Music and I

In my early teens, I was forced to listen Rod Steward's tapes over and over and over again thanks to my elder sister. She also introduced me to the American pop musics and later European hits.

By the age of 16 or 17 when most kids were crazy with pops, I had chance to visit a friend who's into audios. He had some european turntable, huge MaCintosh amp, 3-head cassette deck, a more conventional tuner, but the biggest impression to me was his massive size of speakers, each was like 18 inch woofer and probably 1.5 or 2 inchs of tweeter. According to him, the speakers were built buy an european musician who was leaving the country and had to leave those big boxes behind.

He told me that if I liked to listen to music, I'd really need some real things to get some real music. He played some of my favorite pop musics, sure, it sounded better than my 18-watts boombox, big deal, right?

Then he played some light music from his vinyl collection, (hey, it was in the mid 80s :) suddenly the room was filled with calm, gentleness, smoothness, and peacefulness. It struck me for the first time that something other than pop music actually sounded good too. ... No, it didn't just sound good, it was an amazing experience!

He pulled out his newerst equipment, a CD player, and a few Telarc CDs, and told me to check those out. ( In the mid 80s, CD player were still a relatively new technology, a basic unit would cost around USD $400 that can probably be easily out performed my today's sub $100 units ) He started playing some Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven's symphony, pop instrumentals like movie themes from Empire Strike Back, etc, I was almost speechless. There're so much more emotions, flow of passions of happiness, moodiness, and sadness, things I never heard from my O' 18-watt Toshiba boombox.

Still seated at the anchored seat, he played Tchaikovski's 1812 Overtue. The first half was "OK", a little boring to me at the time (hey! remember I was a pop music kid!), but 2nd half was a complete twist, everthing came one after another like ocean wave, barely leaving me any time to breath! Then suddenly the MASSIVE connon fired here, there, and here, and there, and it was as if I was there marching toward a victory, a triumph of some sort. I was filled with joy, my heart was beating fast, my sweating hands still grabbed the arm-rest of the chair.

"... everthing came one after another like ocean wave, barely leaving me any time to breath! .."

Back to silence... tic.. tak.. tic.. tak.. The clock on the wall was sitll ticking, and I heared my heart beating. It was then when I finally made out a few words out of my mouth... "w.... wow..."

It was with this experience that I discovered music and it marked a new chapter in my life to be with music from there on.