The Best Thing My Parents Did For Me

I am sitting here, listening to Adagio in G Minor by Tomaso Albinoni, and I remember the time not too many years ago when I listened to classical music not because it was something I enjoyed, but because it was something I thought was Good To Do. I did it for the same reasons I used read about wine. This was Something People Did. Later I learned that people actually feel about wine the same way I feel about mead—you cannot go to any store and pick up any mead—let alone your favorite mead. To become a connoisseur is not just a point of pretension but a proper matter of logistics. To create a vocabulary for different tasting beverages was not useless jargon but a way of making sense.

My relationship to classical music became much more intimate when I briefly audited Craig Wright’s “Listening to Music” course at Yale my senior year. I was already taking too many classes, but a friend told me it is a must before I graduate, and so I went every once in a while. The technical aspects were too advanced for me, but some things stuck. And what stuck most was that the music was created to tell a story—and it was complex not in error or fluff, but because the stories were complex and decisions were made for a reason.

This sounds incredibly lame coming from me because this is the point. If I were to read a summary of classical music and catch the line, “It tells a story,” this would mean almost nothing. But coming from Professor Wright’s infectious, sophisticated, voice, it meant something to me.

And this is where we get into my parents. When I was ten, they would sit me down in front of the television and play “Once Upon A Time In America,” or another 4-hour long movie. They would not tell me what it was about. I was to sit down on the sofa and watch the entire thing, without breaks, because “that would ruin it.”

They would sit me down and tell me to read Tom Sawyer because, “This is the fancy American book.” Only years later I would learn that they had never read it themselves.

This idea of patience in the presence of expertise is the most important lesson they have given me. This idea that if something seems boring or pointless, it is not necessarily the work. There is a high chance I am not seeing something as I should be.

This is also the reason I have not yet purchased a book-summary app. I would rather flip through the pages and get a small glimpse into the real window of the author, and maybe have the texture of a genius rub off a little on me, than read a general summary. The same way I made time to drop into the music course every once in a while.

Without this lesson, I would still not understand classical music.

Listening to Music is a Yale Open Course. You can find it here.