Until the end of 1980s, my parents and I moved house 4 times. That means 5 home addresses in total. Every new house always meant a new environment. Well, I guess. I was born in Bandung and I can’t remember the moment I moved to Jakarta. Anyway, different environments, more friends, different going out patterns, different roads to take, etc., even though the last 4 addresses were all in Jakarta. (And yes, I will talk about music if you keep reading.)
In a new environment, everyone, including myself, tends to make mistakes, like taking the wrong road (hence getting lost) and mistaking someone’s name with someone else’s. But as one stays longer, one makes less similar mistakes due to learning from previous mistakes.
In 2002, I moved to this multicultural city called Melbourne. So far, I have lived in 4 addresses, all in different suburbs. Although all of them are in Melbourne, they differ more greatly than how things differ in Jakarta. I mean, the environments (street name signs have different graphical designs depending on which council owns the area, for example), the people, the languages. Yeah, languages, you read it correctly. Well, yeah, English is the de facto language here, but there are lots of ethnic groups here as well, and they talk in their languages in public as well. I was mildly surprised when I opened my first Australian bank account, the customer service girl spoke Bahasa Indonesia to me right after I showed my passport.
Now, sometimes I travel to Indonesia, and every time I go there, I always see how environments change, how customs change, even how the language change! The last time I went there, I was supposed to give an academic talk just 4 days after I landed. So, when I flew there, I didn’t waste the opportunity to read an Indonesian newspaper provided on board, hoping that I would be able to refresh my knowledge on how to speak formal Bahasa Indonesia. There was a moment where I said to myself, “What does this word mean?”, and showed it to my wife, who responded it with a “Huh?”. You know, we talk to each other in Bahasa Indonesia. But somehow, we caught up and learned new words after we arrived there.
Anyway, what does this thing about homes have anything to do with music?
My Melbourne times remind me that there are some musical pieces where every part of the song sounds about similar, and there are some that are vastly different. Those parts may require similar or different techniques to play. Sometimes we can find a musical arrangement for a piece where the style from beginning to end is about the same (like how English is spoken pretty much everywhere), yet we can recognise the different melodies (like the street name sign designs), but there is a part with a very different style (like a non-English language spoken in an English-speaking country).
Next, the tendency to make mistakes when encountering a new environment. Similarly, in music, we have that sort of tendency when trying a new piece. A good way to improve is by rehearsing. We make mistakes when rehearsing, but combined with self-evaluation, as the English proverb says, “practice makes perfect.”
And like travelling to our homeland, playing the pieces we learned during our early times learning music now means we can play with a new vocabulary of techniques, as we have expanded our palette. This even applies to self-composed pieces. There is always something new, something fresh, something unheard before.
Visiting homes (in both musical and non-musical ways) and travelling inside them are what we can do to find out what’s missing inside, and hence form the road to improvement.
[Photo by Linda Tanner]
It’s a double-sided business card in the sense that it doesn’t matter whichever side you’re looking at, you don’t lose any information. There are two themes for the designs of the sides. One side is Visions-themed, and the other side is [my upcoming album]-themed (the name of my upcoming album is deliberately censored, teehee…), although strictly speaking, the Visions-themed side uses the typeface for my upcoming album artwork. I had a local business called PrintTogether print my cards (I have used their service before and have been satisfied, this time included).
