Yio Kyung (Joy) Lee

LA101H Section 003

This I Believe

I believe in the enchantment of music. Music has the ability to produce an influence

beyond the listener’s simple entertainment. Elgar, Prokofiev, and Mahler are movers of hearts,

conveyors of sorrowful stories, and inspirers of dreams. In the 18 years of my life, music has

been the ultimate enchantment that clears away the stress of a chaotic day or my channel of

expressing my jubilant joy after a hard-earned victory.

I remember the days when I used to twist and whine whenever the word “practice” was

uttered from my mother’s mouth. I’d run upstairs and pretend I had a lot of homework, and my

mother would merely shake her head and tell me that I had better come down to practice

afterward. Then later in the day, my guilty conscience would drag my feet down to the “music

corner” of our living room. I would pick up my violin for an hour, and then proceed to my piano.

I carried this torturous cycle with me throughout my adolescent years. (Although, to my

mother’s great disappointment, I can’t say that it was a daily recurring process.) During those

days I never imagined that there would come a day when I would praise God for the ability to

practice and channel my emotions through meaningful melodies.

Music’s maturation in my life was a subtle yet decisive process. It began when I met my

final violin teacher, whom I would go as far as to call my life’s musical mentor. Xiao-Fu Zhou

was a man who loved music with his whole heart and his whole life. Each lesson was like an

adventure in which he would show me the desolate, dismal sorrows of an aching Brahms or the

jovial dreams of a light-hearted Bach. Xiao-Fu’s eyes would close as his fingers gently closed
down on his violin. And all of a sudden, Brahms’ sorrows were Xiao-Fu’s sorrows of his past

struggles as a young man who was placed in a foreign land called America; Bach’s dreams were

Xiao-Fu’s moments of joy as he fulfilled his journey of delighting many at the likes of Carnegie

Hall. I fell deeper and deeper into the music’s enchantment. Such lessons continued, until one

day, I found myself looking at music from a different perspective.

It was in April of my sophomore year of high school. I walked home, broken from a

defeat in a battle that I had been preparing for, for quite some time. I opened my door and as

soon as I looked into my house, the only thing in sight was my piano straight ahead. I sat at my

piano and began to play. And I played, and played, and played, and played. The music started to

take over my emotions as I began to play whatever popped into my head. The stress of the day,

the tears from the defeat, and the anger from the disappointment flowed from my heart to the

keys, until I could play no more, for there was nothing more to be played. The healing process

had already begun. The enchanter had come and gone, and the enchantment had done the

trick.