A letter to Miss Hailey, my English Teacher at Lakeland Senior High School
Fall, 1995
I hope that this letter finds you healthy and full of energy. Please do not assume that, just because I’m in college, I punctuate every sentences correctly, and that all my sentences have direction. Give me a few more years of college to become an eloquent writer.
UF is fabulous! I’m learning so much in so little time. This past summer I was a camp counselor at the Methodist camp in Leesburg and since then, I have done a lot of soul-searching. College is a wonderful place to get to know yourself better. It has been a time for me, to set up my own personal schedule. I have found that I work constantly. I wake up an hour and a half before my first class to practice. Then I practice between classes. I eat only two meals a day and I sleep seven hours a night. I work on book homework late into the night and then relax for about an hour in front of the TV before I go to sleep. My body has become extremely efficient because I love all that I am doing.
I’m taking English 1101 here at Gainesville. I was blessed again with a wonderful teacher. I love a lot of the things about his teaching, but one thing in particular is that he does not limit our expression of words. For example, if we feel inclined to emphasize a point, we are told to use any word necessary to prove that point, whether it be a cuss word or whatever. He is a fiction writer, and he has interesting, legitimate opinions on things. We just finished reading Slaugtherhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, and I loved it. The aspect of time did not play a role in the book at all. Everything was relatively told in little sections, so that by the end, the reader would see the whole picture in its entirety. The structure of the novel was different, and it was interesting to find the repeated words throughout the novel. At the beginning of the semester, we were asked to write a journal entry and mine was mainly about my soul searching this past summer. This soul-searching was not particularly linked to religion, politics, or even self. It was directly linked to my music-making. At this summer camp, I was unable to practice much, but every night I would play hymn music in chapel for prayer time. This prayer time for the congregation quickly turned into a devotion time for me. I had memorized all the hymns that I was playing and put them all in C major so that it would be easy to go from one hymn to the other. Having them memorized, appeared, oddly enough, like I was playing music inspired by God or something. This really hit home with me because I felt like this is how all the music that I played should be like. All the traditional Bach suites, concertos, sonatas, etc., I felt should feel the same way.
Let me insert part of my journal entry here because I think I explained it pretty well. I promise not to write much more.
“…. Here, at camp, I found a sort of peace with my cello playing that I had never experienced before. When I played in chapel, it was about my own personal prayer and bible devotion. I felt the spiritual side of music and when I returned to my classical music practice time, I saw the music so much more differently. I think I finally saw the music apart from the notes. This is hard for me to explain, but I knew something was totally different. When I discovered this other side, I quickly picked up my cello and began to play Bach’s 2nd cello suite, something that I had played over and over again, but this time it sounded a little different. Yes, it sounded a little differently than all the other times that I had played it before, but then suddenly as I was playing it I felt something. Not something from the outside but something from the inside. I felt something inside of me that I had never felt before. As I was playing these notes that I had studied many times, I felt an understanding of not just the notes one by one, but the musical line or lines as a whole. As I was playing I began to make these lines come together and intertwine with each other to produce something as a one whole unit. When I finished the prelude, I sat back and let the distant sounds echo in my mind. As I was experiencing this feeling of completeness, I remembered how it felt to be playing the phrases and experiencing the notes not from diligent practice but from my own interpretation of the music. I quickly started the Allemande, the next movement, and I experienced the feeling once again. After playing the whole second suite, I realized that music was not the notes. Music is the stuff in which is in between the notes. I was just blown away by this sense of understanding that I immediately wanted to share my discovery with someone else. …”
November 30th, I fly with my mother to Indiana for my audition into the school of music at Indiana University. I am practicing a lot for my audition because I really need to transfer to Indiana University. I cannot see myself here at the University of Florida for four years.
I am glad that I feel that I can write you and I’ll be sure to come to school to see you some time.
Love,
Corry A. Rankin
