If I can't hear the music

I had a concert today. It wasn’t anything to write home about, just a basic sonata they give to all the second year students for your first sonata. You don’t have to be particularly talented to play it. I mean, you have to be talented to play piano but it’s no more talent than you exhibited in high school. It’s even earily similar to the piece I played to get into this music school.

I’m a stealth music student in my suit and tie. No one on this train can probably even guess that I’m a budding pianist who has absolutely no aspiration to join a company like my thusly attired fellow riders. No, mine is a greater fate. I’ll become famous, a big success, playing collaborative concerts with people who I really consider my peers. I don’t feel like I’m peers with the people in my music school. I get annoyed; it feels like they’re only in it as a hobby. Many of them have this defeated look in their eyes. Music school is their last chance to enjoy their extracurricular activity before the buckle down, get an 8-12 job at some faceless company. Up on their high office buildings they’ll only head copiers, staplers, and faked aisatsu*. They won’t hear the music.

No, music is not all around you or in you. Banging on a trash can in what kind of sounds like a beat for a song isn’t music. I hate this ubran symphony Stomp crap. It’s noise but it’s not music. At least I think so and I think my peers who don’t know me yet will agree with me. My “friends” call me a snob, asking why I won’t open myself up to new experiences with music. Why should I? Music is something that inspires, that moves me to do something higher. It transports me onto a stage with adoring fans, away from this sardine train. Sardine Train…that sounds like a title my little sister would like. But she’s a high school student and it’s a well known fact that high school girls have no taste in music.

After all, she sings her own songs, making up some poppy ditty about her hair ribbon that she sings in her ear bleeding voice. She asked me to write a song once but that’s not my place. I am not a composer; I am not a conductor; anymore than I am a high school girl. I song I could try and clumsily bang out on the piano, sometimes banging my head on the precious keys in frustration would be no more music than the earlier mentioned office building. If I’m trying to make my own music, I can’t hear what the music is telling me.

And besides, since when is it wrong to be a snob? How is only listeing to the greats of the piano world any different than the woman next to me who insists on wearing one brand from one store. How is demanding that my music actually be music any different than demanding a Coach bag? Double standards make me mad. This train makes me mad because it’s loud. It means I have to turn my headphones up which could damage my hearing. I’d rather be dead than deaf. If I couldn’t hear music, well, let’s just say life would become less than suitable.

Time to focus on the piano. I close my eyes and listen to the music, my hands moving across the keys ina fluid bounce up and down the scales. My concert, only containing a few of my “friends”, my mother, and none of my peers, plays back. I shouldn’t play piano on the train, I shouldn’t push down the invisible pedals but I can hear it. They can’t hear it but to be quite frank, they’re a bigger audience than I just had. Someday when I’m playing sold out venues in Europe they’ll think back on the man playing piano on the train and they’ll wonder why they must pay so much to hear the music I play.

But for now, only I hear the music.

Aisatsu- greetings, pleasantries, VERY important in Japan.

There was a man on the train who was wearing a suit and glasses but carried a beaten brown bag. He reluctantly sat next to me and halfway through the train ride I noticed that he was moving his feet and hands like he was playing piano. I wasn’t on the train long but it looked like he would have given a good concert. He also looked extremely put off by everything (probably being on a train in August and having the only seat be next to someone you don’t want to sit by probably didn’t help. Seriously people, I don’t bite and I shower!!)