Shayan Ashraf (17)
I. Flight
I wonder now what Icarus’s last thoughts were. As the wax on his wings melted away, did he feel the warmth of the sun? Did he know that centuries later, the legacy of his ephemeral flight would be the name of the cold waters that devoured him for eternity? I wasn’t worried by such questions when I fell in love with playing the piano.
My first and only real piano was a used upright, with ivory-white keys lined under the fallboard. The piano was a medley of deep brown shades, heavily polished to reflect a classic wooden pattern. After I lifted the fallboard, I could make out the logo printed in slightly faded gold lettering:
My first and only real piano was a used upright, with ivory-white keys lined under the fallboard. The piano was a medley of deep brown shades, heavily polished to reflect a classic wooden pattern. After I lifted the fallboard, I could make out the logo printed in slightly faded gold lettering:
Беларусь.
The family we had bought the piano from said the Russian company which manufactured it was known for imbuing its uprights with a uniquely warm sound. In America’s climate, the piano just needed to be tuned up a little, but it would be as good as new, they promised. The piano was old, yet dignified with a foreign beauty. I had never seen anything like it, and I could not have been more excited for the musical adventures I envisioned.
My first teacher was a quiet and humble Russian woman who radiated warmth, always speaking softly and moving gently. She pushed me to emotionally connect with the musical pieces I was playing, and she gave me free rein to choose what I wanted to learn next. Though I often reached for songs still far beyond my skill level (the main Pokemon theme song was unfortunately more difficult than I ever could have imagined), my teacher supported my endeavors to find joy in the activity. Looking back, I never played anything quite exactly right. When playing Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 67, No. 2., I pretended I was a bluebird jumping from branch to branch, romanticizing the melody instead of adhering to the strict three-count. Whenever the suggested finger placement for a note felt unnatural, I would make my own arrangement. The piano became an extension of myself, including all of my imperfections.
Some years later, though, my parents became disappointed with my lack of achievement in various concerts and pushed me to take standardized music tests. In Bangladesh, success was measured by recognition; my parents expected America to be the same. They set me up with a new piano teacher, who was equally kind but much stricter. The first lessons were to take place at her apartment on the Upper West Side. Never having been to Manhattan much, I found the buildings to be cold, invading the sky with their grand cornices. I still remember climbing up the narrow, red-painted stairway to my teacher’s place on the third floor. As I steadily climbed the steep steps, I wondered, How could anyone ever fit a whole piano through here?
The monumental, classic-black grand piano occupied a quarter of my teacher’s living room. Sitting down at the matching bench, I felt isolated by the piano for the first time. The cover was lifted so that I could make out the dozens of intricate strings and hammers set against a gold-trimmed interior. Looking over the various sections, I realized what a piano exactly was: delicate machinery, hammering out precise frequencies when commanded to. Its beauty was refined, but uninspiring. The stark white keys gleamed like the teeth of a great beast and the hammers bellowed with Daedalus’s agony after every incorrect note and mistimed beat. Most of all, I hated seeing the reflection of myself and the luxurious apartment around me in the waxed black surface of the piano. All color was lost, the definitions of each object simply different shades of the same vague white color. As my hands crawled up and down the keys, every note was either right or wrong, with no in-between.
Within a couple of days, I was staring at an intimidating stack of theory books branded with the bright red ABRSM (a UK-based music examinations board) logo. I was introduced to Mr. Dorian and Ms. Mixolydian, two kinds of “modes” among several others for playing scales that I would’ve been very happy to have never met. While the fundamentals were necessary, piano became an increasingly foreign venture as I was swamped with seemingly endless lists of German and Italian vocabulary to memorize for my theory exams. Einfach? Giocoso? Guided only by the yet-to-be-realized golden stamp on a music certificate, I was lost. Music became alien to me. I stumbled through musical passages, tripping over dotted eighth notes and fumbling accidentals. The passages I played through were increasingly filled with ledger lines, creating more strata for notes to fill in the hierarchy.
My investment in piano meant that it had become an integral part of my worldview. But I was no longer leaping from branch to branch—the range of my movement was predetermined, leashed to the bench. I became an extension of the lengthy vocabulary lists, complicated scales, and rigid structure of Hanon’s repetitive exercises. Still, I tried to believe that every sacrifice I made in creativity was justified in the pursuit of individual distinction.
“[The basis for music] is the labor of the refrain: Does it remain territorial and territorializing, or is it carried away in a moving block that draws a transversal across all coordinates…” (Deleuze and Guattari 302).
My flight was thus: I was marching along the black and white checkered marble floors of an endless labyrinth with stairs at regular intervals. I mistakenly believed I was directing my own steps as I speedily climbed infinitely upwards with unnatural confidence. Taking a closer look at myself, I noticed the reflection of my featureless face in the cold steel of my hand, a smooth oval. Every joint was a lever; my body consisted of gears, bolts, and pistons. I suddenly turned the corner into a mesmerizing passageway which continued indefinitely, receding. It was identical to the one I had just left. I glimpsed the fleeting image of someone else just as they climbed the last stair and turned another corner. Someone else! Were they dancing like me? Where were they headed? I had to catch up. The same tempo which was once brutally quick was now torturously slow. Fear took over, but I was not aware of it. It propelled my ascent, which by now had only taken me to what seemed to be the passageway I started in. Absorbed by every step, twirl, and flourish, I had become immobile, and the walls and floor moved around me instead. Instead of translating I was spinning about myself, realizing that I was alone. I was a simple cog in a much larger machine, my desire to move forward nothing but a static, circular rotation as I chased my own apparition.
“[There are] intrinsic reterritorializations such as musical coordinates, and extrinsic ones such as the deterioration of the refrain into a hackneyed formula.” (Deleuze and Guattari 303).
Unlike Icarus, I never flew beyond the labyrinth. My flight followed the staff lines, repeating the same motions with mathematical precision. Daedalus’s instructions only led me further along the endless stairs that haunted me whichever way I turned. If every musical note was tuned to an exact frequency, how could I ever escape?
My first teacher was a quiet and humble Russian woman who radiated warmth, always speaking softly and moving gently. She pushed me to emotionally connect with the musical pieces I was playing, and she gave me free rein to choose what I wanted to learn next. Though I often reached for songs still far beyond my skill level (the main Pokemon theme song was unfortunately more difficult than I ever could have imagined), my teacher supported my endeavors to find joy in the activity. Looking back, I never played anything quite exactly right. When playing Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 67, No. 2., I pretended I was a bluebird jumping from branch to branch, romanticizing the melody instead of adhering to the strict three-count. Whenever the suggested finger placement for a note felt unnatural, I would make my own arrangement. The piano became an extension of myself, including all of my imperfections.
Some years later, though, my parents became disappointed with my lack of achievement in various concerts and pushed me to take standardized music tests. In Bangladesh, success was measured by recognition; my parents expected America to be the same. They set me up with a new piano teacher, who was equally kind but much stricter. The first lessons were to take place at her apartment on the Upper West Side. Never having been to Manhattan much, I found the buildings to be cold, invading the sky with their grand cornices. I still remember climbing up the narrow, red-painted stairway to my teacher’s place on the third floor. As I steadily climbed the steep steps, I wondered, How could anyone ever fit a whole piano through here?
The monumental, classic-black grand piano occupied a quarter of my teacher’s living room. Sitting down at the matching bench, I felt isolated by the piano for the first time. The cover was lifted so that I could make out the dozens of intricate strings and hammers set against a gold-trimmed interior. Looking over the various sections, I realized what a piano exactly was: delicate machinery, hammering out precise frequencies when commanded to. Its beauty was refined, but uninspiring. The stark white keys gleamed like the teeth of a great beast and the hammers bellowed with Daedalus’s agony after every incorrect note and mistimed beat. Most of all, I hated seeing the reflection of myself and the luxurious apartment around me in the waxed black surface of the piano. All color was lost, the definitions of each object simply different shades of the same vague white color. As my hands crawled up and down the keys, every note was either right or wrong, with no in-between.
Within a couple of days, I was staring at an intimidating stack of theory books branded with the bright red ABRSM (a UK-based music examinations board) logo. I was introduced to Mr. Dorian and Ms. Mixolydian, two kinds of “modes” among several others for playing scales that I would’ve been very happy to have never met. While the fundamentals were necessary, piano became an increasingly foreign venture as I was swamped with seemingly endless lists of German and Italian vocabulary to memorize for my theory exams. Einfach? Giocoso? Guided only by the yet-to-be-realized golden stamp on a music certificate, I was lost. Music became alien to me. I stumbled through musical passages, tripping over dotted eighth notes and fumbling accidentals. The passages I played through were increasingly filled with ledger lines, creating more strata for notes to fill in the hierarchy.
My investment in piano meant that it had become an integral part of my worldview. But I was no longer leaping from branch to branch—the range of my movement was predetermined, leashed to the bench. I became an extension of the lengthy vocabulary lists, complicated scales, and rigid structure of Hanon’s repetitive exercises. Still, I tried to believe that every sacrifice I made in creativity was justified in the pursuit of individual distinction.
“[The basis for music] is the labor of the refrain: Does it remain territorial and territorializing, or is it carried away in a moving block that draws a transversal across all coordinates…” (Deleuze and Guattari 302).
My flight was thus: I was marching along the black and white checkered marble floors of an endless labyrinth with stairs at regular intervals. I mistakenly believed I was directing my own steps as I speedily climbed infinitely upwards with unnatural confidence. Taking a closer look at myself, I noticed the reflection of my featureless face in the cold steel of my hand, a smooth oval. Every joint was a lever; my body consisted of gears, bolts, and pistons. I suddenly turned the corner into a mesmerizing passageway which continued indefinitely, receding. It was identical to the one I had just left. I glimpsed the fleeting image of someone else just as they climbed the last stair and turned another corner. Someone else! Were they dancing like me? Where were they headed? I had to catch up. The same tempo which was once brutally quick was now torturously slow. Fear took over, but I was not aware of it. It propelled my ascent, which by now had only taken me to what seemed to be the passageway I started in. Absorbed by every step, twirl, and flourish, I had become immobile, and the walls and floor moved around me instead. Instead of translating I was spinning about myself, realizing that I was alone. I was a simple cog in a much larger machine, my desire to move forward nothing but a static, circular rotation as I chased my own apparition.
“[There are] intrinsic reterritorializations such as musical coordinates, and extrinsic ones such as the deterioration of the refrain into a hackneyed formula.” (Deleuze and Guattari 303).
Unlike Icarus, I never flew beyond the labyrinth. My flight followed the staff lines, repeating the same motions with mathematical precision. Daedalus’s instructions only led me further along the endless stairs that haunted me whichever way I turned. If every musical note was tuned to an exact frequency, how could I ever escape?
II. Resonance
I stared into the concentric circles of my first tabla, intrigued by the multitude of resounding tas and comforting ges that could come out of one object. The dull, charcoal-black innermost circle had a slightly more granular texture compared to the ivory-colored, smooth surface surrounding it. Not only did each terrain produce a different sound, but so did the borders between the two.
Before I knew it, the wings that piano had given me melted away like the faded logo printed on my upright. I no longer sought to explore Schubert’s dense and often unappealing sonatas. Unlike piano’s mechanical articulations and fixed number of keys, tabla represented a world of infinite possibilities.
Terekete tako tako terekete tako tako ta. Even playing the most basic tabla exercises, I felt as though I was on a different continent. I found comfort in the fact that my tabla had taken a journey similar to my own; my teacher had carefully transported the drums from India, where the best manufacturers are. Though the climate in America ever so slightly altered its timbre, the sounds largely remained the same.
For about five years since I had entered the fifth grade, I attended the Udichi School of Performing Arts, miles east from where I had gone to learn piano. Every Sunday, I loved walking up the ramp instead of the stairs to the doors of the rented-out school building. The cohort of students with whom I practiced claimed a narrow side hallway, spreading out a carpet in the middle just wide enough to fit all the students. The first step was to take off our shoes out of respect for the instrument, after which we would gather around our guru¹ and begin to write down our new bol for the day. My favorite kind was a rela,² a type of composition meant to emulate the rhythm and movement of a train. It featured variations on a common theme, with refrains like a poem. Each stanza presented a new set of sounds, never entirely repeating. A rela-style piece also focused on fluidity and stability of the hands, so the sound emanating from the two drums together would be well-balanced and each line easily transitioned into the next.
“Dhagetete gegetete kotagigi tetekota.” My guru’s eyes were always closed, his mind focused. He seemed to be simultaneously recounting childhood stories and pulling the words out of the powder-filled air.³ With each hit of the tabla that my guru would occasionally play while remembering the rest of the piece, another wave of powder flew into the surrounding area.
“Kotagigi tetekota kotagigi nanakota.” All of our heads were dutifully directed downwards towards our notebook as we hastily scribbled to catch each syllable before it evaporated. Looking around, I felt solidarity in our evenness, in everyone’s identical posture and similar heights.
“Lodge yourself on a stratum… find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them” (Deleuze and Guattari 161).
“Taketete keketete kotagigi tetekota.” I always loved using this line of the bol to slide my hand across the bayan, pressing harder and harder, sliding the pitch to fluidly connect the sharp kota⁴ with the softer hum-like tete.
“Produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment… Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole ‘diagram,’” (Deleuze and Guattari 161).
“Kotagigi tetekota kotagigi nanakota.” As we started to practice the piece together, closing my eyes just as my guru did felt natural. My fingers moved on their own, synchronizing with my peers around me. I became less aware of the tabla as distinct objects and engaged with them as extensions of my body, drowning out the feelings of loneliness I felt from piano in the tidal wave of tals⁵ echoing throughout the room.
“Here the [Body without Organs] reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari 161). The train was thus moving steadily along a set of old ivory-colored rails. It began in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights, close to Udichi. I directed the train as if it were a part of me, diagonally through the busy streets and red lights, the tall apartment buildings slowly fading away into the trunks of large trees with roots reaching further horizontally than the tree did vertically. The black pavement with white crosswalks gave way to a soft, brown path bordered by lush grass. I felt its softness without stepping on it. Feeling weightless, I leaned out the window and inhaled the fresh air rushing by my head. Bright yellow “yield” signs blurred into bluebirds leaping from branch to branch, and I could feel their wings flapping as if they were my own. I gently leapt off the train, humming a melody harmonized with the steady chug of the train before flying off into a new world.
¹ Instructor, with respect (Bangla)
² Parallel to sheet music (somewhat)
³ Tabla players use a powder to reduce some friction on certain parts of the drum when playing, also rubbed into our hands. A lot of it ends up in the air, like chalk dust.
⁴ Left drum with a deeper sound
⁵Beats
Before I knew it, the wings that piano had given me melted away like the faded logo printed on my upright. I no longer sought to explore Schubert’s dense and often unappealing sonatas. Unlike piano’s mechanical articulations and fixed number of keys, tabla represented a world of infinite possibilities.
Terekete tako tako terekete tako tako ta. Even playing the most basic tabla exercises, I felt as though I was on a different continent. I found comfort in the fact that my tabla had taken a journey similar to my own; my teacher had carefully transported the drums from India, where the best manufacturers are. Though the climate in America ever so slightly altered its timbre, the sounds largely remained the same.
For about five years since I had entered the fifth grade, I attended the Udichi School of Performing Arts, miles east from where I had gone to learn piano. Every Sunday, I loved walking up the ramp instead of the stairs to the doors of the rented-out school building. The cohort of students with whom I practiced claimed a narrow side hallway, spreading out a carpet in the middle just wide enough to fit all the students. The first step was to take off our shoes out of respect for the instrument, after which we would gather around our guru¹ and begin to write down our new bol for the day. My favorite kind was a rela,² a type of composition meant to emulate the rhythm and movement of a train. It featured variations on a common theme, with refrains like a poem. Each stanza presented a new set of sounds, never entirely repeating. A rela-style piece also focused on fluidity and stability of the hands, so the sound emanating from the two drums together would be well-balanced and each line easily transitioned into the next.
“Dhagetete gegetete kotagigi tetekota.” My guru’s eyes were always closed, his mind focused. He seemed to be simultaneously recounting childhood stories and pulling the words out of the powder-filled air.³ With each hit of the tabla that my guru would occasionally play while remembering the rest of the piece, another wave of powder flew into the surrounding area.
“Kotagigi tetekota kotagigi nanakota.” All of our heads were dutifully directed downwards towards our notebook as we hastily scribbled to catch each syllable before it evaporated. Looking around, I felt solidarity in our evenness, in everyone’s identical posture and similar heights.
“Lodge yourself on a stratum… find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them” (Deleuze and Guattari 161).
“Taketete keketete kotagigi tetekota.” I always loved using this line of the bol to slide my hand across the bayan, pressing harder and harder, sliding the pitch to fluidly connect the sharp kota⁴ with the softer hum-like tete.
“Produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment… Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole ‘diagram,’” (Deleuze and Guattari 161).
“Kotagigi tetekota kotagigi nanakota.” As we started to practice the piece together, closing my eyes just as my guru did felt natural. My fingers moved on their own, synchronizing with my peers around me. I became less aware of the tabla as distinct objects and engaged with them as extensions of my body, drowning out the feelings of loneliness I felt from piano in the tidal wave of tals⁵ echoing throughout the room.
“Here the [Body without Organs] reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari 161). The train was thus moving steadily along a set of old ivory-colored rails. It began in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights, close to Udichi. I directed the train as if it were a part of me, diagonally through the busy streets and red lights, the tall apartment buildings slowly fading away into the trunks of large trees with roots reaching further horizontally than the tree did vertically. The black pavement with white crosswalks gave way to a soft, brown path bordered by lush grass. I felt its softness without stepping on it. Feeling weightless, I leaned out the window and inhaled the fresh air rushing by my head. Bright yellow “yield” signs blurred into bluebirds leaping from branch to branch, and I could feel their wings flapping as if they were my own. I gently leapt off the train, humming a melody harmonized with the steady chug of the train before flying off into a new world.
¹ Instructor, with respect (Bangla)
² Parallel to sheet music (somewhat)
³ Tabla players use a powder to reduce some friction on certain parts of the drum when playing, also rubbed into our hands. A lot of it ends up in the air, like chalk dust.
⁴ Left drum with a deeper sound
⁵Beats
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Shayan Ashraf is a recipient of the Scholastic gold medal for personal essay writing. He is currently a senior at Hunter College High School, where he is a writing mentor and editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. He greatly enjoys badminton, origami, and Bengali tea.
Shayan Ashraf is a recipient of the Scholastic gold medal for personal essay writing. He is currently a senior at Hunter College High School, where he is a writing mentor and editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. He greatly enjoys badminton, origami, and Bengali tea.