My hands bled too

I went to go see the film Whiplash in theaters about a week ago. If you haven’t seen Whiplash, then what you might want to know is that it’s a film about a college freshman named Andrew (Miles Teller) at a Juilliard-like music conservatory in New York City. Andrew is a drummer, specifically a jazz drummer, and he plays under the guidance (“guidance”) of the infamous Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a verbally abusive maniac driven to push his students to their limit. It’s a very good film. It’s entertaining and well-paced; the acting is top-notch; the music is fantastic. It is, at is core, a film about a boy and a man who are both rivals and allies. Even more simply put: it is a movie about boys and men and greatness.

I don’t really know how to talk about Whiplash beyond very basic film discussion language. I know how to talk about pacing and editing and music, but I don’t really know how to talk about its content. I enjoyed Whiplash but I also hated every second of it. I spent the bulk of the film sitting with my knees curled up to my chest, fists clenched, even looking away at some scenes.

I am also a percussionist. Well, I was a percussionist. I didn’t play drum set; I played keyboard percussion. I didn’t go to Juilliard or even a Juilliard equivalent, nor did I major in music. But I attended a high school with a wildly competitive music program, where I, too, stayed after school longer than necessary, learning the same pieces of music over and over again. No one threw a chair at me, no one hit me in the face, but I certainly had batons tossed in my general direction. I, too, was thrown out of rehearsals. I, too, sat in practice rooms crying, bandaging up my swollen, bleeding fingers, hoping one day I would be considered great.

If you had spoken to me when I was 15 or 16, I would have told you that I wanted to major in music. I wanted to study at a good music conservatory, and if all worked out, I wanted to play in pit orchestras for musicals. I practiced all the time. I practiced during my lunch hour. I practiced during my open period. I practiced after school. I was in every band my high school offered: symphonic, marching, jazz, and even orchestra.

There is only one named female character in Whiplash. It’s Nicole (Melissa Beniost), Andrew’s girlfriend, who he eventually breaks up with because she’ll get in the way of his greatness. There is an unnamed female trombonist featured at the end of the film, but as far as female representation goes, Whiplash is a failure. There are women in music, there are women in jazz, and there are women in percussion. I would know. Those were my people.

I was one of three or four female percussionists in a section of about 35 students, depending on the year. There is a difference, I believe, in being a male percussionist and a female percussionist. The difference is that in the middle of a rehearsal one day, one of the events coordinators came to observe. He was the kind of high school teacher who isn’t really a high school teacher. He’s the guy who taught one English class and otherwise just made sure Homecoming had an appropriate theme. He came to observe the drumline practice before a football game. I stood off to the side, prepping my keyboard to practice. He approached me. “So are you, like, one of the drumline groupies?” he asked.

When you are a girl who plays percussion, everyone assumes you are there to get boys to sleep with you. Having spent a huge part of my life with male percussonists, I can say with confidence that I never wanted to sleep with any of them. My fellow female percussionists and I were not there to be groupies. We were there to play. And when people asked why none of us were on drumline, why we stood off to the side with marimbas and xylophones and timpanis, it was because we knew better. We knew better than to try to break through the glass ceiling. My junior year, a girl made the drumline for the first time in eight or nine years.

“Every day,” one of the boys on drumline told me, “we’re going to try to get Molly to cry.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s an idiot.”

And sure enough, I would see Molly come out of drumline rehearsals with tears down her face. She stuck through to the end of the season and then she quit. No one blamed her. The rest of us girls kept to ourselves, stayed out of the limelight of drumline. We tried to attend a drumline breakfast once and we got kicked out of the restaurant. “No girls allowed,” they told us. The instructors were there and they said nothing. They shrugged. Boys will be boys. We left. We did our own thing. It wasn’t worth making waves. As girls, we learned it was easiest to shut up and learn the part.

My instructors were nothing like Fletcher in Whiplash. No one ever called me a cocksucker. But they were not necessarily kindly disposed towards me. For the first two years, I was the darling of the section. I was responsible. I was organized. I seldom, if ever, misplaced my music. (There is an entire section of Whiplash dedicated to the sheer anxiety of misplacing your music folder. This is the most accurate part of the film. After practicing, the thing I did most while I was a percussionist was photocopy all of my parts over and over again to ensure I was never without my music.) I began to struggle my junior year. I was balancing two very difficult pieces. A week before those pieces had to go in front of a judge, I had a brutal private lesson with my instructor.

“Why don’t you know it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

The worst thing you can be in music is unsure. Fletcher glares at Andrew in the film. “Are you rushing or dragging?” he asks. Andrew doesn’t know. You have to know. You always need an answer.

I told my instructor that I didn’t like one of the pieces. I struggled to practice it because I didn’t like the process of learning it, of playing it.

“You think you can just do things you like for the rest of your life?”

I didn’t have an answer for that one either, and then I started to cry. He rolled his eyes, and he kicked me out of the lesson. That was the breaking point in our relationship. That is when they stopped respecting you in our program: once they saw you cry. It was over for me, and I knew it. I spent the entire next week in the practice room until 8 or 9pm. I learned each piece inside and out. I played with a metronome (I was always rushing, never dragging). I played till my hands bled, and I’d go home and ice and bandage them for the next day.

That year, I managed to get a perfect score on my solo competition piece. I qualified for state. I brought the score sheet into my instructor’s office. He took it from me and then threw it away. “I don’t know what he was thinking,” he said, referring to the judge. “You know you don’t deserve this, right?”

Whiplash is a movie; it’s an exaggerated truth. “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job,’” Fletcher explains to Andrew.

“You know that you are not perfect at this piece?” my instructor asked.

I didn’t know what to say. Don’t make waves. Just accept it, keep your head down, learn the music. I knew I wasn’t perfect but I also knew I was good. I was deserving of accolades. I worked for this. “I know,” I told him.

“How did you get this score?” he asked.

“I practiced a lot last week,” I told him. “I was here every night—”

“Oh, well,” he said.

He decided to not let me take the piece to state. It wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t perfect. That spring, I was demoted from my position as section leader. They told me I could be an organizational leader, since I was so good at making copies and keeping folders and not losing things. It’ll be a very important role, they explained to me.

I was done. Without a leadership position, having fallen out of favor, I was done. I went for help on music conservatory auditions, but my instructors had gotten over helping me. I wasn’t going to be great. I was undeserving. I had made too many waves, faltered too much, and now I was on my own. And so I quit. I applied to a handful of music conservatories, and I did get in, but I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to the abuse or the culture in my life anymore. And perhaps that’s why Whiplash was so difficult for me to watch. I spent the whole film thinking, You can quit whenever you want. Andrew wants to be great. I wanted to be great too. But there’s a line.

I knew so many wonderful, talented female percussionists. Girls who were serious and proud and capable. They scared me, and I think I sometimes scared them too. But none of us play anymore. We went into other fields. The girl I spent four years in percussion with is pursuing a graduate degree in molecular biology. We all liked music, but we weren’t willing to put up with it. I feel like I’ll never know if this made us weak. I watched girls like Molly, Molly who was an “idiot,” quit and I thought, She couldn’t hack it. She couldn’t keep up with the pace. I remember seeing her at the Homecoming football game the year after she quit, sitting with her friends and shouting and having fun. She was having fun. She looked really happy. Every day I saw her on that drumline, she was crying.

I wonder what would have happened if we said something. If we had talked about how unfair it was to be a girl in that section. If we had made a big deal about it. Would it have changed? Or would it have gotten harder? Would the program have turned into some utopian music education dream world, where everyone practiced all the time but was constantly bombarded with positive reinforcement? I don’t think so. There’s an old world culture to music—it’s the same in the visual arts, in fashion, in whatever. The way we’ve always done it works. I just didn’t want to do it that way anymore.

There’s a conversation at the midway point of Whiplash in which Andrew gets into a fight with his cousins. They have friends, they’re popular, and in Andrew’s mind, forgettable. They won’t be great. They’ll be liked and happy, but no one will ever remember them. I wonder if I’m ever spoken about in the percussion section anymore. I’m six years removed from the program. I know, deep down, that I’ve probably been forgotten about. But I wonder if they talk about my glory days and wonder why I couldn’t keep up with it. I wonder if I’m one of the legacies from the program. One of the good ones. Hey, remember when? But I don’t know. They probably don’t. I chose to be forgettable. I quit.

After my lesson that afternoon, I fished my score sheet out of the garbage. I kept it. I kept my perfect score. I knew I didn’t deserve it, but I wanted it anyway. On it, the judge wrote: “Good job.”