First of all, let me get something straight.

     I am by no means a professional classical musician.

     Seriously. All I've done for musician-being in my fourteen years of existence was play piano, pick up double bass in grade 6, play in a (pretty professional, if I do say so myself) youth orchestra, and do competitions from time to time.

     That is all.

     So why am I talking about "my experiences" like I'm a fully-fledged, battle-hardened, seasoned warrior of the stage? Like I have been through countless hardships on my journey to musical understanding and emerged with difficult triumphs weighing heavily on my heart?

     Well no. I'm aware I'm just a child. I've barely scratched the surface of the classical world yet. In fact, I'll probably look back on this when I'm older and cringe at my ignorance. However, this is just for fun, just to reflect on my experiences so far. So screw you, older self, go laugh at something else. 

     With that out of the way, let's start with the very beginning. 

     I first started playing piano at the tender age of four. I hated it. 

     I lived in China till I was 8, and let me tell you the world there is cutthroat. Even before I hit two-digits in age I noticed how hard everyone was fighting to be at the top. Naturally, because I am a sheep, I did the same. So I played techniques and Chopin and Beethoven pieces at some point. 

     Piano was a chore. I was just doing it because my parents said I had to. I was just playing notes. 

     I almost never made it past that stage of music. 

     Even though I practiced 1 - 1 1/2 hour a day even when I was 4 years old, I never learned to love music. I was locked into the "classical music boring" mentality because it really was boring. I vaguely enjoyed listening when my teacher was playing, but that was as far as it went.

     Speaking of my teacher... She was strict. She put great demands on me, and by extension, also my mother. She always put pressure on my mom to watch over my playing like a hawk, dutifully looking over her notes. This made her anxious about the whole thing, therefore more likely to lash out at me when I made a mistake, therefore making me anxious about the whole thing, theremore making me hate music even more. 

     It's a whole vicious cycle going on. And it's not anybody's fault particularly, it was just the way it was. And doing all those techniques did pay off in the end, but I lost so many years of my life thinking music offered little more than tasteless techniques and climbing levels while not knowing what the whole point was. 

     I remember a conversation between my dad and I when I was young. I don't recall how the conversation started, I was probably throwing tantrums over piano, but one thing led to another and he asked me (in Chinese), 

     "Why do you play piano?"

     I thought about it. Then I had the perfect answer:

     "To make my fingers more agile!"

     That was not the right answer for him. He frowned and said, "But you can practice typing to make your fingers more agile. Why do you play music?"

     I didn't know. 

     He then said, "Music is for enjoyment. You play beautiful music to make others and yourself happy."

     I didn't understand. Wasn't music about notes and rhythms and fingers being fast and pressing the right keys? 

     I forgot about the conversation until fairly recently.

     And I didn't see the wisdom in his words until even more recently. 

     Even here in North America, I am still in a very Chinese household, surrounded by Asian peers, absorbing Asian ways. In many ways this is a good thing, such that it inspires me to work hard, but it is bad in just as many ways. Especially in art. 

     Being from this culture meant that not only was music the "obligatory talent" most of us have, not only was competition fierce and parents/teachers demanding, but that corporal punishment was very common. One wrong note, one slap on the hand. I began to associate piano with tears and pain. With tedium and cutthroat rivals. I was never gonna make it to the top anyway. Why bother? Why do I play?

     At that point, the answer was "because everyone else was playing, because everyone else had something they could show off". And I learned to hate being left behind in any way.

     Then we immigrated. And things were the same for a while.

     Until I changed teachers. 

     I had been rapidly climbing in level in China. I took the level 5 exam when I was about 6 or 7, which is actually pretty amazing if I think about it, especially considering that the standards in China were leaps and bounds above those in Canada. I actually cried leaving behind the piano teacher, but I was crying a lot at that time so I don't know if it counts. 

     So I was uprooted and thrust across the Pacific over a painful 13 hour flight, in which my 2 year old (at the time) sister wailed and we all barely slept. We touched down on the eve of June 25th and that was it. New life, same old Chinese principles. Even now, I internalize a lot of my motherland's ideals, but I digress. 

     Musically, I was a trainwreck. I barely even knew what music was. I claimed to know how to play piano, but all I knew was how to press some black and white keys and tweedle out some Chopin noctune or another. 

     My dad was right. I only knew how to type. 

     New land, new teacher. I started taking lessons again, and boy, what a shock it was. 

     "What?? Teachers here don't care about technique???? She doesn't make me play Hanon? She doesn't put a pen above my fingers and make me raise them high enough to hit it? What is this madness?"

     Needless to say, this was unfamiliar territory. This teacher, probably in her 20's, living in a a tidy apartment that looked over my future school (even though I didn't know it at the time), took a 180 and changed the entire meaning of music lessons. 

     Not only did she introduce me to jazz and pop, she also taught me the beginning of voicing! Phrasing!! Rubato!!!! Brand new, unheard of ideas that were absolutely not invented centuries ago!!!!! 

     The only problem was I didn't grasp anything. 

     She taught me a lot of new ideas, musical ideas, which finally got this trainwreck of an unmusical child onto the right track (geddit??) to becoming the person I am today. However, I didn't really learn much from her. 

     Maybe it was because her standards were so lax. She taught me principles but barely assigned any homework. Every day, I'd play the pieces through once for half an hour and when lessons come, she'd still praise me. I hit a plateau in improvement. 

     I got frustrated with the lack of progress. For me, music never became anything more than a chore, even after this revolution of music's definition. I still have yet to understand what those shiny new principles mean when applied to those notes I was so good at plunking out unfeelingly. I was still intaking knowledge and processing it like a robot. 

     Then, less than one year after immigrating, even before I fully learned the English language, I got accepted into an art school. The beautiful structure my piano teacher's windows looked over was to be my home for the next five years, from grade 4 to grade 8. 

     This school changed my life. But it didn't do so immediately. 

      I came closest to abandoning piano, and music altogether, in grade 4 or 5. I had made little to no progress in the last few years. In fact, I actively deteriorated. I could raise my fingers higher when I was younger. Wow. What a tragedy. I care so much about that nowadays. 

     Anyhow, my mother and I were discussing quitting completely. I was done with music, and so was she. I thought it didn't have anything more to offer. I still held the same beliefs that I had in China. I still hated everything about this incomprehensible tangle of notes. My mom was just tired of making me practice every day. She was spending big money on lessons, and here I was making zero progress. We all wanted to quit. 

     But I didn't. Purely because I had been playing for so long. I just didn't want to give up on something that had been with me through all the stuff I've been through. Oddly enough, I managed to convince her to give me one more chance. 

     Then we switched teachers again and that was the start of my recovery. 

     I learned later that this new teacher was absolutely appalled at my playing when we first started. She described it as "riddled with wrong notes" and "lifeless". I thought I was passable at least. Apparently not. 

     Well I stayed with her from grade 5 or so, to a few months ago, when I finally quit after a long, fulfilling journey with her. The reason I quit was because I was just struggling to make time for piano as I was heading into high school. It was a difficult decision, and that alone speaks to my progress. 

     Immediately after we switched to her, she began to take apart all my previous ideas about what music is. She taught me artistic interpretation, tempo flexibility, dynamic fluidity, textures and colors, but most of all, she taught me how to feel the music. How to make music an art form capable of tearing you apart. 

     The changes didn't happen immediately. In fact, I stayed skeptical for a while yet. Fortunately, I had another front supporting my complete reface of ideas. 

     My former school was one of the best public art schools in the city. Publicly funded and completely tuition-free, they accepted 60 students across the city through a 3-stage audition process looked over by specialized teachers in all the art fields, but somehow, assholes still managed to get into it. Anyway. 

     Our music teacher, in particular, was a... bit of a strange creature. She shamelessly played favourites, fawned over particular students and ignored some others, and led almost all the musical activities in the school, all except strings and band which were done by other specialized teachers. She did choir, grades 4 and 5 instrumental music (xylophones mostly, but there were other stuff), and multiple choral clubs. She organized the two big shows our school put on side by side with the artistic director, and she really was one of the most iconic teachers of our school. 

     Because of her, our school collectively placed music as the most emphasized art form of all. You were endlessly admired if you were at a high level, and you'd better be really, really good at another art (usually either dance or visual arts, drama was the neglected child of the four) if you want to even get noticed. She single-handedly shaped the school. 

     I was good at theory and note-naming, so she favored me a little, but she absolutely adored someone else. She gave him all the accompaniment opportunities, always picked him to answer questions, and as a consequence, he became extremely popular despite him being one of the shyest people I know. Being as competitive as I am, I fought to become better than him. 

     (I did not become better than him.)

     So that is how I became interested in getting better at music. 

     But that was not the only way this particular teacher saved my musical career. 

     She made music fun, first and foremost. She made a simple xylophone magical, made our untrained voices harmonize flawlessly. I remember in one of our first choir classes, we sang a simple scale in canon and I was blown away. We sounded like angels, I thought. 

     We played music from all around the world, worked to get traditional African songs right, played Korean drums. Girls and Boys Choir got to perform outside of school. Chorale and Jazz Choir introduced all sorts of music to me. I was overwhelmed with a world I've been grazing the edges of but never quite stepped into. I never knew music could be like this.

     We performed, we rushed around backstage, we memorized music and we got to feel the heat of the spotlight on our skin. We got to wear scratchy performance uniforms, we got to sing with our friends, and we got to breathe in the applause of our audience and know that we've put on an incredible show. 

     I think that's when I started to fall in love with music. 

     However, I still thought classical music was boring. That was unavoidable... until grade 6. I'll talk about grade 6 later. 

     At the same time, my younger sister started playing piano a little bit later than me, at around 5. At that point, we were about a good 3 years into living in North America, and we have yet to move away from some of the harmful values our nationality imposes upon us. 

     She started taking lessons from the same piano teacher I talked about last. Immediately problems began to surface, and I started questioning a lot of the ideals I was brought up with. 

     In fact, I probably have my sister's tumulous musical journey to thank partly for my current views on music. 

     She did not take to piano. My mom frequently compared her to me, put our progresses together under a scrutinizing lens, and I think that made it worse. She threw tantrums almost every single time she sat at the piano, and every session stretched to hours. 

     The problem was, my piano teacher excelled at teaching experienced players like me, who already understood notes and rhythms, but she was less good at teaching beginners. She spent a good 2 lessons on sightreading and clefs and all sorts of lines and notes and rhythms and beats and different tempos and dynamics, before she moved on to pumping out pieces like a conveyor belt. 

     My sister wasn't that kind of a fast learner, where she could intake information and barf all of it out perfectly. However, that was the expectations of a teacher who was used to teaching students that already knew all that stuff. Again, not anyone's fault, just the way it was. 

     Shockingly enough, she stuck with it for like 3 years. 

     It was not an easy 3 years. 

     She cried almost every single time, and I would get frustrated, but I had to suppress my anger because if I got angry then my mom would get angry, then my dad would get angry, then it was disaster. We tried everything to help her, but nothing worked because it wasn't the right thing for her. 

     So I became her surrogate teacher. I taught her rhythm, the confusing new time signature of 3/4, triplets, ledger lines. My job was to keep her from crying. 

     Once again I started to question if music really was a source of happiness. Especially classical music. Choir and xylophone and Korean drumming was a lot of fun, but classical training was grueling and filled with tears. It made nice parents mean. It made fun performances stressful. If music was supposed to make you feel fulfilled, then why was it so hard?

     Why could I not see the beauty in it that everyone else seemed to be able to see?

     Why could that boy I was competing with for the teacher's attention devote his life towards his piano and violin? Why could my piano teacher play with so much passion that I felt that tug in my chest? Why couldn't I do the same? 

     I was lost and confused and angry. I couldn't understand, even after all this time, all this change, all this reform. I would never voluntarily listen to any sort of music. Never look for the beauty in chords and structures. Never put myself forwards to do anything musical that I wasn't required to do. 

     So I was intaking all those musical ideas, those new concepts, and storing them somewhere far, far away. I was waiting for an explosion, something new and something that changed my entire, passive, stagnant, musical view. 

     Well it was grade 6. As part of our art program, we were all assigned an instrument to play as the next level of our instrumental music curriculum. Even though the music teachers ultimately made the choice, we got to try the instruments ourselves and say which ones we want. They would try their best to honor our choice. 

     I tried all of them and I clicked with one immediately. 

     The double bass is an instrument that everyone forgets about. It's taller than I am, never gets any good parts in any setting, a pain to lug around, an awkward big mess, exhausting to play, painful on the weaker fingers, and I fell in love just like that. I am not going to mention how I might have been biased because my mom told me that there is a good bass teacher that could get me into a good orchestra and that it's an instrument with very little competition. Being as purebred of a musician that I am, there was no way I would be influenced by that. Not at all. 

     So I ended up with the double bass after putting it first on my list of preference. And this decision ultimately changed my musical life. 

     I started taking lessons from the teacher my mom had mentioned. Almost immediately, I began to climb. I had absorbed the hardworking, meticulous attitude towards technique I accumulated in China, combined with the brand new musical ideas I learned here. Despite all the hardship, I can say I ultimately got the best of both sides of the spectrum. 

     The teacher noticed that I took to it well and pushed me harder and harder. She was relentless, setting a fast pace through the repertoire, and I ate it up instead of burning out. Unlike piano, there was never a point of plateau in my entire bass career so far. I faced an endless uphill climb through piece after piece, and my love for this clunky instrument only grew. And with it, grew an interest in classical music. 

     You see, if I had taken up a band instrument, I would have played jazz and traditional band music, maybe even rock and developed an interest in those genres instead. However, the double bass is an inherently orchestral instrument. It can be used in jazz and other types of music, but bowed bass is almost entirely classical. And when I first brought the bass home, a new door opened up in my life. 

     Grade 6 also happens to be when COVID hit. 

     Suddenly I was home with nothing to do. At that point, I had been having problems in many of my friendships, so I spent it pretty much alone. What else could I do other than practice?

     So I threw myself into it. I inhaled all those new bowing techniques, left hand positions, ecstatically noting new calluses on my hand. Through this time, my love for piano also grew instead of being overshadowed by bass. I was often frustrated when I wasn't immediately good at playing this stringed instrument (you know, "if I don't succeed at something I've never done before first try, it is failure!"), so playing beautifully advanced pieces on the piano was a moment of respite from being terrible at double bass. 

     Playing double bass was the final link I needed to finally immerse myself into the world I had been in for so long. It unlocked the meaning to all those layers of harmony, especially because this instrument mainly plays harmonic support. As I was learning it, I played a mixture of soloistic pieces and studies aimed towards orchestral excellence. As a result, things finally started to make sense. Now, as I played piano, I began to recognize chords, progressions, and most of all, the emotions tied into every note. I finally began to understand. 

     It only took me 8 years to get what music is all about. That's only over half of my life.

     I auditioned for the biggest, bestest, orchestra in the city before I hit 2 years of experience on the bass with no