to the E string, you're keeping it too close to your body. It needs to be aligned with your hand."
Brett did as told.
"Keep the elbow up when you change strings. No, don't stop the bow. Elbow, Yang. Your elbow's too slow, that's why your string crossings are not clean. Stop focusing on your left hand, your left hand's perfectly fine, just keep the bow moving. Shorter bow there, Yang, stay in the middle. Careful, you're too close to the bridge now, yes, that's better. That's an upbow. Upbow, Yang. Elbow. No, your bow is not straight again, Yang, focus!"
Brett stopped playing abruptly and took a step back from the stand, huffing annoyedly. "This is fucking stupid." He muttered.
"Yang! Language!" The teacher raised an eyebrow, playfully. "There are minors present."
Brett looked around, but Lea was nowhere to be seen. She'd been moved to a different class a while ago. But then who was the minor...?
Then it hit him that the score in front of him was in A minor , and that Eddy was just trying to make a joke, and in other circumstances he might have found it slightly amusing, but certainly not today. He rolled his eyes.
"That was lame."
Eddy snickered. "Whatever. Again, from the top."
♪ ♪ ♪
After the lesson ended, Brett fumbled with his violin to put it back quickly into the case. The class had been a full hour of him struggling against the damn thing, and he was so glad it was finally over.
"Yang. Is everything alright? You looked quite out of it today."
He nodded. "Bad day, that's all."
Eddy hummed. "Yeah. We all get some of those now and then."
"Yeah, okay, Mr. Soloist, whatever you say."
He half expected Chen to call him out for being disrespectful. That's why he was so surprised when he heard the teacher chuckle instead.
"Believe it or not, Yang, even the best of soloists get those days. Days where nothing works, where things you thought you knew by heart are suddenly slippery under your fingers, and all the work you've been doing the previous days seems to amount to nothing. But those days are just that. Days. Twenty-four hours, and then they're gone."
Brett rubbed his nose. "Okay. Yeah, you're right. I'll just sleep on it, and tomorrow will be better."
He picked up his case and headed for the exit, shoulders hunched. Eddy felt a small pang in his chest.
Yeah, we all have those days.
That doesn't mean we have to go through them alone.
"Yang."
"What."
Eddy sighed. "Sit."
Brett gave him an ugly look, but did as told, slouching into the chair and crossing his arms defensively.
"Spill it."
"Spill what."
"Whatever's going on in your mind right now."
"There's nothing on my mind, I'm just tired."
"Yang, if mood manifested physically, yours would look like a dark cloud above your head."
Brett snorted at that. So rich coming from you, Little Miss Sunshine , he wanted to say, but refrained from it.
"I'm fine. Everything's fine."
Eddy hummed again, staring intently into Brett's eyes. "Say it again and I'll believe you."
He could see his student's internal battle, to tell or not to tell, that was the question. He could also see the exact moment he gave in, arms untangling, eyes fleeing towards the opposite corner of the room.
"It's just... I practice my arse out. Open strings first, every single day, then scales with all the different articulations, the arpeggios, the metronome, everything you say, I follow to the letter. But my intonation is awful, my bow keeps skidding, my bow strokes don't go together with the fingerings, every passage I tackle, I have to start excruciatingly slow, and half of the time I keep missing the shifts!" He rubbed his face. "Sometimes the violin feels like home, but there are days where it's as if I was back on my first day. I don't know." He paused. "Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a musician. Maybe I shouldn't be here at all."
There it was. The thought that had been plaguing him since he'd first arrived at the Con now laid in front of them, naked, openly displayed for Chen to laugh at it, or even worse, to prove it right.
Eddy just stared back for a while. Brett gradually shifted and ended up sitting at the edge of the chair, Chen's yet unspoken words the only thing keeping his fragile mental balance.
But if he was expecting his teacher's next words to be either the tipping point that drove him back to safe land or pushed him over the edge, he was sorely mistaken.
"I heard there's pizza for dinner tonight." Eddy mumbled, and raised from his chair. "We better head over to the cafeteria quickly, or there will be only the ones with mushrooms in it left. Why would they put mushrooms on pizza, anyway?"
Brett gawked at him. "I..."
"Come on, Yang, I'm hungry. If the good pizza's gone when we get there, I'll have you doing three octave scales 'till your fingers fall off."
♪ ♪ ♪
After they parted ways in the cafeteria last night, Brett thought he wouldn't hear from Chen again until the following Monday.
Next day soon proved him wrong.
"Yang!"
Brett winced. He put his fork back on the table and glanced at his teacher, who was striding towards him from the other end of the cafeteria.
"Hi, Eddy!" Phoebe greeted, and Eddy nodded briefly at her and Shaun, who was sitting next to her. Then, he drew his attention back to his student.
"I need you to assist me with my lessons this afternoon."
If Brett had been chewing something, he was sure he would've choked on it.
"What? Like, today?"
"Yes, today. Classroom 302, at two o'clock. Bring your violin."
Chen sauntered away, leaving a dumbfounded Brett staring at his retreating back.
"Brett," Phoebe nudged at him.
"Mhm?"
"It's ten to two."
"Oh, shit."
♪ ♪ ♪
He arrived at classroom 302 at the same time Chen did, and they got in together. A bunch of kids, all ranging from 4 to 6 in age, already had their small violins out and were waiting for them. Eddy greeted them and they answered with the loudest "Good afternoon, Mr. Chen!"
"Have you all been practicing what we did last week?"
"Yes, Mr. Chen!"
"Okay, then, how about you show me, then?"
He gestured for Brett to sit at the end of the classroom and started his lesson. Brett tried to pay attention, but it was a beginner's string class, and he soon found his mind drifting off. The drowsiness from the food he'd just eaten, combined with Eddy's soft, deep voice (he wasn't nearly as scary when he was talking to children, he noticed), lulled him to a near comatose state which had him almost falling off his chair. He was ungraciously snatched from it, however, by the teacher's sudden "Yang!"
"Huh?"
"Since you were demonstrating such exemplary behaviour in my class, I'd like you to come forward and illustrate how to properly hold the violin's bow."
"Sorry, what?"
"How to hold the bow. Show them. Surely you can do that, right?"
"Huh, erm, yeah, sure."
Brett took his own bow from his case and moved to be at the front of the class. From the corner of his eye, he saw Eddy sit in his chair behind the teacher's table. He could feel the man staring at him, and that along with so many pairs of eyes watching him intently made him queasy. But he wasn't going to let that show. No. Not in front of him , certainly not. If Eddy Chen wanted to make him uncomfortable, he'd need to work harder than that.
"Alright then. So. Huh, just, grab the bow with your left hand, yes, no, but leave your violins on your legs first, don't drop them!, yes, like that. Now that our violins are all safe, let's just graaaaab the bow with our left hand like this, yeah, a bit nearer the tip, yes, like that, well done! And now we do a little bunny with our right hand, yes, just like that, very good..."
Eddy, still sitting at the teacher's table, smiled inwardly at the bunny trick. He might be stealing that one from now on.
♪ ♪ ♪
By the time the class ended, Brett was exhausted. He'd spent the last hour patiently helping Eddy to correct each and everyone of the kids' bow holds. The fact that everytime they put their violin up to play, then down to rest position again, they went back to doing it wrong and had to be corrected didn't help at all. He couldn't wait to go to his room and crash in his small bunk bed.
"Right. Pack your stuff, we're on to our next class."
Come again?
"OUR next class?"
"Yes, our next class. Come on, Yang, we're late."
Brett stood in the middle of the corridor, watching Eddy stroll away with a dumbfounded expression plastered in his face.
"Yang!"
He jolted at the stern voice and meekly followed Eddy down the hall, slightly jogging to keep up with the taller man's long strides.
♪ ♪ ♪
"That passage is not clean. Do it again?"
The next student, a boy who must have not been older than 8 or 9, picked up his violin and repeated the same bars, with the same results.
"Ian, be honest. Have you practiced this?" Eddy asked.
"I have, Mr. Chen, I swear I have! I have played this song like, about a hundred times already!"
"It's a piece, not a song. And, by played it, you mean powered through it several times until you were tired of it and stopped practicing?"
The boy shrugged. Eddy sighed.
"Ian, I've already told you several times. Practicing like that won't take you anywhere." He gazed at Brett, who was sitting at the back of the classroom. He was nodding off again!!!
"Yang!" he barked.
He almost lost it when he saw the boy nearly fall off the chair, but managed to keep a straight face. He was the teacher, for Heaven's sake.
"How would you tackle this issue?"
"I, erm, huh..."
"As you've surely seen, because you were paying such keen attention, Ian is having trouble with a few bars of the piece he is playing. He claims he's practiced the piece but that particular passage has not gotten any better. How would you solve this problem?"
Brett looked at the boy, then at Eddy, then back at the boy. How was he supposed to know? He was not the teacher!
"Huh, well, I... I mean. What I would do is, huh, I'd get a metronome and practice that passage slowly, then gradually speed it up."
"Until what? Speed it up forever?"
"Well, no", durr, he wanted to add, but he didn't. Instead, "I'd just get the tempo of that passage a little over the performance tempo, so I have room to fall back to in case I'm having a specially clumsy day when I have to perform it."
"Is that all?"
Well, apparently not.
"No, of course not. I, huh," shit. What else did he use to do back then, when he had similar issues on the flute? "I would also practice the fingerings of the passage by changing the value of the notes, so I get to play different rhythms with the same fingerings. I've found it helps," he shrugged.
Eddy hummed. "Very well explained. Did you get that, Ian?" the boy nodded. "Okay then. Let's try to do it much, much slower, just this bit. Bar 37, please," and he then proceeded to act as a human metronome for the following 20 minutes.
With Eddy turning his attention back to his student, Brett felt himself relax. Had Eddy just praised him? He fell back into the chair (he'd been standing at the edge of it without realizing it), his heart beating wildly inside his ribcage, his chest suddenly, unexpectedly warm.
♪ ♪ ♪
He didn't even bother to complain when he was dragged along to another of Mr. Chen's lessons. This time, the student was a girl, around 11 or so, and it was obvious she'd been playing for quite some time. In Eddy's eyes, she was a very promising student. In Brett's eyes, she was a prodigy whose abilities were far beyond his own. That's why, when he was asked how to improve the girl's playing, he just stood there, mouth agape, wondering what in all heavens above was he supposed to answer to that.
"It seems my assistant was a little distracted." No, he was not! Brett wanted to protest. "Arianne, would you mind starting over from the beginning?"
"Sure" she quipped. She lifted her violin and started playing again.
Brett looked at her intently, trying hard to find something to say. The girl was playing the first movement of the Khachaturian Violin Concerto, and she was near damn perfect. What did Eddy want him to see? Intonation was mostly right, rhythm was right, the bow hold was right and oh. There.
"Huh, erm, your sound is fading a bit on the downbows, I think," he finally said.
Eddy nodded, pleased with the answer. "And what would you do about that?"
Brett blinked at him, befuddled. "Uh, er... open strings?"
"Mhm. Not necessarily open strings," he was back at addressing Arianne, "but it would do you good to practice the bowing of this passage first, then add the left hand. You have to make sure to adjust the pressure of your arm as you go down, so the sound doesn't..."
As the lesson went on, tiredness started to sink in, Brett falling back on his chair, his thoughts soon drifting away.
At some point, Eddy glanced at him through the corner of his eyes, and smirked.
♪ ♪ ♪
"Come on, Yang. Last lesson of the day and you get to go have some rest."
Eddy opened the door and went into the classroom, Brett dragging his feet after him. The student wasn't there yet, so he walked towards the end of the classroom to sit there, but was interrupted by Eddy, who was already tightening his bow.
"Close the door, please."
Brett did as told, befuddled, and sat at the back. It took him a solid ten minutes to understand that no student would come to the lesson. Because this was no lesson. This was Eddy Chen's practice session, and he had gotten first row seat.
He had started with some open strings, making sure the bow was straight and the tone was even and projected. He then spent some time doing scales, methodically correcting any small deviations in intonation. He then played some tenths, then some fourths, then some thirds.
After a good 40 minutes of warm up and working on technique, he started playing the piece he was currently working on, some sonata Brett had heard but forgotten the name of. He stood there, gawking, marvelling at how his teacher made his violin sound. The air of the room started to condense, and the harder the piece got, the harder it became to breathe. A small pool of water started forming at their feet, and Brett had to pull his knees to his chest to keep his socks from getting wet. Then, when the air got so thick it was almost unbearable, Eddy suddenly stopped.
Brett felt like he'd been snatched out of a trance.
"What went wrong there?"
Not this again.
It had to be a bad joke. To help students below your level of skill was barely acceptable when you were a student yourself. To give practice advice to teenagers far more proficient than you at the violin was preposterous. But this! This bordered sacrilege. How was he supposed to correct the teacher? The man's playing was perfect!! How on earth could he know what had gone wrong?
Only he did know what had gone wrong, he realised. It was pretty obvious, actually, and he felt dumb for not getting it inmediately.
"The shift," he said. "You missed the shift."
Eddy nodded. "And what should I do to fix that?"
But Brett had run out of ideas."Uh... I mean... I don't know. Practice it?" He offered with a shrug.
Eddy smiled, but said nothing. He lifted his violin and started playing. When he got to the tricky shift, he repeated it slowly, gradually speeding it up until he managed to get it in tune more than three times in a row. He then went back a few bars and started playing at the beginning of the phrase again.
This time, he didn't miss the shift, and he smirked.
♪ ♪ ♪
They left the classroom nearly half an hour later. The water that had accumulated on the floor from Eddy's playing had soaked Brett's shoes, socks, and the hem of his pants, and his mood had soured accordingly. Eddy, who didn't seem bothered by the water at all, even though he was just as wet, was whistling some tune while they walked back to the cafeteria.
"Good day today, huh?"
Brett made a noncommittal sound and kept walking.
"I actually found your explanations to the students very enlightening, and I'm sure they did, too."
Brett huffed.
"So, maybe tomorrow..."
"Yeah, yeah, okay, I get it. The practicing slowly thingy, the bowing thingy, the shift thingy, whatever. Yeah, so everybody has the same problems I have. Maybe we should all go celebrate together or something."
Brett instantly felt bad about his outburst, and stared at his feet. He looked up, though, when he heard Eddy chuckle.
"Yeah, they all do. We string players all struggle with more or less the same issues. But that was not my point."
Brett looked at him, confusion etched in his face. What had all that been about, then? All the lessons and the advice?
Eddy stopped in his tracks. "You don't get it, do you? Jesus, are you really that dense?"
Brett huffed and crossed his arms. The nerve of this b...
"You solved their problems."
What?
"You solved them," Eddy repeated. "Man, you can be really thick sometimes. Not only were you able to identify the problems these students -and you yourself- had, which is essential, because you cannot correct what you do not hear. But you also provided reasonable solutions to those problems. All of the time these children spend practicing from now on will be better, more efficient, because of the things you told them to do. And when the advice you gave them actually helps them overcome some of the difficulties they are facing now, they will see it works and then be equipped to deal with similar issues in the future, even if they don't have a teacher to fall back to." Eddy came closer to him and stared into Brett's eyes, trying to get his point across. "All those problems you have with your violin, they are common, and they are frustrating as hell. But you know more than you thought, and you've proven it today. You have effective ways to tackle each and everyone of your issues. Now you just have to put in the time and effort."
By which he meant: you're a musician, a good musician, deserving to be at the Con. And you will get better if you work hard for it.
Brett wasn't really good at subtleties, but this subtext he could read.
They both stood there, in the middle of the corridor, and Brett didn't know what to say. He felt like he could cry. Eddy sighed and stepped back.
"Go practice, Yang. And trust the process." He said, walking towards the cafeteria. "I expect you to nail the Vivaldi next Monday."
"Yeah, yeah," Brett mumbled, though Eddy could no longer hear him.
♪ ♪ ♪
After dinner, everybody went back to the dorms floor. Evenings in the Conservatory were spent mostly playing board games or cards with your friends in the common area under the Conference room, doing some light reading, listening to music or studying, if need be. Brett, being the social butterfly he was, could almost always be relied upon participating in whatever game they were engaging on for the day.
Not tonight, though. Tonight he left the diner earlier than everyone else and, violin still strapped in his back, sneaked into an empty bathroom with huge mirrors, far enough from the dormitories so he could be sure he would not be heard or stumbled upon.
He took the violin from his case, faced the mirror, and played the first note of an A minor scale.