Essay | Mad Men and Mad Me

1st June 2021

I take pride in that I have watched Mad Men—an American period drama with 92 episodes—three times. And during the pandemic I went in for a fourth, because as the psychology suggests, in times of uncertainty we magnetise back to things we can predict—a comfort mechanism that revolves around control, if you like. My obsession, really, comes down to protagonist Don Draper’s relatability. Played by Jon Hamm, Draper is a lauded creative genius at Sterling Cooper, a small advertising agency on Madison Avenue. But what part, specifically, of this broodingly handsome, tall, successful, rich, ad-man in the 1960s could I possibly attach myself to? 

In a flashback to the Korean war, Draper - real name Dick Whitman - accidentally drops his lighter onto the oil-soaked dirt which ignites a deadly explosion. The blast killed and seared his superior, the real Don Draper, beyond recognition. Whitman, then, in a knee-jerk reaction, steals his dog-tag and assumes his identity to not only desert the war effort, but to escape his abusive and poverty-stricken life at home.

Matthew Weiner, the master director behind Mad Men, and his unparalleled band of writers were immaculate with the detail in regard to Draper’s existentialism. In one episode’s conclusion, Draper and his trophy wife, Betty, take the kids—Sally, Bobby and their newborn, Gene—around the neighbourhood to trick-or-treat. They arrive at the home of Carlton, a family friend, who acknowledges the kids’ Halloween costumes; the parents are seen in their normal everyday attire. It then cuts to a mid-shot of Carlton who looks up, off-screen, and says with supposed wit to Draper “And who are you supposed to be?”. The episode ends with a slow zoom-in on Draper, his face showing visible signs of suppressed inner turmoil. Carlton wasn’t just teasing him, he was teasing me, too, as if he knew my own troubles.

Who am I supposed to be? British? Chinese? An equal dose of each? Draper mirrors, in some ways, my own conflict of being British born with Chinese blood, and the racism I’ve experienced along the way. There are people with whom I have talked personally about how they wished they were white and resented their parents for being Asian themselves. Pain soaked their words as they implied that they were born into a world that wasn’t made for them. It hardens a lump in my throat to learn of these accounts of racial self-hatred, because growing up I was very much guilty of the same thing. 

The Western media portrayal of East Asians had, and still has, a huge influence on the way we present ourselves to the outside world. They’ve caricatured Asian men as effeminate, nerdy, and utterly incapable of courting the opposite sex. As a confused teenager, when I’d be in a class with another East Asian kid and they would display the aforementioned, stereotypical characteristics, I’d watch them closely. I’d watch them because I didn’t want to be like them. I’d avoid displaying any Asian traits that the West finds undesirable. I just wanted the country I was born in to accept me. 

In another Mad Men episode titled ‘5G’, Draper’s half-brother, Adam Whitman, notices his picture in the newspaper from an award ceremony and tracks him down, having initially believed that he died in the Korean War. But Draper couldn’t risk having remnants of his past interrupt his inauthentic life. He offers Adam $5,000 to leave and to never return. The innocence in Adam’s face to find out his only surviving family member is not only alive and successful, but wants him to disappear forever, is painful.

This seemed to resemble my own rejection of my Chinese heritage, and being paranoid of it following me around in British society. I never used to utter a word of Cantonese in public in fear of racist retaliation. I listened to heavy, masculine American music like Slipknot to counteract the Asian stereotypes of weak effeminacy. I read books by white, rather than Asian, authors and moulded my mind along their lines of thinking. These cultural markers that I took on—the language, the music, the books—became my symbol of Draper’s dog-tag switch. I felt ashamed—the men in the street with their mock kung-fu vocalisations, the sharp ‘C’ word that sub-humanises me. In hindsight, talking to my Asian brothers and sisters, I began to understand why I cut off cultural ties: it was for survival.

But it feels as though things are changing. The media’s usage of Asian imagery when reporting on COVID-19, such as images saying “You are the virus. You are the culprits.”, has resulted in a recent petition by six East and South East Asian women, conceived out of a collective anger. The silence has been broken. My reliance on adopting a Western mind to survive has since waned. I have matured, and I’m learning a lot about how I manifest my true self in both the Western and Eastern worlds. Unlike Draper, whose identity theft is a crime, I am free of legal consequences when expressing my troubled past. Maturity is signalled to start when you are brave enough to face yourself. 

Draper’s development in its entirety is reassuring; his questions are explored and answered by Weiner and the writers, like a dress rehearsal of what an identity disaster could be. I still haven’t lived out my own life; I’m still changing. I’m shaped by external forces and still finding my answers.

When I was young my mother always loved to use Chinese philosophy on me. One saying translates from Cantonese as such: by re-visiting you will always learn something new each time. I probably won’t completely resolve my identity crisis even if I watched Mad Men for a fifth, sixth, or seventh time. But with each viewing, I’ll respond to Carlton by admitting that I don’t know who I am supposed to be, but I sincerely hope to have a different answer than I did the last time.

Essay | Why Humans Make Music?

16th May 2021

Nearly a decade ago, under the kind consideration of our A-Level music lecturers, they organised a concert trip for us to attend the Royal Academy of Music, London, the great city of music-making.

RAM put on in their own grand concert hall a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, or more famously known as the “Emperor” Concerto. The pianist, who had an extra brain to conduct, was none other than the French master of subtlety, colour and tonal warmth, Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

I can still recall the exact point where I was arrested by the music, causing a clamping sensation in my chest, slowing creeping up to produce a razor-like scratch in my throat. The introduction of the piano in the second movement (adagio un poco mosso), a passage of quiet, trickling descending notes that made one picture fine crystals falling out of the sky, made my eyes glisten with tears. They emanated from this feeling of uncorrupted bliss, acceptance, security, and re-birth.

I left the dark concert hall into the broad afternoon daylight disorientated; my view of the world shifted to a vantage place I’d never been before. I found it impossible, from then on, to stop external stimuli such as beautiful musical expressions from putting me under the influence of wonder. I pondered without much result as to why that particular piano passage, or any “great” music in general, arouses such intense emotions and sudden awareness of the enormity of life. It wasn’t a necessity to have shed a tear at that point in time, but I ended up doing it outside of my own will.

People of Science and Arts have subjected themselves to the fundamentals of music. Why do we make music and enjoy it? Humans aren’t exceptions when it comes to music, or my favourite description – “sonic mathematics” - from a YouTube comment on a video with Jacob Collier riffing about esoteric music theory; Birds, too, have their own songs. They tweet with admirable variety across landscapes and conjure up complexities of their very own. Humans, however, are more advanced in that our music tends to encapsulate the Human Condition. Understanding how the Human Condition is reflected in “sonic mathematics” is a Herculean task but steps can be made if I narrowed our viewpoint – that is of a classical pianist with a pinch of philosophical musical thought.

The conception of musical ideas in the classical world can, as a matter of fact, come from, but not limited to, profound emotions like nostalgia or existential crises; they can come from trying to grasp, intellectually or irrationally, Life’s meaning. The former emotion makes me think of 20th Russian modern romantic composer/exile Sergei Rachmaninoff, writing about his beloved Russia.

The latter’s most prominent figure that I think of is the 20th Century Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, Gustav Mahler, who earned his legacy through his post-Beethoven symphonies. “Whoever listens to my music intelligently,” he said, “will see my life transparently revealed.” Music composition is expression of complex feeling and thoughts where words utterly fail to do justice, but there was a time where literal words in the form of a programme were used by Mahler to help listeners understand the context of his symphonies. No sooner when it had been written than it was thrown out. Overexplaining one’s musical story is a double-edged sword that unintentionally severs the principle of a “pure” symphony – the music itself stands alone. Music affects the emotion and the psychology, not the rationality, so a “concrete image” would be detrimental. Once asked by a journalist on the meaning of his Second Symphony, Mahler replied “I believe I have expressed my intentions clearly enough in the music. When I conceived it, I was in no way concerned with a detailed programme of events, but at most with an emotion.” These emotions that Mahler had were something of gripping crises in existentialism. He was tormented, like many formidable artists were, by the realities of the human condition. What is the purpose of all this toiling and suffering? Will death at last reveal the meaning of life? But the remarkability of Mahler is that despite this drudgery and gloom he was also very human, he relished in the profundity of life. He swam, walked, hiked up hills. Even when his doctor gave a prognosis and estimation of his time left on this earth, he declared with exuberance “I am thirstier for life than ever”. And his symphonies embraced all that was human and the joy of living. Music becomes the medium to transform that inner turmoil and its uncontainable energy into something where mere words end up doing nothing but committing an offence of descriptive inadequacy.

When an artist like Mahler, with all his grievances about the human condition, become too concerned with this limitation of our biology, he turns to creative outpouring for consolation. Although there are theories that propose music, from an evolutionary standpoint, as being carried out by humans to give cohesiveness to a group, classical music can be a very individual experience. A movement of a symphony, for example, can remind you of a time in your significant time in your life where you felt all-consuming, or the moment when the loss of an important person in your life collapses you; or some music can make you feel jubilant, brimming with hope about Humanity’s future – we listen to music that makes is feel understood as a person.

The most important music to us are the ones that tackle the problems that we are going through, and whether they succeed or fail in soothing the roughness of our struggles, is subject to subjectivity. But we must acknowledge that the artists try.

In Deryck Cooke’s essay Mahler as Man and Artist, “the romantics intended their symphonies to be expressive of life; the difficulty was explaining in words just what they expressed.” We make and enjoy music because it helps us with the impossible: to say the unsayable.

Essay | Why Should Young People Go to Classical Music Concerts?

23rd December 2020

The world will always remain busy: new technology seems to be developing at an unbelievable rate, politics – not just in our country, but in many places around the world – gets more divisive by the minute. Many people find their own ways to turn eyes and ears away from the noise that this world makes. They seek comfort, relaxation, a way to alleviate anxiety, a place telling them that the world will be okay in optimistic tones. What they need is classical music. 

The seemingly unmovable stereotype is that the classical genre is exclusively for the elite and elderly. But recently, though, this stereotype does seem to be budging. A 2019 report found that 35% of adults listened to classical music and “it was the fourth most popular music genre”, garnering more fans than R&B or hip-hop. 

A third of the audience are under 35 years old and the reason for them listening is to break away from their playlist of popular music. Roshni, 24, who works in pharmaceuticals, listens to the piano works of Claude Debussy in order to “escape”. It is the first word that resonates with her to describe this form of music. “It is a distraction,” she says, “similar to reading a book”.  

Sitting in a darkened concert hall, from my experience, enhances this feeling of escape from the world. I prefer concerts that have no windows with a lone spotlight on a single or group of musicians. While listening and gazing in awe of their virtuosity, I begin to reminisce about my own life, at the same time exploring the deep, colourful musical world with the musician present. 

There are various other benefits, too. A research team at Oxford University in 2004 found that listening to 25 minutes of Mozart or Strauss can “significantly lower your blood pressure”, when compared with people who did not hear any music at all. In order for the pressure to fall, the music as suggested by the researchers should have no lyrics, subtle changes in volume and rhythm, but certain parts of the music repeated in intervals. 

Classical music reduces stress levels too. If and when you have a bad day at the office – even if that’s the home office – putting on some Rachmaninoff or Ravel may help lower the cortisol levels in the body.

In another study, pregnant women reported that “listening to classical music every week relieved their stress and anxiety”. This find also extended to hospital patients, too, in helping them reduce anxiety pre- and post-surgery. 

Caroline, 23, says that classical music is not only beautiful but calming. She explains that the purity is what attracts her to it, compared with modern day’s tendency to over-sexualise some other genres. 

Moreover, listening to your favourite piece of classical music in bed 45 minutes before you sleep, can help improve the quality of your slumber. Studies have shown that the speed of the piece matters, suggesting that the ideal tempo for a good quality kip is around 60 beats per minute. So, maybe next time you’re snuggled under your duvet, opt for some Schubert instead of radiating your eyes with your mobile’s harmful blue light. 

These are all biological and physiological reasons to listen to classical music. But, as a classically trained pianist, I have often found another benefit: often times classical music can help me express the inexpressible. It is a pathway to my deepest thoughts when words fail. This music can be so deep, layered and textured. All the instruments are a different voice from one another. Fortunately, classical music’s narrative isn’t one-size-fits-all, helped along by it sometimes being lyric-less. You can attach your own personal story to which you could relate, much like popular music. Sometimes showing to a friend my favourite classical piece – whether it is solo piano or orchestral – I am in subtle ways telling them feelings I have but haven’t the vocabulary to utter it.  

We all know how stressful the pandemic is; with the uncertainty and the constant barrage of twists and turns in government policy. When this all ends, as I am sure it will, go to your nearest concert hall and immerse yourself in a classical concert. You will find emotions you haven’t felt in a long time, or perhaps if this is your first experience of the genre, new ones altogether.

It’s an effective past time; listening to it live soothes your own world inside, whilst also giving you ample time for reflection to figure out the one unravelling outside.