My Musical Journey

 

Today's post is a bit autobiographical and has no point, which may make it rambly at times so proceed accordingly. I am curious to know if anyone can empathize with the relationship I've had with music over the seasons of my life, so I am documenting that this morning.

Like good Asian parents of their era, my mom and dad got me into piano lessons, from probably age 6 to when my school and extra-curricular activities started to take up too much of my time in my teen years. For me, that meant a pretty big dose of the classics - Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and so on - which was supplemented by the occasional concert my parents would take my sister and me to, not the professionals but rather California Youth Symphony, which funny enough a few of my friends performed in, so it was fun to see them on stage even if I thought at the time that sitting through a classical concert was a boring way to spend a weekend afternoon.

My deepest engagement with popular music was, which I suspect is common among my peers, junior high and high school. In that short span from grades 6 to 12, I went from not being able to name a single Top 40 artist to religiously listening to the latest hits on the radio. Of course, streaming wasn't available in the 1980s, and my parents were stereotypically thrifty, so fandom for me only peripherally extended to buying albums, attending concerts, and rocking merch. 

I find it interesting that my intersection with popular music took three somewhat distinct forms. One was your typical pop hits since those songs and images (and, a nascent platform, videos too!) were ubiquitous. One was what we called "modern rock" at the time, which was the Depeche Modes and the New Orders and the Erasures of the world, particularly popular among the various Asian crowds I ran in at school and in the Taiwanese youth group I was a part of. And one was various forms of hip-hop, from the poppy stuff like Fresh Prince to the crass stuff like 2 Live Crew to the enlightened stuff like Public Enemy. 

And then, just as quickly as music became a big deal in my life, it just as abruptly shrunk down to almost nothing in my college years. I went to an Ivy League school and was very active in my Christian fellowship, so there wasn't much time to just vibe out on tunes, although in my later years in on-campus ministry I tried to keep up with the latest as a point of connection to the younger men I was spending time with at the time. 

Similarly, in my years right after college, I got involved in my church's teen youth group, which was all urban and predominantly Black, so once again I kept tabs for relationship purposes rather than to indulge my own musical tastes. And then, after I became a dad, I made a half-hearted effort amid my work-life juggling to follow the music my older kids were into, namely alt-rock (Aaron) and k-pop (Jada). 

But, to bring things to the present, that's going on 30+ years of music not being something important to me that I spent time on for my own enjoyment, and only peripherally tried to be a bystander of in service of connection to people who have been important to me over the years. The childhood version of me might be horrified to learn I grow up and am not utterly obsessed with music of any kind. And, many of my peers are surprised to hear music is just not that important in my life.

But I guess that's not totally true. I've gotten back into classical music, nothing too serious, just enjoying the serenity of the really good stuff as background at work or while driving to the golf course. I will increasingly put Christian worship songs on first thing in the morning or late at night, to recenter myself at the beginning or end of a particularly crazy day. And, I forgot to mention that when I was in college, I had one brief, one year stint in a Christian acapella group, and I guess that lodged in me an appreciation for that art form, since I enjoy searching YouTube for covers of religious and secular tunes in that style.

So that's my musical journey. What's yours?