Chapter 47

So who am I? 

I asked myself this question time and time again. Probably more than ever in the second year of university. I didn’t stop there though.

What makes me happy? 

Oh boy, that’s a tough one.

What am I good at?

Welp. I’m pretty average at science but I did once excel quite a lot at playing the cello back in highschool. Though I was a privately trained cellist in an otherwise public school music pool… But still, it gave me some of the best experiences in my life. But there’s no way I can do that in university when I’m trying to apply into a competitive professional school program right? 

Right?

That’s when it hit me. Maybe I could do more cello playing. 

Now, if you’ll recall. I mentioned that in the first year, I couldn’t really do any classical cello playing anymore as it’s not my program. Also, my plan to include some form of cello playing in the form of joining the UW Orchestra fell through because I had a mandatory lab. So now what about second year? Surely with the new found freedom in scheduling my classes I could adjust my schedule to do UW Orchestra right? Yes! But I didn’t stop there. Let’s not jump ahead too much though. 

I joined the UW Orchestra for the first time around second year fall term and found myself in a similar fashion as before in highschool. I was sitting close to the front but not at the front. I was in the first desk but wasn’t the principal cellist (the most decorated cellist). This was fine by me, I was just happy that I got to do more cello playing now. Though a small part of me did still want to learn about the guy that had the principal (first) position. 

The principal cello position went to a cellist who came from Earl Haig. If you recall, Earl Haig was one of the art schools that always crushed my public highschool in the Kiwanis competitions. So when I joined the UW Orchestra the first time, I had, on instinct, harbored resentment towards him. Though nothing really came from this outside of the playful joke. Also, credit where credit is due, the guy was playing better than me.

Pretty quickly, I started making friends and learning about the orchestra as a member of it. As it turns out, it was more than just a club of volunteer musicians who performed at a small concert at the end of the term. It was also taken as a Pass/Fail credit course for some music majors. 

This was surprising to me. Firstly, I didn’t even know we had music majors in university. Waterloo was known for Engineering, not really for science and definitely not for music. I didn’t even know we had a department! I had always thought it was just a small subdivision inside of the general arts building but it was true. There was a music department. While it was kind of small, it was definitely there. 

How small was it? It was hidden away on the far side of campus and attached to a student residence building. Yeah, you heard that right, it was a small subset of a student residence. They didn’t even have a building to themselves. In comparison, Engineer was on their 7th building around this time to accommodate for more Engineers incoming. 

Secondly, why am I joining this orchestra as a volunteer when I could be getting credits for doing this? It seems like a no brainer. I wanted credits to space out my optometry school application endeavors and this was a credit towards something I was already doing, so why not get credit for it? Well, sadly, I wasn’t doing orchestra full time. You see, around second year, while more freer than the first, still had limitations.

One of the limitations was between two music related things. In second year, the acapella group I was a part of in first year had their rehearsal time at around the same time as UW Orchestra. I didn’t have the heart to quit acapella because it was too fun but I couldn’t just ditch the orchestra either. So, before I found out about the whole accredited orchestra credit thing, I decided to talk with the leader of the acapella group as well as the conductor of the orchestra to make an arrangement where I would spend every other week at each of them. 

The acapella group were fine with it on account that we still had other rehearsals through the week in the form of sectionals and the orchestra conductor was fine with it because I was one of the more competent cellists and knew all the repertoire they were doing most terms too. Unfortunately, what the conductor couldn’t do was give me credit for showing up only half the time.

Still, I enjoyed the simple fact that cello playing was now, once again, in my life. The orchestra was also not half bad either skills wise. I think this was the case for two reasons. The first reason was that in Waterloo, the population was pretty Asian. It doesn’t take a genius to clearly see that it was approximately 50% asian and 50% white. Out of all those Asians, the orchestra attracted a bunch of the ones who did RCM when they were young. These Asians were also usually the ones who worked their ass off in highschool but were gate-kept from going into music by their parents. Having such a strong history, it seemed natural that some would want to keep it going, if not just on habit alone. Lucky for the orchestra, this also means that they were very competent at music and usually had a solid foundation for classical music as a whole.

The second reason? As I mentioned, Waterloo was an engineering school. There simply wasn’t another official orchestra anywhere closeby for the Waterloo students. I mean, the University across the street at Laurier had an orchestra I think but that was full of actual music majors, not part timers or volunteers. This was the only choice for those who wanted to participate in an orchestra recreationally. 

Speaking of recreational orchestra playing. I realized that the members who joined the orchestra for credit were quite few in numbers. Most of us were there as volunteers. When I dug into this a bit more I found out that the reason for this was that there was another method of getting credit from playing in an ensemble. Music majors needed approximately 8 terms of ensemble participation for graduation and most decided to do something called ICE. The Instrumental Chamber Ensemble.

This was a course anyone could register for. You’d audition and would be assigned a coach and a group of other musicians. The music coach would then give you all repertoire to work on. You met up twice a week, once with the coach and once with just the group. Then, at the term’s end, you’d all perform at a recital in the music department/student residence’s chapel. This was also the same as UW Orchestra, a CR (credit) or no CR course meaning it had no official grade. However, unlike the UW Orchestra, you can find your own time to meet up with the coach and your ensemble mates. Meaning you can technically fit this ICE course into any schedule you wanted.

Due to how flexible this ensemble was and how fun it sounded, I quit the UW Orchestra in the winter term of second year and decided to participate in this instead. It was just a much better outlet for keeping cello in my life with also the benefit of getting instruction and improving too! It was also always exciting. When the term starts, we’d never know what kind of trio we’d be getting. 

Sometimes, we’d do trios with flute, cello and piano. Sometimes it’ll be cello, violin and piano. One time we even had a quartet with 2 violins, a viola and a cello though that was incredibly rare. It was all that I’ve wanted in a course to keep the cello in my life. What was more was, ICE gave me access to the storage rooms in the residence as well as access to the practice rooms. Gone are the days of my cello taking up space in my rented student housing. I now have a locker for my instrument! Gone also were the days of practicing in my apartment and pissing off my roommates. Now I had a place to practice. 

Then I had a thought. If I am having so much fun doing music and getting all of these ICE credits, why not just do more of it? I was having a bad time in science undergrad with courses I didn’t want to take but had to just for the sake of applying into the optometry program. This was in stark contrast to the ICE courses I really enjoyed doing and liked doing for the sake of doing it. So why not balance out my schedule with more music? I had some wiggle room for electives for electives, so why deny myself of this? Then I came upon the realization.

I wanted, more than anything else, was to do more music in university. 

From ICE alone, I got a glimpse of how university classes can be when you actually like the topics you are learning about. It was exciting to want to go to class as opposed to dreading it. I came to the understanding of who I really am at that point. I knew that I was someone who loved classical music and didn’t want to leave it behind. 

I wasn’t sure if all the RCM I had done in the past would help me and what made it worse was that I hadn’t even touched upon my music theory nor history since the summer before undergrad started. It was kind of a gamble because I was essentially putting myself, a science student, among a class of music majors who do this as a means to eventually become musicians. So I had to gamble on my musical background and hope that it wouldn’t completely demolish my GPA in university. 

But still, I just wanted to be part of that world. I wanted to have a schedule where I would have some music classes between all my science ones to take the edge off. 

And so, that’s exactly what I did. Towards the end of my second year in university, I readjusted my schedule and when third year came around, I had filled up all my elective slots with a very different set of courses. Instead of filling up on bird courses that were easy GPA boosters like my fellow science students, I chose to do classical music courses instead. Not just the ICE courses either, I did music theory and history too. These were classes that had a proper grade and will affect my GPA directly. 

I didn’t know how I would perform in those classes. The curriculum seemed familiar but still, I wasn’t sure how things would really play out. 

Regardless, I knew this was something I had to do. 

I needed to attend university for something I actually wanted to learn about.