Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lara St. John

There is a quiet fury tucked inside this memory: a child whose first language was sound being told to translate herself into worksheets. Lara St. John frames music as something bodily and instinctive, "never remembering a life without" it, which immediately positions her not as a student climbing toward artistry but as someone already living inside it. That matters, because it makes the adults' demands feel less like guidance and more like confiscation.

The line "mostly by ear" signals a particular kind of musicianship: improvisatory, intuitive, porous to the world. In classical training culture, that ability can be treated as charming at best, suspect at worst - too messy, too personal, too hard to grade. "Scales and drudgery" isn't just a complaint about practice; it's an indictment of an institution that confuses discipline with virtue and technique with truth. The grownups want measurable progress, the kind that can be checked off in lesson books and auditions. The child wants the electricity of discovery.

The subtext is about authority: who gets to define "real" musicianship, and what gets erased when an art form is turned into compliance. St. John doesn't deny the value of fundamentals; she bristles at the way fundamentals become a substitute for listening. The quote lands because it captures a common cultural tension - expertise versus joy - while insisting that joy isn't the enemy of mastery, it's often the reason mastery starts.