Music has always taken up a chunk of my life, whether I liked it or not. When I was younger, I was forced into taking piano lessons by my parents. I hated it. I remember throwing tantrums because I didn’t want to practice for thirty minutes. It was like that for years. My parents knew I hated it, but they figured I would appreciate it when I was older. Spoiler alert, I haven’t. The summer going into 8th grade, I remember picking up the ukulele. I watched Youtube videos to try and play and it came quite naturally. The Christmas of my 8th grade year, my grandfather gave me my great-grandfather’s guitar. The guitar was much harder to learn than the ukulele, but eventually I learned “Misirlou” by Dick Dale. Today, I’m the frontman of my band. We haven’t come up with a name yet. We have played “Misirlou” at every gig and it’s one of our favorite songs. 

My views on music, I feel, are unconventional. I view music as a language of sorts. Not a language of words, but of sounds, harmony and emotion. I feel many people today lack the ability to sense the emotion in music when it doesn’t have words. I feel words in music can often clash with what the emotion of the music is truly conveying. I greatly admire composers. They truly are the brain behind music and they are the ones with true talent. Not the people who play or sing the music. Especially not people who sing. I remember when I was in Italy to attend a class on screenwriting at a college. There were pianos and guitars all around the campus free to play. Me and my classmates came across one of them and I played for them. A lot of my classmates were Italian and couldn’t speak really great English, but I played some instrumental songs and I knew they understood the music perfectly. Even when I eventually did start singing, they understood it perfectly. Then another one of my classmates came along and she could play the guitar as well. She wanted to play “House of the Rising Sun”, but couldn’t remember the chords. Then I told her in a language that wasn’t English or Italian, but song. Once she began playing and singing and her accent disappeared and we all understood what she was conveying. Throughout the rest of the course, I made an Italian friend and we would constantly share our music taste (which was very similar) and sing our favorite songs. This led me to believe (although it’s corny as crap) that music can unite us if we like the same kind. 

Music is a language you don’t have to study to understand, you just have to listen.