Sailing into another World

As a little girl, I loved watching my mom run her long slender fingers swiftly across the keys on our upright piano. Growing up, listening to piano playing deeply impacted my life. My mom would practice in her free time in order to relax and entertain the family. Little as I was, having free time sometimes meant climbing onto the seemingly large mahogany piano bench and carefully pressing different keys with my tiny fingers and listening for the various tones and tempos. In the car and on the radio, I often listened to many famous pianists playing beautiful work by Beethoven and Mozart. At age five, I began taking piano lessons; playing the simplest pieces even seemed to be a huge accomplishment. The more I played; the more I began to realize that practicing the piano allowed me to do something no other activities did. When I played the piano, I could fall into the crevices of deep sound and forget my surroundings.

This soon led me to believe that music allows one to sail beyond our universe, into a different world, a world filled with imaginations, beautiful sceneries, and life stories.

Being in eighth grade now, I have many activities and classes I take. From school projects to tennis to Chinese School, finding time to relax on a school day is often an impossibility. Though practicing the piano daily sometimes feels like a drag, my day feels incomplete without the sweet sound of the melody flowing beneath my fingers. On days I am highly stressed, playing the piano and hearing the beats and rhythms allows me to express my feelings. Listening to the romantic harmonies of my Chopin Nocturne, I picture a solo singer singing the notes in high pitches in a silent ballroom. I can easily leave the busy schedule I am in, and travel to a different place, a place where it is quiet and peaceful and the soothing voices are the only things I can hear.

Though I listen to so many different types of music—Pop, R&B and hip-hop, I feel that classical music can let me roam freely in imagination—no one’s telling me the lyrics of the notes, or the loudness of the keys. It’s all up to me, making the dynamics and the lyrical connections of the notes, so one can flow into one’s music, and let others enjoy.

After hard days, an hour of peaceful and graceful sounds calms me down. Music is the only open door for me to enter, where I can forget about waking up at 7:00 AM the next morning, and about the Language Arts essay due the next day. I enter a different universe, filled with dreams and fantasies. This, I believe.