Authentic

Puhhk! Puhkk! As college students in the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music

briskly walked through the expansive halls, their dress shoes clapped against the

porcelain tiles, producing an echoing thunder. Despite bearing towering instrument

cases on their meager bodies, they glided through the building with a grace comparable

to nature’s songbirds. Watching them as a tiny six-year-old, I could not help but hang

my mouth ajar and tilt my head with burning curiosity. Outside the Conservatory’s vast

windows, I noticed a set of blue-gray rain clouds that obscured much of the sunlight I

had enjoyed earlier during preschool, creating the image of nightfall.

In contrast, recessed lights shone from the high ceilings within the Conservatory,

casting a bright white light throughout the many modern rooms. While I explored this

new environment with my wandering eyes, I sat against a mahogany wall and lay my

legs carelessly on the tiled floor. To the left of me, my brother lay motionless on his side,

resting his head on our family’s designated music bag packed full of piano books and

spiral notebooks. To my right, my mother, still dressed in her work clothes, looked at her

phone with nervousness and excitement. Soon, my brother and I would have our first

lesson on music theory.

A few years ago, my brother and I began playing the piano with Dr. Mai, a piano

teacher who taught at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. As we sought to improve

our knowledge of music, Dr. Mai suggested that we take music theory lessons with her

dear friend, Dr. Akira. We enthusiastically enrolled when we discovered an opportunity

to join Dr. Akira’s group music theory class in the summer of 2016. On the afternoon of

a Friday in late October, my mother drove him and me to CCM in our 2007 Honda Pilot

after my brother and I had come home from school. As we drove through deciduous

trees dripping with gold and fiery tones, I leaned my plump face against the icy

windows. As my gaze shifted toward the window, which was now blurred by my warm,

wet breath, I felt steel pins jab against my stomach lining. I wondered if Dr. Akira would

be a stern, old-fashioned teacher like Dr. Mai or if he would be similar to my patient,

cheerful elementary teacher, Mrs. Klein. I fell asleep since these thoughts required too

much brain power for an energetic seven-year-old. After waking to a sharp left turn into

the entrance to the Music Conservatory, I groggily brought myself to look at the time.

With my mother’s conservative time management, we arrived nearly an hour before the

agreed lesson time of five o’clock. We left the car and entered the Conservatory, hoping

to escape the freezing air that squeezed our skin tight. The building’s warm air

embraced our bumpy skin, revitalizing us. While my mother walked behind us, my

brother and I ran through the majestic hallways, searching around the building’s

countless faces for our classroom. Eventually, finding it next to the Conservatory’s

entrance, we sat on the floor. After a while, my brother fell asleep.In the next thirty minutes, students began to arrive at the classroom, many of

whom I recognized from our piano studio. Together, we waited and curiously chatted

about our mysterious teacher. At five o’clock, noticing the absence of a teacher, we

became cheerful about the possibility of not having music theory lessons. Our parents

rebuked our cheerfulness and ordered us to sit upright and patiently wait. Soon, in my

peripheral vision, I noticed a stout, muscular man briskly walking towards the

classroom. He wore a tight-fitted black tee with a glistening ankh cross hanging from his

neck. His head was remarkably circular. However, his face was more like an oval,

extending to the top of his head. Thick, short black hair sparsely populated the top, the

back, and the sides of his head, in addition to his goatee, which surrounded his

signature partial smile like soldiers around a fort. Above his thick nose, his thin-rimmed

oval glasses enveloped comforting brown almond eyes. When he was not much further

from the classroom as we were, he cracked a brief joke about his tardiness to our

parents and unlocked a door to a room I would never forget.

Like the central area of the Conservatory, vast windows characterized this

classroom. As dusk approached, warm tones resembling fall leaves floated across the

room. Meanwhile, the shiny steel window beams and desks left shadows stretching to

the end of the room. The room was plainly decorated, yet the light coming into the room

infused it with colorful tones. My brother and I squeezed through the tightly packed

desks to the far corner of the room, five desks away from Dr. Akira. He gave a simple

introduction as he ate an egg salad, which he had pulled from his bag. Despite being

from Japan, he spoke perfect English; his deep, resonating voice lacked a foreign

accent, and his grammar was flawless. After our class briefly introduced ourselves, we

completed a few exercises to develop a perfect pitch. During these exercises, for the

first time, I heard Dr. Akira play the piano.

Although he touched the keys aggressively, a beautiful, soft tone resonated from

the piano. The pillow of sound comforted my ear, introducing me to new depths of

sound. With a few hands, he created the same, if not greater, musical nuance than a

professional symphony. I locked my eyes on the piano’s sound, which bounced from

wall to wall, through ears and crevices, down the floors of the building, to the garage,

bouncing, bouncing, eventually blending with the blues of the cool fall air.

A few minutes later, I sat on the seat again. My limbs did not meet the cold metal

of the seat but floated above the seat’s abrasive grasp. Dr. Akira had dived into some

lecture, but I did not notice as my eyes locked on the piano’s resonating sound. He had

gone through notable composers, including Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Mozart, but

had stopped before mentioning Bach.Dr. Akira discussed how American music teachers often have a weak

understanding of music history and cannot correctly pronounce the names of notable

European composers. He frequently criticized the pronunciation of a few composer

names, such as Johann Sebastian Bach. In that class and every class from thereon, he

would discuss how Bach should not be pronounced with a hard “k” sound but rather a

throaty sound that resembles a sharp scraping “ghgggh.” He would emphasize the

sound and maintain a straight face as we giggled. On several occasions, including this

first lesson, his face would crack into a smile after we settled ourselves.

As the class neared its end, Dr. Akira told us to perform the piano pieces we had

been learning in front of the class. Unlike my piano teacher, Dr. Mai, Dr. Akira would

order us to provide contextual information about our pieces before we played. I had

never found the contextual information as a necessary element, so I stumbled as I

spoke, blurting random guesses about the musical period, notable composers who lived

during the same time, and the significance of the piece. Perhaps I said that Mozart’s

Sonatina originated from the Baroque Period or that Mozart wrote it during his forties.

When I said it, Dr. Akira’s face flustered a tomato red. He delivered a long, spontaneous

speech detailing the importance of understanding information about a piece to perform

it. He analyzed my piece, discussing how a performer must execute the Sonatina as

Mozart intended as it belonged to the Classical music period. For a performer to adhere

to the classical style, the rhythm should be exact and not stretched or shrank to the

performer’s liking, and the articulation should be replicated to the performer’s best

extent. As he spoke, a light glowed in his brown eyes and shone even brighter as the

sky dimmed a grayish blue. As he played the Sonatina to demonstrate the proper style,

my ears became submerged in a liquid gold sound, a sound equivalent in profoundness

to the colorful leaves that fall.