Reflection
If you are a parent of a violist, here is the nicest thing you can say to your child when they worry about their sound: "I just like listening to you play scales." My father, Jack Crawford, earnestly said that to me when I was in my 20s. He was a musician. I had just dropped out of music school and I was worrying about my playing deteriorating. I know he meant that what he heard was beautiful to him. I have kept steadily playing all these years, and now I am in my late 50s. I feel lucky to have fingers and toes and breath. Sometimes, I pretend that that day is the very last chance I'll have to play.
It's simple to see the connection between playing the viola and absolutely everything else--obvious, really. I left music school for a list of reasons that don't matter now. I've had a happy career as a lawyer and law professor, and now I write books. But I am always a musician, always a violist, although I don't talk about it during the course of any ordinary day, and that means that I get to know how fun it is to play with other people, and how noble and human the sound of the viola is. This is special knowledge that all of you have, but there are a lot of people who haven't had these joys. And I get to know that something that seems impossible to someone who hasn't done it—like playing a string instrument—is in fact possible, given time and care. This makes lots of other difficult things possible as well.
Now I am coming to the end of my professional career. I've been commuting by plane every week (with the viola) between DC and Boston to teach, and that's bananas. So I am looking forward to my next chapter. And here is where my luck has landed me: I have been taking lessons and I am really enjoying learning new repertoire. Now I can find other people to play with regularly, and maybe I can even join an orchestra. I can keep learning and getting better. I have had a good life so far, and now I get to take this next step along my path as a truly amateur violist. We happy few.
About Susan Crawford
Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is the author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, co-author of The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, author of FIBER: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It, and a contributor to WIRED.com. She served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and co-led the FCC transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations. She also served as a member of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Advisory Council on Technology and Innovation and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Broadband Task Force. Ms. Crawford was formerly a (Visiting) Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Michigan Law School (2008-2010). As an academic, she teaches courses about cities, public leadership, technology, and communications policy. She was a member of the board of directors of ICANN from 2005-2008 and is the founder of OneWebDay, a global Earth Day for the internet that takes place each Sept. 22. One of Politico’s 50 Thinkers, Doers and Visionaries Transforming Politics in 2015; one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology (2009); IP3 Awardee (2010); one of Prospect Magazine’s Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future (2011); and one of TIME Magazine’s Tech 40: The Most Influential Minds in Tech (2013). Ms. Crawford received her B.A. and J.D. from Yale University. She served as a clerk for Judge Raymond J. Dearie of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) (Washington, D.C.) until the end of 2002, when she left that firm to enter the legal academy.