W hen I started music lessons at the conservatoire, I was barely four years old. A year later, I received my first violin. I grew up in France in the 1990s, when music education was nearly free, with only a modest annual fee of 50 euros. But education in those days was ‘serious’. Classical music, or what some called ‘sacred music’, was no joke. Everything else, apparently, was lesser or even ‘garbage’, according to one of my violin teachers.
So this is how my musical education began: rigid, upright and, above all, unquestioning. You listened, and you kept quiet. This was, at least, the Russian method employed at the conservatoire in the suburbs of Paris. And when your arm or hand hurt, you pressed on without flinching, as if it were your fault. If I was in pain, it was because I was lazy, my teacher said. I share this context so you can understand the environment in which I first learnt the violin: a toxic space, devoid of childhood and the very essence of music: freedom.
After years of suffering – passing my violin exams each year with success, but also with immense anxiety – I finally saw a psychologist because I was traumatised. I was twelve. The first thing I told him, when he asked why I couldn’t sleep, why I was stressed and what the worst thing in my life was that frightened me, was always the same: the conservatoire and playing the violin in front of old, white adults, who were often racist.