Piano and Cello

I lived in Philadelphia for about a year, when I was five or six, with my parents studying as graduate students. It was then that certain pieces of American culture were forever stamped on my memory, not necessarily as something foreign, but rather as part of my own childhood--cream cheese, George Michael (my mom's favorite) and Steve Wonder, Seven Eleven slurpee, Toys R Us and transformer toys, Sesame Street, and so on.

Probably Halloween, but I'm not sure. But look at those super inspired drawings. I must say, my country's art education didn't do well in recognizing and fostering my potential (lol).

And there was a huge (at least it was for this little boy) underground arcade where my mom did part-times. One of those Christmas seasons, obviously.

So, my favorites. Things I remember. One of them was Disney animations, and particularly the "Silly Symphony" series (I learned the title of it only recently). I loved it so much that my parents asked the video rental shop guy to make a copy of it (it was still the VCR era). I must have watched it some dozens of times. You know how kids are.

And, the number 1 -- Silly Symphony, Music Land.

I still enjoy watching this. So very much.


Horn people (Trombone? Tuba? I'm not sure), Cello people, just fascinating.

But let's say people are really like that. That the world is populated with musical instrument people. And imagine there's a historian who looks and thinks just like Foucault. And let's say he's a Viola. Foucault the violan. I'm already excited.

So, this Violan Foucau (the ancients didn't want the superfluous 'lt' dangling at the end) studies, of course, a certain kind of genealogy. He writes in one of his books, titled Piano and Cello: the History of Sound. Since this is the world of People of Music, of people who sound-speak, "sound" means, from our point of view, language, or more precisely, the ways in which people articulate their thoughts.

In the history of this world, the relationship between the Pianos and the Cellos is similar to the relationship between the Romans and the Greeks, in the sense the latter exited before the former, and the former overwrote the latter in many ways, including, most importantly, the fundamental nature of language.

What happened? According to our renowned Violan historian, the transition from the Cellos to the Pianos resulted in the compartmentalization of sound. The Pianos preferred precision. They desired a sound standard, the universal notes, so that anyone within the boundaries of the Great Piano Empire would hear the exact same notes when the same music is played. Now there were Tuners, working at the Universal Keys Institutes all over the empire.

The Universal Keys Institutes. Foucau emphasizes the significance of the word "keys", making a critical note here: now the Pianos virtually replaced, at least in the official realm, the notion of sound with notes. Before, sound was continuous. Also, the Cellos music was predominantly oral. The notion of writing down notes and keeping scores didn't exist then. But now, with the advent of the Pianos, the continuous scale of sound began to be compartementalized; sound was divided into notes, and then assigned to individual keys.

It was, of course, a relatively gradual change. Chronologically speaking, in the earlier period it was enough to differentiate each note from others (compartmentalization); then, the Institutes began to established throughout the empire, standarizing notes.

Another interesting, and quite fascinating. point Foucau makes is that the development of orchestra during the Pianos era does not signify the development in our thinking. It has been a common belief that the invention of orchestra marked the monumental leap in the history of our mental faculty, on the account that orchestra made it possible to create more complex ideas by playing multiple streams of sound simultaneously and harmoniously. However, Foucau argues that orchestra was in fact an effort to reclaim the polivocality and the free association of sounds the Cellos had, while maintaining the Pianos control over sound. While Foucau doesn't manifestly advocate the Cellos ways, he makes it clear that the our current civilization built upon the Pianos civilization is actually in many ways a detour, a perpetual pursuit of the lost sound between the keys.

My army years.

I don't usually talk about my army years, because a) I don't like 'men talks' (in South Korea, a two-year service is mandatory for men, while women can choose to be officers, which is still quite rare), and b) I don't consider it something to boast about (no matter what they actually do, the bottom line is that military exists to kill). But, still, there's no doubt that it was a very peculiar experience.

When the time comes, men who 'failed to meet' the conditions of exemption are conscripted, and they have some choices: the regular army, navy, air force, conscripted policemen (including the riot police), etc. The most peculiar one is called the KATUSA, Korean Augmentation Troops to the United States Army. Basically, they are Korean soldiers doing their service at U.S. Army camps in Korea, and I was one of them.

The KATUSA soldiers are under two chains of command, obviously. They are almost the same with the U.S. soldiers in terms of whose orders they follow, with whom they do most of their work, the kind of uniform they wear, the rules they have to obey such as curfew, etc., except they get promoted, paid, and discharged by the army of their own country.

So, some interesting bits of those days:

* There are American holidays and Korean holidays. On the former, we got days off. But on the latter, it sometimes got a bit 'political'. As I belonged to a support battalion, and our job was to maintain, to keep the machine running, it was almost always busy around the year. So, if we went too aggressive about getting our leaves on Korean holidays, although it was our legitimate right, it could always lead to situations where Korean soldiers as a whole loose their favor with their American bosses, so to speak. Of course there were good ones, too. But the thing was that, every one of us had to keep us as a group look good.

* On weekends, I would wake up at about 4:30 in the morning (one can be so diligent when he is off duty), dress up as quickly as possible, and embark on my way home, which took about two hours, I think. The gate opened at 5, and in winter, it was darn cold. The worst part was when I got to the subway station, after about 20-minute bus ride from my camp. The way the metropolitan subway lines were built in and around Seoul was that the outer part of the lines (in areas not as densely populated as the central city zone) were built on the ground level, and the same goes for the respective stations. The station where I took my train was just like that, and as it was the very first   station of the line, the doors of the train would left open until it finally started to move (the wait took about five minutes), and all the while freezing wind would blow into the train. What made it even worse was that, for an unconceivable reason, the city decided to replace the old seats covered with cloths with metal seats.

* Since the U.S. soliders changed their station every year or so, and officers were often transferred to other units even during one year, while I with other KATUSA soldiers stayed in the same positions for two years, I worked for about four or five officers during my time. All captains, one African American woman, one African American man, two white men, and one Puerto Rican man. I think I spent the longest time with the last one, the Puerto Rican, who would order pizza for two of us every time we had to work late (like I said, we were always busy, and it was especially so for me and my captain). My English was just enough to make everyday conversations sound fluent, including the usual work talks, but not enough to discuss, say, politics, which was a shame, as a chance to have serious conversations with the U.S. Army officers would probably never come again in my life. Still, it was then I learned a little bit about the peculiar relationship between the U.S. and his country, and he was the only one, including soldiers in my own rank, that I took to the city and did a little tour together; old palaces, traditional markets, Korean restaurants, those kind of usual suspects.

More on tomorrow.