It’s Christmas time, the bells are ringing, and a jolly, rich voice booms across the square. But the sound is muted — you’re studying for exams and the only things you can hear are math equations and “Epic Celtic Music for Concentration.” Meanwhile, in the living room, your mom is watching a tragic Chinese drama, your sister is playing Candy Crush, and your dad is humming to the sound of the dishwasher.
Everyone is in their own world, oblivious, lost, alive. Because — listen. It’s everywhere. That hight strum of life vibrating in the air, tingling, magical — music. We breathe it in; the notes surround us, shape us from birth, connect us as the one solvent across time, space, and culture. It is the heartbeat behind flashing lights and moving bodies, the color of a story. It is focus, sweat, tears.
Music is the voice of collective humanity and sensuality. And for me, music is my wings, my weights, and my history.
Our relationship started when I was five. Completely fresh to the world of instrumental music, I stumbled into my first piano lesson, thinking of how miraculous it was that I could reproduce Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Yes, I thought it was one of the easiest form of pleasure, because all you had to do was push a key or two and voila — beauty. But that misconception ended a week after it started. What ensued for the next five years was torment, harsh criticism, tired hands, and awful clanging.
“Absolutely horrendous; this is not music!” My Asian teacher would declare and proceed to threaten to kick me out of his house if I didn’t practice more. In fact, it wasn’t until middle school, eight or nine competitions later, seven or eight years after I began, that my piano teacher finally began to praise me (and even then, quite minimally). Now this might sound horrendous, and in part, it was. But my piano teacher was a brilliant musician whose students were held to a professional standard. And indeed, his militant training produced results, even for me, whom he had deemed as quite a failure the first few years of my education. And with one instrument just barely able to sing under my hands, I adopted another, my lifelong dream — the flute.
Now the flute was an entirely different world for several reasons. First, I had chosen the flute with 100 percent conviction, unlike the piano, which was a rash (though later fortunate) decision based on a whim of an illogical child. Second, my teachers were kind and fostered a learning environment almost completely pressure-free. Third, I was good at the flute. And fourth and finally, learning the flute meant I had to join band. The first reason above all, drove my development. But the last reason above all, hindered it.
And I’m not going to lie. Trying to commit to and love something you innately disliked (not necessarily disapproved of) was a nightmare. Music, which had once been a part of my identity, soon became something I had to prove myself with (seeing as I was terrible at marching and unreceptive to the whole band hype). And I don’t exaggerate when I say that some of my best and worst memories are associated with music, with competitions, with sun, and with everything else I swallowed, saying: “I love this. I have to do this. If I don’t succeed…” With everything else I didn’t have an option to not succeed at, to not enjoy, because there were conditions attached.
In retrospect however, I think the real reason music grew to be a burden was because it was one of the only things I’d ever been held responsible for as if my life depended on it, and not by my own volition. There was no dabbling for enjoyment — there was a mission, a culture of absolute expectation, a gap between brilliance and dismal failure. I had no choice to test it out, to simply enjoy traveling dimensions with sound, to say: “This is a hobby.” Because everyone around me said: “This is basically your life.”
And now after thirteen years of dedicating myself to music, I’ve realized the funny fact: my greatest subject of expertise is also the one subject I never considered going into. Because, every time I enter UT’s Butler School of Music, every time I see a football field, every time I catch a whiff of sunscreen, every time I step into a concert hall, I’m seized with an uncontrollable urge to vomit. Not out of hate — I admire great musicians and great music. But because everything wretched attached to music in the depths of my mind bubbles to the surface and weighs down the pure bliss I remember from producing golden tones in the late strokes of midnight.
And now when I see a piano or a band, my first reaction is to turn away, but when you hear the faint trill of bells in the back of your head, and your hand glides across black and white, something that smells like adventure permeates the mind, and for an instance, you could fly.
