What I remember the most from my early childhood is my dad’s Sony DVD player. He bought it in 1997 when he married my mom, right before the China-Japan Relations worsened and Sony got rare in the market. It cost my dad three months’ worth of salary, but the money was well spent because the DVD player became the primary form of entertainment in my family for the next ten years. My dad often used it to play me various discs during my early education. One of the discs contained several famous classical music pieces, such as Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ and Mozart’s ‘Serenade’. I did not know these pieces were composed hundreds of years ago from nations far away. My parents also never told me anything about these pieces since they did not know anything about music. They bought the disc only because ‘Best classical music pieces that all kids should hear’ was written on the cover. Thus, compared to just listening to the music from somewhere on a CD, I preferred watching ‘Finding Nemo’ or ‘Garfield’ much better. This was my first memory of classical music. I was not very impressed by it, but a seed was planted.
The journey that led me to classical music wound gradually after that. When the Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music and became an international superstar, he launched a ‘piano rush’ in China. Millions of parents made their kids learn piano, dreaming of replicating the miracle Lang Lang had created. I was one of the kids, but unfortunately, I was no Lang Lang. Nominally I practiced for one hour every day. But actually, the first half hour was always spent running from my mom and finally being held on the piano stool. The second half hour was always spent crying and struggling. I still remember in 2009, before my family moved to Beijing, my mom asked my piano teacher, “It will be very expensive to learn piano in Beijing. Does my son have the talent? Should I let him continue?”. My teacher answered very directly with no pause, “No, you don’t need to make him keep playing”. Although today I feel quite shameful about this, I have to admit that I was happy that my teacher answered this way.
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Two years of piano learning was a failure, but I did learn something. It granted me an understanding of the fundamentals of music as well as basic skills of sight singing and ear training, which made me become a member of the choir in elementary school. In the choir, for the first time, I made music with others. As a tenor, I did not have the melody. My part always sounded boring when sung alone, but once all of us came together, there was harmony. It felt like magic to me. The feeling is completely different from playing chords on the piano. Behind the harmony in a choir, there is trust in other members: you follow your part strictly, and you know your peers will do the same.
During the few years in the choirs, the most impressive performance for me was at the seventieth anniversary of my elementary school. We performed a reduction of Beethoven’s ‘Symphony No.9’ with the school’s wind band and a few teachers as soloists. We did not speak German, so we wrote small Chinese characters under the text to indicate the pronunciation. Although our chorus director told us the lyrics were about the universal brotherhood of all human beings, I was too young to understand the meaning behind those big words. But the music itself impressed me a tremendously. At first, only bassoons were playing the simple Ode to Joy theme, naked and dull. Then clarinets took over. With the countermelody now played by the bassoons, the boring tune suddenly sounded warm, just like a ray of light shining through the clouds and brightening the earth. With increasing instruments entering the music, the texture got denser, and a joyful emotion brewed. The absolute climax came when an interplay between horns and woodwinds brought the music back to D major; all of us burst out singing “Freude, schöner Götterfunken!” (“Joy, beautiful spark of divinity!”). All accumulated energy released instantly. In the first rehearsal after the band smashed the very last chord, my eyes were moist. Still immersed in the music, we did not cheer or clap. The band director tapped on the music stand, said, “You know what? The composer was deaf when he wrote this”. And there was only silence.
Therefore, Beethoven’s ninth symphony came into my playlist. Soon ‘Eroica’ and ‘Symphony No.5’. Then came Chopin’s ballades and Brahms’ piano quartets. I could no longer sing in the choir when my voice changed, so listening to classical music while reading the scores became a substitute. In the world of music, I could forget all the loss and emptiness from the exterior, so I felt safe and protected. At the same time, rational compositional techniques give classical music infinite emotional richness. Modulation, the change of key, counterpoint, the elaborate interaction between voices, and many other musical crafts gave me so much space to explore. Music became my safe harbor, where I could immerse myself.
Music not only fertilized me internally but also connect me with others. One day I was listening to Prokofiev’s sonata for piano and flute. The magnificent instrumental writing fascinated me, and I realized that it would be so much fun to play this piece myself. So, I decided to dedicate my energy to either the flute or the piano. Perhaps because my childhood was shadowed by black and white keys, I chose the flute. Hence, I formed a chamber music society in my high school from amateurs who played just for fun. This chamber music society offered me a new musical experience very different from singing in a choir. In a choir, we had a conductor whose primary job was to bring everybody together, so we singers coordinated with each other simply by following the conductor. However, when it came to chamber music, there was no longer a conductor, so we, as soloist, needed to feel each other’s articulations directly. Also, chamber music required each of us to bring our own interpretation, unlike in a choir or orchestra. Above all, chamber music was more of a primitive way of how people cooperated before the thing called a ‘leader’ was invented. I enjoyed it: in chamber music, individuals are emphasized, so we cared more about other players as well as ourselves.
Besides playing existing music, sometimes we also played our own pieces. At first, we rearranged some chamber or orchestral pieces to the instrumentation we had, although most of the arrangement was found too hard for us amateurs to play. Then we also wrote pieces on our own. I composed a trio for the piano, violin, and flute. When played, the awkward sound of this poor piece embarrassed me a lot, so we ended up laughing uncontrollably. But that was pure happiness for me. After all, one of the greatest joys is hearing the music you wrote played by the people you love.
Works Cited
- Knausgaard, Karl Ove. “Letter of Recommendation: Gum”. The New York Times, 10 Aug. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-gum.html
- Lippman, Laura. “Letter of Recommendation: Double Boilers”. The New York Times, 30 July 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/magazine/double-boilers.html
- Tingley, Kim. “Letter of Recommendation: Zip Ties”. The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-zip-ties.html
- Zhang, Jenny. “Letter of Recommendation: Karaoke at Home”. The New York Times, 7 July 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-karaoke-at-home.html
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