I recently had a chat with one of my students who is
dyslexic. She explained to me that, whilst she feels she is clever, she has a
very hard time demonstrating this on paper. She knows that she ‘gets’ things
but she finds it difficult to express her ideas. If someone could see into her
mind, she said, they would appreciate what she is capable of, but as long as
her ability is gauged by her schoolwork, or by other such measurements of
‘success’, people will not know this.
I myself do not have dyslexia but there is a certain area
in which I can empathise with my student. That area is music. I feel there is a
huge discrepancy between my musical creativity and my ability to express this
creativity in conventional ways – by singing, for example, or playing an instrument.
I’ve never spoken to anyone about this before, and I do
not know how common this feeling is. Perhaps it is a kind of ‘musical
dyslexia’. I constantly have tunes bouncing around in my mind, and I do not
mean Coldplay or Mozart or whatever. I mean original compositions, tunes I have
come up with myself. I am constantly playing percussion on any available
surface, and am obsessed with making up little ditties. Perhaps it is a kind of
tic. I could easily spend an hour in the shower, singing or humming to myself.
But I have never been ‘musical’ in a conventional sense.
I was absolutely hopeless in music lessons at school. It didn’t help that the
only music taught at my school was classical music, and that this was taught in
an extremely dour way that seemed more akin to mathematics – tones, semitones,
crotchets, quavers and all of that stuff. We had to play on pathetic little
xylophones, and our teacher would bark at us if we made mistakes. I thoroughly
hated music lessons, and used to put no effort in at all. I didn’t see the
point.
As I got older I did take up a few musical instruments –
clarinet, bass and guitar. I was even in a band for a while, but I was never
any good. I could never for the life of me read music, and I didn’t have the
patience to improve. It’s not that I didn’t, and don’t, enjoy playing the
instruments; it’s more that I always felt inherently kind of crap at them, in
the same way as my dyslexic student feels useless at reading and writing. The
frustration, in other words, lies not in the fact that I am not musical, but
that I am musical but unable to
express it.
This feeling of frustration reaches its nadir when it
comes to singing. I cannot sing with my mouth, but I can sing with my mind.
This sounds very flowery I know, but that is how it feels. If someone could
wire up electrodes to my brain and convert my mental
compositions into actual songs, I would probably be a fairly successful
musician. The creativity is there, but the ability doesn’t seem to be.
