the enchanter

Epiphany...

I just had a great lesson.
One thing I've come to reailze is that, even when I can't/don't practice much, if I am really immersed in something with total devotion and seriousness, it somehow enriches my music in an inexplicable way. When I am just not practicing without real reasons other than feeling depressed (I am so easily depressed/discouraged/disgusted by my own sound, more than anything in the world) and just let time slip by, I completely lose touch with cello (of course then follows a period when I finally realize I can't just not do it so I pat myself in the back to make myself feel like practicing SOME and kind of push my way through.. this is the traditional way of forcing yourself until you gain momentum. This used to work, especially when I was young, and if I am not distracted by other things i.e. separated from the noisy stressful world, without school, surrounded by other hard working individuals, at a camp or something, but it does not work so well as you become older, because your head's too big and you start doubting yourself and asking questions too much for you to just plough through the ordeal.).
I've been feeling - ever since March break - that my music has lost the very present emotional intensity, missing a certain "edge" to the music as I was becoming more or less happy and complacent. March break was a very special time of healing and repentence for me, and because I had suffered much and was now becoming "reborn" in a way, and my music grew one deep layer richer.. But it kind of stopped as I became happier and every day became the same old pretty good okay day like the last one. And you just can't play music like Elgar concerto, Bach Suites, and Ligeti Sonata and Schuman without emotional depth gained through real personal sufferings and the human understanding and humulity that follow from them. I guess as an artist you really must experience a range of emotions with the utmost sensitivity to transform your craft into a form of truely communicative expression. Recently again, I have been through different kinds of emotional and evocative experiences, and really difficult hurting last few days, having to work extremely hard;but I feel that living in a kind of extreme way, all of these doubts and sufferings have come together and have become something tangible that is expressed through my music. Today when I played with my pianist in a rehearsal just before my lesson, I felt a surge of peaceful happiness and gratefulness and tears of thanks; while I was playing in my lesson, I almost cried, feeling a sense of humble honesty and ingenuity flowing through my sound, my body, and my whole being, and just baring my soul to my teacher as its humble self like a painting of an unadorned, humble nude body.

It is the most humbling and grateful joy to realize that my music indeed speaks my life... it gives my life a true meaning. One's life is really so meaningless and trivial by itself. I am so happy and grateful to be a musician. Now the title of "musician" does not feel like some kind of label attached to me, it just seems to speak who I am.

And the question of happiness and what makes me truly happy... I think I know better now to a degree. In any case.. music is wonderful.