Lennie's suppressed musical aspirations

Lennie's suppressed musical aspirations are a central part of her movement from self-confinement toward a future she can claim as her own. For a long time, Lennie treats ambition as something that belongs to Bailey, especially the possibility of attending Juilliard. She has not simply lost interest in music: she has quit and pressed herself into what she later recognizes as a constricting version of her own making. Her return to the clarinet turns that buried desire into action, while forcing her to confront the guilt that made her mistake having a dream for betraying her sister.

Identity and Background

Music is not merely an extracurricular pursuit for Lennie Walker. It is a language through which she can feel and express what ordinary life, especially life after Bailey Walker's death, has made difficult to contain. After practicing Cavallini's Adagio and Tarantella for two straight hours, Lennie experiences the playing as almost physical transformation: it is like turning air into colors. The intensity surprises her and makes summer band practice seem possible again. That response contrasts with the smaller, safer self she associates with her earlier life, and hints that musical expression can become part of how she learns to live with grief rather than shut it away.

Before that return, Lennie's musical ability had been visible to others even when she could not accept its implications. Marguerite St. Denis had praised her playing and urged her to go to Juilliard, telling her, "Your playing is ravishing. You work on the nerves, Lennie, you go to Juilliard." The praise made a future in music imaginable, but it also intensified Lennie's unease. A clear path toward her own ambition felt to her like a claim on something that should belong to Bailey.

How the Ambition Was Suppressed

Lennie's understanding of the sisters' ambitions begins to shift in a conversation with Big. Lennie insists that Bailey wanted Juilliard, had worked hard for it, and had regarded it as her dream. Big recalls Bailey's apparent relief when she was rejected by the New York school. When Lennie protests, Big asks, "Whose dream, Len?" He gestures as if playing an invisible clarinet and points out that Lennie was the one he saw working so hard. His question does not erase Bailey's aspirations; it unsettles Lennie's certainty that the dream she associated with her sister could not also have been hers.

The recognition lands with painful force. Lennie recalls Marguerite St. Denis's encouragement, then acknowledges that she quit. She describes having shoved and crammed herself into a jack-in-the-box of her own making. The image makes suppression an active kind of enclosure: Lennie has not been denied music by a lack of talent or support so much as folded inward by fear and by her interpretation of what it would mean to succeed. In her account, she had felt like an impostor whenever Juilliard was mentioned, and like a traitor, as though pursuing the possibility would steal Bailey's dream just as it had been taken from her. Her later question—why she had not thought that the sisters could dream alongside each other—names the false choice that had kept her from imagining a future in music.

Returning to the Clarinet

The change becomes public when Lennie walks into the music room and challenges Rachel Brazile for first chair. Rachel initially treats the announcement as an extension of Lennie's connection to Joe, but Lennie insists that the challenge is about her and her clarinet. She wants the solos. The distinction matters: her ambition is no longer framed as an indirect way of attracting someone else's attention, but as a demand she can make on her own behalf.

Lennie then tells Rachel that she is starting up again with Marguerite St. Denis and will try for All-State. The decision to resume lessons has formed on the way to rehearsal; the All-State ambition emerges as she says it. Music returns not as a fully settled plan but as a sequence of commitments Lennie is brave enough to voice before she knows exactly where they will lead. Rachel offers to split the solos, but Lennie refuses the compromise and proposes a contest in September. For once, she does not retreat from competition or soften her ambition to make another person comfortable.

Naming a Future

The confrontation with Rachel clarifies that the desire is larger than winning a chair. Afterward, Lennie runs from the music room into the woods to write a poem to Joe. Alongside her forward movement is the unbearable knowledge that she has a future and Bailey does not. Her musical ambition therefore does not arrive as an uncomplicated escape from loss. It is inseparable from the survivor's guilt that makes imagining a future feel morally fraught.

Later, when Sarah imagines them going to New York City together, Lennie finally says that she would love to go to Juilliard, though any good conservatory would be acceptable. What she wants most is to study music: to discover what life, what living itself, sounds like. Sarah also suggests Berklee in Boston, widening the horizon beyond the single school Lennie had treated as charged with her sister's unrealized dream. Lennie's admission is significant because it makes the aspiration speakable without making it exclusive: she can want music, and she can dream alongside Bailey rather than in Bailey's place.

Music, Grief, and Change

Lennie's renewed ambition does not resolve her grief or diminish her love for Bailey. At the cemetery, she understands that Bailey will die again and again for the rest of her life, and that grief will remain part of her, step for step and breath for breath. The conclusion she reaches is not that living well means leaving Bailey behind; it is that she can love her sister by living with daring, spirit, and joy. That understanding gives her musical future a different meaning from simple recovery. Practice, a challenge for first chair, and the possibility of a conservatory become ways of participating in life while carrying loss.

The arc of Lennie's musical aspirations thus moves from a dream she could not distinguish from Bailey's, through a period of quitting and self-confinement, to a future she can name in her own voice. Her clarinet offers more than a route to recognition: it is a means of turning feeling into sound and of allowing ambition and mourning to coexist. Lennie does not have to become untouched by grief before she can begin again; she can move toward music with Bailey's absence beside her, and with the life still ahead of her.