OK, this is from waaaaaaaaaay back when I was in my 3rd year of studying with Mr. Bloom.
We’re in the middle of a lesson and he started prodding me about my beliefs. Well, it started with me saying, “stop YELLING at me!!! I’m right here, I can HEAR you just fine!!!” and him responding “I’m from a Russian Jewish family in BROOKLYN. We talked to each other like this all the time!!!” This boiled down to him poking around in my belief system. Since I was raised with nothing… and not even baptized… I just told him that I had my own ideas. He said, “well, it sounds like you should take some classes in religious PHILOSOPHY!” I had already taken many religion courses out of interest only but I though, hey, what the hell, if it counts towards my degree, I’m all for it.
The following semester, there were a few classes available that I was actually interested in. Unfortunately, the one I was most interested in was a graduate-level class – Medieval Philosophy. The dean signed off on this so I was able to take the class. Cool!
To make a long story short about the actual class, I loved it. There was a ton of reading and individual analysis. Since I didn’t come from a “pre-fixed” background, my instructor loved reading my papers and offered a lot of extra reading for me to help me grasp some of the concepts he was just glossing over in the classroom.
In the end, I aced the class and was seriously pushed by the department to change my major. I kind of balked at that since philosophy vs music… well, actually, the music biz won in this argument.
After I was done with the class, I was in repertoire class with some colleagues. Mr. Bloom decides that now is the time to ask what I learned in the class. I responded in a general manner, stating that one of the teachings that I gleaned from St. Augustine was that “on free will, Augustine argues free will most certainly exists and argues that people can choose to be good, or good will as he puts it, or chose evil.”
He listened, pondered that for a moment, and then asked, “well, what does that have to do with your music career?”
I thought about that for a moment and responded that “I think it means that I choose to listen to my horn teacher unless he’s being evil, but then I will listen to myself.”
He got quite a kick out of that.
