music makes me feel alive

It's been about two years since I played in my last orchestra concert, and I relived the experience yesterday (Saturday), when I went to my brother's orchestra concert.

It wasn't that they played any of the same pieces or that the stage was the same or even that the age group was the same, but for the first time since graduating high school, I genuinely missed playing with ASYO (Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra). I hadn't really before because it has persistently been a bittersweet memory from high school, a time that I can easily recall when I have to think of instances when politics overshadowed beauty, and acknowledgement and relationships were built on a rather hierarchical system (that is, people who sat in the front hardly ever knew the names or the faces of those who sat in the back).

But as I watched my brother arrange his music on the stand and chat amiably with the people around him, as the lights started to dim and the room grew silent, and as the concertmaster came out and signaled for tuning to begin, I felt the same mix of emotions I did 27 times before - the mix of excitement and preparedness and a hint of nerves - and old routines just lit up inside my mind - tapping my feet on stage as a form of applause for the conductor or soloist, flipping pages frantically, crashing through crazy 16th notes (faking through most of them my first year in), breathing in sharply and cueing with nods and soaring on melodic phrases...but what I remembered most and missed the most was the feeling of being so small and so big all at once - hearing the brass blare out notes and the timpani rumble the floor as the strings (of which I was a part) scrubbed away at ridiculous runs and emerged victoriously with a triumphant chord.

That is, it's not just being part of a large group of musicians, but more being part of a work of art. Something that has lasted through centuries, tested in front of audiences all around the world - something that makes you feel so alive when you're playing the piece. The adrenaline that rushes through you when you hear colors (kind of how Ratatouille tastes colors? LOL) and see sounds and feel in your gut this overwhelming feeling of satisfaction - that as some of your audience members might feel like it's dragging on for them, the little black notes are just flying past your eyes and fingertips as you jump from letter B to letter X and shift from a sweet andante in the second movement to a heart-pounding allegro vivace...

So, maybe you skipped all of what I just wrote in the paragraphs above (especially if you don't care for classical music), but the bottom line is: playing crazy masterpieces in a (good) large symphonic orchestra is, for me, one thing that makes me feel intensely alive.

The one piece I remember distinctly feeling a crazy turmoil of overwhelming emotions (in an awesome way, not a self-destructive way lol) is "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Mussorgsky/Ravel - the last "movement" (are they called movements?) was just so mindblowingly crazy, filled with nostalgia and hope for the future (as many of the seniors I was close with were graduating after this concert) and an intensity that I think I will remember forever, as cheesy as that sounds. Apart from Dvorak's Symphony VIII (which also will always hold a special place in my heart), this piece is one of the few over the years that really rocked my world.

You can say so many things with music, that I'm actually doing an injustice to the piece and to the overall entity we call "music" to try to wrap it all up in a blogpost.

Of course, a lot of the "normal" music we listen to does have words in the songs, but with those, when you find just the right songs, they can make you feel like they say so much more within their AABB rhyming patterns and overused chord progressions.

And I did find quite a few songs (or at least revisited them, not discovered them for the first time haha) in the past two days that have made me feel so connected with the music and understand where the singer is coming from - it's been rather intoxicating. The same songs I heard a few months, a few years before, all of a sudden make so much more sense in light of the experiences and lessons I've amassed in whatever time since I last heard those songs...and when songs make sense to you, or evoke certain emotions and thoughts in you, it's pretty crazy how alive you feel...to know that someone else feels or felt the same exact way that you feel or have felt before. As they used to say: a psychedelic connection.

And then, let's not even get into praise/worship songs, because to fully explain why those are such an integral part of my (and many others') experience in church and walk with God...that would take way too long. And I'm not even sure what words I would use.

So yeah. That was a very sporadic, all-over-the-place rant on how much music makes me feel like I'm living a meaningful and colorful life, especially when I'm caught at the right time by the right music. I know a certain blogger also always talks about how much he loves music and its influence on his thoughts, attitudes, emotions... (cough) but yeah, I totally agree. Music means so much to me, and it's funny to find that I had loosened my hold on it for quite some time now. It almost makes me want to practice violin tomorrow. (Key word: "almost").