I sit there on the uncomfortable bench, staring at the black and white keys for so long that my eyes start to dry out and the keys turn into a blur in front of me. Had it not been for the chiming of the clock behind me, I would’ve never realized how long I had been sitting in front of my grand piano. Glancing up at the clock, I see that it’s already nine o’ clock, and I should really start this tormenting procedure before it’s too late to take my shower and collapse onto my oh-so-comfortable bed. Flipping open my book to the right page, I begin to think about what brought me to this terrible practice. Starting from my very first day of piano, when I was six, my feet dangling off the sides of the bench, barely touching the floor, to me sitting here right now, as a freshman in high school, where I feel my hands are too big for the keyboard, I had ‘pursued’, as my mother likes to call it, my musical career.

It’s not that I don’t like music; I ironically love it. I’m the kind of the girl that you will find wandering around campus with ear-buds plugged in, turned up to the highest level, and not a care in the world. It’s the classical music that gets to me. It’s so slow, so interminable. Plus, if all you had to do was to push a key to get the right note, what was the point anyways?

“Your music is so dead,” my piano teacher said one day, as I was trying to grasp the ‘essence of the piece’, as she called it. She shook her head. “All the notes are right, but there is no depth, no feeling. The music is not alive, but rather, dead.”

I had shrugged. The keys that my fingers hit are simply muscle memory anyways. I hit the key that the music wanted, and it came ranging out. What more was there to ask for?

According to my mother, a lot could be asked for. She had always had the hope that I would turn out to be a musical prodigy, the reincarnated Mozart. She was quite disappointed when I sat at the piano at the age of six and simply played the nonsense that a six-year-old could accomplish at that age.
With the book at the right page, I slump there, staring down my enemy from across the black and white river. Key after key, note after note, the song is slowly pieced together. It combines in order to produce a melody, just bit by bit. And in the end, it produces a nice result. I suppose that music is like life, isn’t it? It’s made up of little things, little memories. Life, like a draft of a musical score, consists of mess-ups and scratch outs, the right notes, the wrong notes, the ups and the downs. The notes flow together seamlessly; they connect the piece together to it create a beautiful masterpiece, full of harmonies and melodies that blend together to give the piece its richness. The music allows the player of the piece to encompass the feelings expressed in the song. Just like life, every player interprets the music differently, allowing everyone to put their own flair on the piece. It is never played the same by two people; while the notes remain the same, it is the overall feeling and expressions that make each time the music is played individual, just like the person playing the piece.

Hm. Maybe this classical music isn’t so bad after all.