I was drawn to this book because I was particularly interested in what Hodges had to say about time, her Korean American identity, music, and the intersections between the three. I remember buying this book on a whim right after reading the back cover, feeling like this would be something I could reread as many times I would like. As someone who grew up in an Asian household in America and also being led into classical violin lessons for a number of years, many of the discussion points raised by Hodges also resonated with my own experiences.

One of the main points Hodges makes in the book is that time is fluid. It ebbs and flows in accordance to your own individual perception of it. She claims that music plays a major role in her experience of time, as something that influences this individual perception. She says that “Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of temporal events.” (24) Music, then, is about sound in time, as a measurement of time, and an aesthetic. While we have clocks to tell us where we currently are in the cycle of a day, music asks performers and listeners to feel time in accordance to sound and harmony. Upon reading this line, I was reminded of my own experiences of music and time. I had a chamber music coach ask us to do more than anticipate the beat, but rather feel the “pulse.” I interpreted this as the implication that rhythm, often thought as a stable means of measuring the music of time, can shift according to the musical context, and it is this “pulse” that lives behind the notes, whereas the beats live on the page. Hodges says that her problem with getting into music’s time, is getting nervous onstage and is unable to perceive this kind of “time.” She describes being the physical symptoms of her performance anxiety and how “an eternity unfolded within” when she drops her bow. (27) What, then, becomes of time in high anxiety? Time takes on a different meaning. It is probably not too dissimilar to the feeling when you have fun, where time seems hardly measured in seconds and minutes, or when you are in a boring lecture, and every second seems to plod one after another. Time has a life of its own that draws you into it, acting differently in different circumstances, and in turn redefines your experience of reality. And from a performing standpoint, this ability to feel time in the context of the music, is the very thing you are supposed to do. So in some senses, the inability to do so undermines the very definition of musician. When people think of musicians, it is someone attuned to sound, someone who gives sound meaning, and someone who imparts that meaning onto others, with so much of that music largely being dependent on its time. (By no means am I trying to say that people with performance anxiety do not deserve to be musicians, as that would also imply that there are no musicians in the world. Such anxieties are prevalent everywhere, like when you are asked to give a big presentation, any confrontation, etc.) As a means of answering the question of why she has stage fright, Hodges suggests a very fundamental process of performance that may illuminate such anxieties:

“Performance embodies the paradox of losing yourself and yet asserting yourself, the way an actor takes the stage in order to become someone else entirely (or, perhaps, how he becomes someone else entirely in order to take the stage). In music, you have to suspend your ego, arrest the rhythms of its constant self-conscious chatter and cede them to the music’s time—although of course it is the ego that is performing, that is indeed crucial to the idea of performance itself. You have to relinquish all thought of who’s looking at you, of how hard you’ve worked, even of how well you want the performance to go, in order to become the music, immerse yourself fully in the music’s time. You have to take yourself out of one time in order to fully command the next.” (35)

Hodges recognizes that for the musician, performing is not just about ego, but putting yourself into another time, therefore performing that which is a self defined by music. Being “out of one time” refers to the observation made previously that not only is music capable of having its own time, but simultaneously suggests that the very ontological state of being also has its own time. As suggested before, an individual’s experience of time can be shaped by their own emotions. Therefore, this is the paradox she suggests here—leaving one time for another, and giving up the self to occupy a different time, and consequently losing the self. And, in losing the self of one time, the performer gains another self.

It is worth mentioning that having this knowledge does not remove all performance anxiety problems. In fact, when it comes down to the logistics of performing, it usually has nothing to do with what someone thinks about performing. The audience and expectations play a major role in getting nervous. But the value of this section to me is the questions of authenticity that follow: is the performance of the self, still a self? (Readers of gender performativity may have some opinions here.) Whose time must the performer live in, in order to become the music, and how might the performer’s own means of occupying time affect that process? This brings me to the next section of the book.

Another aspect of this book that I was drawn to was the intersections of her Korean American identity and her relationship to music. Most of her identity was shaped by her mother, who had come from Korea and was a major supporter of Hodges’s aspirations. Hodges mentions Amy Chua and her “Tiger Mom” model, and how other people probably saw her mother as a tiger parent—the parenting style often seen in Asian immigrant parents who set their kids onto high academic tracks at the cost of various other pursuits, sometimes using disagreeable means. Though Hodges does not feel her mother is a tiger parent, she does address the concerns of Asian parents. From the outside, there is the opinion that such parents seem to use their kids to assimilate into American culture, and one of these methods is sending your kids to music lessons. But Hodges says that assimilation maybe wasn’t the right word, but rather “symmetry:”

“…symmetry describes the relationship of a single identity to itself. Every personal identity is an entity in flux, a constant negotiation of the multitude of more specific identities that it comprises and their myriad proportions to one another…each of us has the capacity to become a slightly different person, depending on where we are and whom we are with…the balance of who we are is determined by the symmetries and asymmetries of those identities, the relationship, forged by their interplay, between how others see us and how we see ourselves.” (101)

I was briefly reminded of my own racial identity, living in a Chinese household in Hawai’i. There were times where I felt like playing violin was definitely “an Asian thing” but truth was, I didn’t really see it that way because I was surrounded by other kids of Asian descent who were doing the same thing, so it seemed normal. But when I came to a school that was predominantly white, I started thinking about how much I actually fit the stereotype. Consequently, it made me feel more un-American than I already was, and I questioned whether or not I should be indulging myself in violin if I played Western classical music if I didn’t identity with it much. Although, all of that thinking did not change how I felt about the actual music; I had begun to see these opposing sides of American and Chinese in the social landscape around me. It seemed inherently wrong to embody what looked like contradictions, still being reduced to playing the part that was prescribed for me before I had a say in it.

Hodges’s passage is akin to the simple concept of opposites—two ideas that seem antithetical to each other. But the curious thing about a pair of opposites is that through one subject, we can understand its other. French writer Hélène Cixous proposes the dualities of man and woman, day and night, master and slave, etc., to which can be expanded to things like husband and wife, light and dark, and so on. A pair of oppositions hold power over the other in varying means and quantities depending on the context. This means that symmetry here isn’t really symmetry, it’s more like maintaining a settled asymmetry. Like Hodges suggests, it is where the parts are present, but perhaps in differing quantities, to which can also be called a kind of “balance.” Hodges implies her mother had navigated this space of balance, between being a more Korean mother and being more American one, or simply being a mother and being a wife. In a predominantly white culture, it is very difficult to avoid such labels of being Korean, American, a tiger parent, etc., when you are not of the majority group, especially for Hodges, participating in a very Euro-centric artistic field. Others try to fit you into a box, threatening to break this symmetry, or influencing you to break the symmetry yourself to find a more comfortable way to be. However, Hodges suggests that breaking this symmetry and losing pieces of yourself, is an act of becoming and moving forward. I think implied is also accepting the pieces of yourself that you want to keep in development, the parts that you want to be more of moving forward, and it really boils down to your own self perception.

This book makes me think a lot about how we move through time, how we change through that time, and how we feel that change. What we do certainly influences how we feel that change, for each thing comes with it both internal and external associations. Music may be a correlative for these experiences, as it, too, occupies time and takes us with it to show us time’s fluid qualities. And in music, we can see these changes reflected in ourselves.