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I.

Openings

 

It took me a long time to realize that this first essay is, at least partly, about grief.

 

At first I wanted to describe the installation and performance called Openings that I organized with the interdisciplinary feminist improv collective fff in my second year at Stanford: Tiffany Lin in her cowboy hat typing questions from our audience ballot-box on her projected typewriter, Simona Fitcal with her video-box turning my violin into a gritty rainbow. The fff collective had been a brainchild of a few friends, including Michele Cheng and Julie Zhu; a collective space where women artists could come together and create and support one another. It was exhilarating, an utterly new experience for me: rehearsals that centered snacks, conversation, and mutual care, and then somehow solidified into something amazing by the time of the performance. I wanted to share this liberating experience of feminist collectivity.

 

 

 

 

But then I sifted through my notes and the hundreds of emails I’d sent about this and found a version of myself that pulled me back into a feeling of smallness.

 

I’d originally had the idea for the concert because I wanted a way to connect the worlds in which I felt most alive, and that felt stranded apart from one another in the architecture at Stanford.

 

There was the part of me that hauled my paper-covered lamp into the basement of Braun Music Center (the hub of traditional performance and non-tech-oriented music classrooms), where I practiced Kurtag and Bach inside the cork-boarded practice rooms that smelled like the Round Building at Indiana University. And then there was the part of me that made bathroom-moth-installations in CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where my violin felt like an oddity among screens and modular synthesizers. And then of course there was the part of me that I was there for, the student of musicology, the one who pushed late into night asking questions about the why and the how and the what-then of the feelings I got when I listened and moved. I was having a hard time connecting with this part of myself in my musicology readings, but in my collaboration with fff I saw an opening. 

 

I had recently started playing some pieces that used specific string tunings to bring out different resonances on the violin, a practice known in English by the Italian name scordatura. The practice is as old as the instrument, though it has become much less frequent since the end of the nineteenth century, when the mythology of Western classical music solidified into the forms typically taught in present-day conservatories.[1] The word scordatura has been used in English since the late 19th century[2]: the “s” is a negation of its body, cordare, which means to tune. Untuned; discordant.

 

[flower for Tiny Studio Salon folks]

Over bubble tea in the busy parking lot of Town and Country Village, I pitched a performance to my new friends in the fff collective: an event called “Openings” that would bring together folks from CCRMA and Braun through the shared opening of experimental tunings. I’d ask Christopher Costanza of the St. Lawrence String Quartet if he wanted to play some Bach with the original scordatura tunings, and see if Christopher Jette, who had shared a mesmerizing electronic piece using a vibrating magnet (an “e-bow”) and a monochord at my most recent Tiny Studio Salon, might want to share that too. Maybe this could be a catalyst for another fff group performance, an improvisation or installation or . . . ?

 

As I described my idea I felt something shutting down in some of my new friends, and I became aware in the context of these new friends of the oddness and specificity of my background as a violinist trained in Western Classical music. As much as I wanted to focus on the wonder and the potential of these niche connections between Baroque tunings and experimental music, the sheer weight of cultural associations wrapped up in my instrument and standing out against the background of bubble tea and Palo Alto parking lot outweighed this wonder. It was like wearing a chicken suit while yelling Shakespearian sonnets and expecting bystanders to be moved by Shakespeare’s slant-rhymes.

 

So I pivoted, making a Google doc for sharing the questions that were on each of our minds, the things that were motivating us in our creative explorations. The event that grew out of the continuing conversation was beautiful, a turning point for me. But there’s a small part of it that still feels balled up, that I think I still need to unspool here.

 

I hold the tangled ball and feel for loose ends:

 

Here: frayed and red-orange. I tug and it goes taut: a feeling of shame. This is me hearing myself, the twist of my body in motion, reflected back as something foreign and hurtful. I cover my shame with the warmth of generous words: Openings, Living Space. The words aren’t quite enough to name what I feel, and I feel my body shrink and disappear in their softness.

 

I turn the ball over and over.

 

Here: tucked carefully in, an end of iridescent purple. I pull. Mother tongue.

 

A conversation with my friend Jonathan Leal, prompted by the complexities of our struggle to find a common collaborative musical language, leads me to a video of M. NourbeSe Philip’s reading of her poem, “Discourse on the Logic of Language.”

 

[. . .]

English

is my mother tongue.

A mother tongue is not

not a foreign lan lan lang

language

l/anguish

     anguish

  -a foreign anguish.

[. . .]

 

Her steady stuttering holds care, holds violence.

 

I put this poem beside a passage I read in Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, a beautiful in-between text of memoir, history, and critical theory:

 

When I hear the phrase ‘Asians are next in line to be white,’ I replace the word ‘white’ with ‘disappear.’ Asians are the next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. (35)

 

. .  .

 

 

My mother was my first teacher, my first violin teacher. When I was three, she began teaching me, using puppets to tell me all the things that I would not have listened to from my mom. She used a modified version of the Suzuki method, a way of approaching violin teaching that rested on the belief that any child could develop musical talent the way they learned their mother tongue. To Shinichi Suzuki, the method’s originator, this involved exposure to the sounds from an early age (infancy at best), modeling by the parent (in Suzuki’s writings, almost always the mother), patient repetitions, and a focus on the development of embodied memory rather than text-based learning. [3] Suzuki’s phrase only practice on the days you eat sat side by side on my mental family altar with do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

 

Suzuki’s father was a part of the wave of westernization that took hold in Japan at the turn of the 19th century; he turned the family side-hustle of building shamisen (three-stringed plucked instruments) into a business manufacturing violins. As a teenager, Suzuki became enamored of the sound of the violin from a recording of violinist Mischa Elman that he heard on the family’s new hand-cranked gramophone, and ended up studying in Germany for eight years between the wars. [4]

 

My mom gave me a copy of Nurtured by Love, Suzuki’s autobiographical manifesto on his pedagogy, years ago, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I only just now read it. Parts of it make me cringe (he talks with wonder about a story of two girls allegedly raised by wolves in India, citing their hairy bodies as evidence for his absolute belief in the power of nurture over nature), but I’m surprised by how I’m gripped by it, how interested I am. (Sorry, Mom, you were right.) Intertwined with the assumptions that I buckle against are things that connect in unexpected ways with other spaces that have been guiding me. Suzuki advocates for love-based cultivation as the basis of education, rather than authoritarian information transfer, making me think of Black Feminist bell hooks’s writings on education as a practice of liberation. [80%] He talks about developing the habit of acting, rather than just thinking, which reminds me of artist/ethnomusicologist Tomie Hahn’s writing on traditional Japanese philosophies of the unity of mind/heart/body:

As is generally known, philosophically, theory and practice are not separated in Japan—the mind and body are not considered to be separate entities but are instead regarded as interdependent.[5]

Tomie Hahn's words connect seamlessly with what I've learned from bell hooks and Brazilian educational activist Paulo Freire, which in turn link with the words of Buddhist teacher-practitioners Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh-- here is bell hooks drawing them all together in a way that connects with Suzuki's protest against disembodied information-based teaching (what bell hooks calls the "banking system" of education here):

Paulo Freire and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh are two of the 'teachers' who have touched me deeply with their work. When I first began college, Freire's thought gave me the support I needed to challenge the 'banking system' of education, that approach to learning that is rooted in the notion that all students need to do is consume information fed to them by a professor and be able to memorize and store it. Early on, it was Freire's insistence that education could be the practice of freedom that encouraged me to create strategies for what he called 'conscientization' in the classroom. [. . .] [Thich Nhat Hanh's] philosophy was similar to Freire's emphasis on 'praxis'-- action and reflection upon the world in order to change it. [6]

bell hooks goes on to highlight Thich Nhat Hanh's emphasis on "wholeness," which she defines as "a union of mind, body, and spirit." Crucially, this wholeness is framed as the bridge to participation in a fully interdependent world, not an insular idea of self-sufficiency. I'm drawn to a beautiful conversation between Meredith Monk and Björk, [7] two other people whom I claim as deeply influential teachers (though I've never met or worked with Björk). In it, interviewer Susan Cahill asks about physicality as a possible link between their two practices. Meredith Monk describes how her singing practice "came from the center of the body out," out of dance and movement, and Björk used a word "holistic" that I had avoided before hearing her say it, because it carried too many vaguely new-age connotations. But when she used the word, it felt fresh and earnest, a way of connecting her embodied practice with the Icelandic ecosystems and communities that had shaped her. I recall talking with a friend after listening to this conversation, full of bubbles from Björk's words, and telling him that I thought maybe my dissertation was about finding "wholeness," about bringing together all the fractured parts of myself. Something in the cautious tone of his reply made me halt again: I heard the word "wholeness" reflected back as something tinged with neoliberalism, with the illusion of self-sufficiency. He spoke about the importance of communities and interdependence, and in the moment I wasn't able to understand that we were talking about the same thing; I felt that my word "wholeness" needed to be abandoned. But with Björk, with Meredith Monk, with bell hooks, with Paulo Freire and Thich Nhat Hanh and even, now, with Shinichi Suzuki, this word thaws inside me again and opens up possibilities for a deep and interconnected healing. An invitational, rather than exclusionary, wholeness.

Throughout Nurtured By Love, I hear Suzuki's insistence on care, which he elides with mothering in a way that feels inseparable from the Japanese patriarchal structures in which he was raised. I search through the text for any mention of his mother, but I don’t find any, despite plenty of descriptions of his father and his father’s violin factory. I find her name finally in an article by a former student of Suzuki’s named Kerstin Wartberg: Ryo Fujie.[8] The article shares a photo of Suzuki’s parents side by side. The stiff tilt of his mother’s head in the formal portrait reminds me of the photos I’ve seen of my great grandmother; her eyes avoid the camera and her face fades into darkness. I can’t tell if the hint of bend in her mouth is humor or disapproval.

 

. . .

 

My mother started playing the viola in public school. She was raised by her two Japanese Canadian parents, who were both survivors of the forced removal and incarceration of Canadian citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Because of their experiences, they raised her to speak English rather than Japanese. Music, as it was taught in her Canadian school system, was my mother’s second language, one she chose and dedicated her life to sharing with countless young students, including myself.

 

One of the most difficult things of my recent journey has been trying to articulate to my mother, to both my parents, why I’ve (mostly) not been excited about playing my violin since coming to Stanford. I think part of why this is difficult to articulate is because I haven’t really articulated what I left behind in doing so; the ways I’ve been diminishing or ignoring the parts of myself being left behind.

 

Writing the word “grief” here feels self-indulgent, even hurtful, in the context of a genocide being enacted against Palestinians by generational survivors of the Holocaust, funded in part by the money that I’ve received from this institution and paid in taxes to the U.S. government. I hold that sense of censure in a palm steadied by Pema Chodron and Yumi Sakugawa, turn it around, breathe into it. Can I turn from a sense of scarcity here, to one of abundance? Abundance of grief. I think of the mother cardinal. What I want to say is that the magnitude of my grief for this small bird was right, and that from this place is an opening to something unfathomably vast. Something that can’t be held alone.

 

Can my grief for my musical identity, my mother-tongue— a grief that I can’t untangle from the chronic migraines, nausea, and depression that I experienced after coming to Stanford—  be an opening?

 

[flower for Liangyeh]

I’m at Stanford; it’s May 2023, week five of the ten-week quarter. I’ve just gotten off a Zoom call with the two remaining students in the class I’ve been teaching, Liberatory Practice Lab. One is auditing, and the other just told me that they are burned out and as much as they wish they could continue they need to drop the class. I have COVID, and the desk of my friend’s studio that I’ve been subletting is covered with Kleenex and extra copies of the sunflower-colored zine that I made as the syllabus for this class.

 

I call up Liangyeh Tai, a dear friend, musician, and somatic educator whom I’d invited to give a guest workshop to my class the following week. I skate quickly through saying that my class has dissolved, and begin to apologize for not being able to host her after all since, well, there’s no class anymore, but she hears something in my voice and stops me, makes space for the tears to come. “Beautiful,” she says as I cry. “Beautiful.”

 

. . .

 

This is a flower for my grandmother.

 

Grandma, I miss you.

 

When I was young I used to call you Northern Penguin, and sign my cards Southern Duckling. This was partly because I was silly and you were too and I enjoyed making you laugh, and partly because it was a way of deflecting from a hardness inside you that I didn’t understand, something that got denser and more explosive as you got older.

 

Sometimes Mom or I could get you to talk about playing field hockey as a teenager, about how much you hated cooking.

 

I think of the Japanese word “ganbatte.” Carry on, persist, you’ve got this; with an undertone of don’t complain. You were good at this, but also you were good at complaining. Usually it was disguised, slant, cushioned in something innocuous, something that the person it was actually directed at might miss but my mom and I could always read. We had practice with each other.

 

In your nineties, you seemed to have nightmares more frequently. You shouted things in Japanese. Your voice was harsh, rough, frightening.

 

When I visited my parents recently, my mom showed me your sewing book, the one you submitted to your program for Western sewing [name?]. The stitching took my breath away. Each intricate fold, the perfect pockets—if each stitch was a word, what I read was an ocean.

 

Repetitions. Patience. Perfection. I think of your daughter, my mother, patiently practicing with me every day for a year until I was able to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with no mistakes.

 

I think of a peony, the dense fist of its bud, its abundant curling petals.

 

 

This is a flower for my father. [Dad: let me know if any of this makes you uncomfortable or doesn't feel accurate! ❤️]

 

Dad, when Brixi had to be put down and you Skyped with me and Phil, you told us how much she trusted you as you held her head on the vet’s table. You were crying as you told us; you choked on your words and apologized: “Sorry I’m not stronger.” I’ve never felt closer to you, more in love.

 

Some years ago I found a YouTube video of you performing the Enesco Legend on a tour in Japan. You are young, and the video looks like it’s from the eighties, though the caption says 1993, when I would have been five. Your sound is soaring, free; I recognize hints of holding maybe just at the tail end of notes, when you put the trumpet down, but I don’t recall attending recitals where I was able to listen like this, to be carried easily in your sound. Listening to your ease made me cry.

 

Sometimes when I look at photos of your dad I wonder about what violence he must have experienced to have left its traces so deeply in your neck cords and shoulders, in mine. I think about painting in the garage while you repeated over and over the same passage that I hear in this Enesco, except it ends in a note that splits into a strained curse. You throw yourself again and again against the wall of the high note; my shoulders brace.

 

You’re right that you’re fine, that I don’t need to try to heal you, that I can’t even if you wanted me to. What I want to say is that I see you, the part of you that chose music even though your dad would have preferred something “manlier,” the wide-eyed wonder that makes both of us susceptible to niche obsessions and passionate, self-immolating dedication to what we believe in.

 

What I’m laying to rest here isn’t the music you chose and dedicated your life to. It’s the idea that expressive nuance depends on power, on the ability to play a high note. It’s the idea that your worth as a human being depends on the next faculty recital you give.

 

I realize that it looks like I’ve given up on my violin. That’s not true; it’s just that I’m still figuring out what particular habits in my body connect with what ways of thinking, and how to practice embodying the version of myself that feels most true, most alive, most radiantly connected with what I believe and seek in the world. Which feels like a very Dad sentiment to me.

 

 

This is a flower for my mother. [Likewise for you, Mom! ❤️]

 

Mom, the smell of camellia flowers reminds me of your arrangements, the blue-handled clippers on the washer when you’d come back in with a bundle of leaves and flowers to stick into the prickly holder in the low brown-black bowl.

 

I love hearing you talk about your friends now, about your chamber music adventures. I’m in awe of your family history, the 500-page gift that you wrote during the pandemic and shared with everyone in the family while I was busy trying to write a halfway intelligible dissertation proposal.

 

Thank you for your patience with me while I was throwing tantrums about practicing. Thank you for cooking the delicious “concoctions” that I complained about, every day after wrangling your high school orchestra students, after getting up at four to pack all of our lunches, after going to bed at midnight because you’d been preparing for the next day’s work.

 

Thank you for taking me to lessons every week, writing reams of notes like the Suzuki mom you helped your students’ mothers emulate, staying up even later to sew gorgeous recital dresses while I fell asleep to the whirr of your sewing machine.

 

Thank you for taking me to countless doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, weird quack doctors, physical therapists, and that lady in Pennsylvania who got teary-eyed about the beauty of her German shepherd humping the pillow while we talked about how to heal my arms. For worrying about me and putting up with my annoyance about how worried you always seemed.

 

Thank you for framing all of my paintings, clearing the same table you used to massage my back with those electric wands that other doctor recommended, setting up the mat-cutter and the point gun so that it wouldn’t cost as much as it would to take them in to the framer.

 

Your love awes me.

 

What I lay here is the fear that made it so hard for me to relax when ---- yelled at me to; the smallness that our inherited perfectionism knit our bodies into when we tried something new. Forgive my public self-therapizing here; I want to say that these habits of fear and smallness are remnants of a strategy adopted in the context of a racist country, cultivated by another mother who loved her daughter deeply too.

 

Beside these, in the rich dark soil, I lay my love for playing, the dancing ecstatically around the dining room table to Shostakovich, the eyes-closed-in-the-practice-room Bach Chaconnes, the closeness with my body-mind-soul that years and years of supervised practice allowed me to experience. These are not dead, just tender; growing new forms outside the shells that no longer fit them.

 

Thank you. I love you.

 

 

[Seed scores for the defense – make this present and embodied. Grief, name it; gratitude. With my violin.

 

Record this and include it as the end of this essay.]

 

 

April 2021

It’s been almost nine months since Phil and I moved back into my childhood home. A dull red cardinal has made her nest in the camellia bush outside the window by Phil’s desk. We call her Lady Cardinal and I identify deeply and personally with her nest-making style: she brings long noodly straws and drops them into a haphazard pile in the crook of the branches where they don’t really stick together at all. Day after day the jumble continues to not really grow, and we wonder if she’s just not a nest-building sort of bird, but then one day somehow there it is, a perfect round nesty imprint of her body. She lays three eggs in it. We watch her every day and night; she’s the only other creature we’ve seen in months. I love her desperately.

 

A few weeks after the eggs hatch, and countless hours watching her and her mate feeding and caring for the young, blind, big-eyeballed birdlings, I’m up past midnight reading. The living room is empty except for the threadbare pink rocking chair I’m in and a cabinet that my parents left behind in their hurried move.

 

I hear chirping in the darkness outside. Something feels off, and part of me tenses to get up, but I don’t. Finally I put my book down and walk into the next room.

 

Outside, in the floodlight, Lady Cardinal is flying frantically from fence-post to camellia bush, making the sound cardinals make, except the sound is clearly grief. I look where her nest should be. The crook of the branches is bare.

 

I scan the ground for any sign of the hatchlings, of the nest, of whatever was responsible, but there’s nothing. The ground is bare too. My heart seizes—if I’d gotten up just a moment earlier, would I have scared whatever it was away? But even the thought of that predator frightens me; I feel smaller than the bird. She flies back and forth, fence to bush, and I want so badly to comfort her, but the distance between us is unbridgeable.

 

Eventually I bring myself to bed. I tell Phil, and we cry until we’re empty.

I want to write that as I lie there my mind goes to all the people struggling to breathe, in hospitals, on asphalt. To their loved ones who can’t reach them through the glass, the iPad screen, the violence of institutionalized racism. I want my heart to hold more. But what I think about is the bird outside in the dark, grieving.

 

. . .

 

The sound of the air conditioning fades. I find myself walking along a curving corridor. There are no windows, and the outer wall is made of cinderblocks. Along the inner wall, an endless row of doors leaks a familiar cacophony of sounds: I’m looking for a practice room. The tile flickers under the fluorescent lights.

 

I feel young, or rather small, and I can’t quite see through the windows cut into each practice room door. I reach a door that sounds different and press my ear to the door: cicadas, heat. I turn the handle.

 

Inside is a tiled bathroom with a large window, open to a California dusk. The smell of orange-blossoms drifts through. In the center of the room is a small wooden table with a broken teapot on it, tipped onto its side. The rasp of cicadas pours out of its open top. Translucent moths swarm against the window and gather around a thin line of tape framing a blank space on the wall.

 

I sit down in the red wooden chair that’s pulled up to the table. There’s a notebook with some pages ripped out; I read it and the words swim.

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Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020).

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Ling Ling, 

[1] Danilo Prefumo, "Rinnovando antichi effetti obbliati: La scordatura nelle opere violinistiche di Niccolò Paganini," in Rivista italiana di musicologia: Periodico della Società Italiana di Musicologia 51 (2016), 37-50. [find more general source]

[2]  Collins Dictionary Online, s.v. "scordatura," accessed February 28, 2024:  https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/scordatura

M. NourbeSe Philip reads "Discourse on the Logic of Language" from She Tries Her Tongue, filmed November 2010 at Words Aloud 7 Spoken Word Festival in Durham, Ontario, Canada,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=424yF9eqBsE

[flower for Jonathan]

[3] Shinichi Suzuki, Nurtured by Love (find hard copy)

[4] Suzuki, Nurtured by Love and  Eri Hotta, Suzuki: The Man and His Dream to Teach the Children of the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022).

apologies-- these are from the Kindle edition and I'll replace with actual page numbers when I find my book
[8] image reproduced from Kerstin Wartberg, "Shinichi Suzuki: Pioneer of Music Education," Deutsches Suzuki Institut 2009, p. 9, accessed February 28, 2024 via IMTEX online:

https://www.imtex-online.com/mediathek/article/308/126/wartberg-kerstin-shinichisuzuki-pioneerofmusiceducation-ebook-.html/

[5] Tomie Hahn, Sensational Knowledge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 2.

 

Hahn directs readers to the work of Yasuo Yuasa (The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, Albany: SUNY, 1987; and The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy, Albany, SUNY, 1993) and Shigenori Nagatomo (“Two Contemporary Japanese Views of the Body: Ichikawa Hiroshi and Yuasa Yasuo,” in Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Thomas Kasulis, Roger Ames, and Wimal Dissanayake, Albany: SUNY Press, 1993b).

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14.

[7]  "Radical Connections: Meredith Monk and Björk," interview by Sarah Cahill (NewMusicBox: Counterstream Radio, March 16, 2007), https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/radical-connections-meredith-monk-and-bjork/

flower for Meredith Monk

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see Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, ed. Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters (Philadelphia: Temple University  Press, 1990).
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