Symphony by Tessa Lim

A personal essay that celebrates music and the community behind the author’s creative journey.

First published in Pandan Weekly in January 2025.

​From the author:

I wrote this piece as a love letter to music and the community that supported me through my musical journey. It was a treat to go back in time and relive all those precious memories of learning the piano! Now, years after those experiences, I see how piano lessons didn’t just teach me music; it gave me a wonderful community and an enduring love for music and art. I hope that you, reader, will be taken down memory lane with regard to your own art journey.

A huge thank you to the SLC community that workshopped this piece with me: Nicole Gusto, Wu Xueting, Stephanie Shi and Isabelle Kish. Your kindness and constructive feedback gave me the courage to keep writing and to tell my stories. Also, a heartfelt thank you to Teacher J and Ms W (real names were changed since I’ve lost contact with them), if you ever see this someday. You gave me the precious gift of music. Lastly, to my family—thank you for always being in my corner for all things in life, including this.

Listen to the author read an excerpt of the piece:

Allegro—“Lively, cheerful, brisk”

It seemed as though everyone around me was learning the piano when I was growing up. Perhaps it was an Asian parent trend, coupled with the fact that many of us came from upper-middle-class backgrounds, so we could afford the instrument and the lessons. As a child, however, I perceived none of this privilege. To me, it was just something one did, like attending school; it was part of my education.

I had two piano teachers. In lower primary, I had Teacher Jo, a tall woman with jet-black hair and thick mascara. She wore ankle-high boots that zipped up and made clacking sounds when the heels struck the floor. What I remember most vividly about her was the way she crunched ice between her teeth with such vigour and enthusiasm. My mother would repeatedly warn me about the dangers of cracking my teeth if I did the same.

We went through John Thompson’s Easiest Piano Course, learning how to read notes. Colourful, oddly shaped monster illustrations danced and hung across the pages, supposedly to make the learning experience more enticing for young beginners. We then progressed to John Thompson’s Modern Course for the Piano, where the pieces began to sound a bit more melodic. What stuck in my memory were not so much the pieces, but the red cover and the black-and-white illustrations of pastoral scenes and country folk on the inside.

Sometime later, we switched to another piano teacher called Ms Wong. Word had gotten round our extended family that she taught good technique, and we all wanted to learn from the best. There were a few of us around the same tender, ripe age to learn piano: apart from myself, there were my sister and three cousins. It became a family affair where, at some point, all of us were learning from Ms Wong.

Ms Wong was a lanky, reserved lady with short curly hair. Everything was done meticulously and neatly. It was to the extent that she would sweep our eraser dust off her dining table into a little dustpan at the end of each lesson. She was strict, but never fierce. She was firm on teaching us the right technique—the main one was “tapping”—fingers lifted high above the keyboard, extended at the knuckles, before coming down strong in a rounded shape on the keys. This, she explained, was how a good note was produced.

Tapping ensured that we were able to play increasingly difficult pieces without tiring out or compromising on quality. But boy, did I hate the process. Part of the pieces we played included Hanon, a set of torturous, repetitive exercises aimed at improving finger strength, agility, precision and speed. To top it off, these were often paired with a metronome during practice to ensure we kept time. Its long slender finger wagged back and forth loudly like clockwork and mocked me as I played. The whole combination sounded like chaos to my ears—I much preferred pieces with variation and melody. On the contrary, my cousins were excellent at Hanon exercises perhaps because they were athletes with good finger strength; they could endure the constant striking of the keys.

The weekly lessons would last for an hour each, a mix of music theory and practical. The former was boring and technical, while the latter was what I eagerly anticipated, getting my hands on the piano and making actual music. At the end of each lesson, Ms Wong wrote short notes in neat, cursive script in our notebooks. These were instructions and homework for us. “Practise bars 2 to 4,” “work on left hand,” and “more body movement and expression” were some examples of what she wrote.

These weekly rhythms and rituals were how I began my piano journey.

Andante—“At a walking pace”

Progress was only really perceptible when you looked back over the months of regular practice and refinement. I made my way through the various piano books and rose steadily through the grades. After a period of having lessons with Ms Wong, she told me about a mini-concert coming up.

Mini-concerts were organised yearly. All of Ms Wong’s students would gather at someone’s house to play and showcase their latest pieces. These concerts were nerve-wracking, but when you’re a child you don’t comprehend the magnitude of these things and just do it anyway. You power through the nerves and perform. And you marvel, awestruck at older kids who play at much higher standards than you, and think about how you are going to get there one day. I can still hear “Top of the World” in my ears, a cover of the Carpenters’ song, played by a student at one concert. It was a bright, soul-lifting tune, and it drifted out the window as a blessing to the world that sunny afternoon.

Because we had a little family student group going on, Ms Wong would arrange for us to play duets together for ease of practice. One concert, I played “Beauty and the Beast” from the classic movie with my cousin. That was one of the most fun mini-concerts, because I didn’t feel so alone on the piano bench.

With each mini-concert, my pieces grew more advanced. One of my last concerts, I was presented with Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 in C# minor. This melancholic piece had been played by the Polish pianist and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman, whose life I had seen in the film The Pianist. This was a piece I fell in love with because of its complexity and rich backstory. And I told myself, the fifteen-year-old me, that I wanted to do Szpilman proud. “For Włady,” I told myself each time I played this piece. Sadly, I botched one of the running lines during the concert, so nervous was I, that I went home feeling rather disappointed in myself.

When I hit grade 5 or so, another aspect was introduced during lessons: music appreciation. These were segments of the lesson where Ms Wong would play classical music tracks and teach us to identify them. We had to purchase a CD box set titled 101 Famous Classical Masterpieces and listen to it at home. I finally knew the names to famous tunes like “The Blue Danube.” While these were eye-opening, the one I enjoyed most was The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten. I loved the way the British narrator introduced the instruments one by one, as though they were characters that got their turn to speak. It was a magical conversation between instruments—of whom I liked the wind section best—and eventually culminated in a grand, all-consuming refrain of the original melody line.

The only way to really get better at piano was to practise, practise, practise. This drudgery is what puts most people off and leads to them eventually dropping out of piano lessons altogether. Strangely, I never really found it a huge chore (except for those dreadful Hanon exercises). Maybe the nature of pure repetition and putting in the numbers appealed to the perfectionist in me. After dinner at 8 pm, I would obediently potter over to the piano and begin my forty-five minutes to an hour of practice without questions or whining. Up and down the keyboard I would go, drumming out scales and arpeggios. Over and over again I would drill tricky parts in exam pieces. I’d stare at unfamiliar scores in front of me, working out the notes as I practised sight-reading.

In retrospect I wonder how everyone at home put up with it. Every day, for an hour, they would have to endure listening to the same pieces being played, ad nauseum, with slips and trips and mistakes. Then, they would have to listen to me work on the parts where I made errors, which was probably even more maddening. A neighbour downstairs complained at some point because I was disrupting his prayer time, and we had to work out a timing at which we would not clash. Such were the problems of playing a grand, loud instrument.

Minuet—“A slow, elegant dance for two”

But the piano also brought about moments of communal joy. Through the piano I remember my grandmother Mama fondly, in the days before she fell ill. She had always loved singing, and when I played Chinese pieces that she recognised, like the Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto, she would sing along too. Through the little window that connected my parents’ apartment with hers, her powerful voice drifted, along with the delicious smells of whatever she was cooking at that time. She was a good singer and hit all the notes perfectly. During those times, we were one in harmony. These days, she is subdued, a shell of her former self, and I wish I had cherished those shared moments more.

My parents were supportive and never forceful about piano lessons. This is something I am extremely grateful for. Growing up, I’d heard and read of tiger parents who were insistent that their child pursue the highest level of mastery of whatever instrument they were learning. When my sister voiced out that she was not keen to continue piano lessons, my parents did not chastise her or view her as any less than me.

Rather, they saw it as their duty to be the enablers and nurturers of the things we loved. They quietly sent me to and from piano lessons and paid for them all. In my earlier years of piano playing, Mum and I would take a 1.5-hour bus ride to and from class. She would sit in for the entire hour, earnestly taking in all that Ms Wong had to say, even if she didn’t fully understand the terminology and technicalities. Later on, when I attended lessons after secondary school, Dad would swing by to fetch me and leave a plastic bag of two siew mais hanging behind his seat for me to eat. After gobbling the food down, I would collapse in a heap on the backseat to sleep the rest of the journey home. The progress I made in piano is owed in large part to their unwavering support.

At some point I began exploring piano pieces on my own. I came across a pianist on YouTube called Kyle Landry, and he played beautiful covers of songs I liked, such as “Comptine d’un autre été” from the famous French film Amélie. I played that piece over and over again, admittedly more times than the actual pieces I was supposed to practise. I played pieces from computer games, like The Sims and Final Fantasy. One day, my neighbour opposite, a teenager, came knocking on my door. “Can you please tell me what piece you are playing?” he asked, adding that he liked it very much and wanted to play it too. Indeed, it was a beautiful piece called “To Zanarkand” from Final Fantasy X. Even Ms Wong liked it when I showed it to her, and she ended up sharing it with her students. The music drew us all together in shared appreciation and joy.

Sonata—“Exposition, development, recapitulation”

Years went by and what made me stay committed to the instrument was a deepening love for the music. Yes, the practice was tedious and not always fun, but the music I was making with my own two hands made me feel so, so much. Joy, melancholy, nostalgia, tension, energy, calm—all rolled into one. It showed in the way I played; my body moved and swayed instinctively in response to the music. While my cousins were technically strong, I conveyed emotion the most naturally. Ms Wong termed this “body movement” and wanted her students to master this as they became more advanced.

Piano lessons led up to the final grade 8 examination. (Exams were inescapable, being in a country that viewed these as the pinnacle of learning.) A year before, I had done the grade 7 exam and found it absolutely terrifying, even more so than mini-concerts. The examiners were flown in from the UK, these big hulking men with British accents who watched you silently as you played. I had practised so hard in the preceding months but somehow my shaking, sweaty hands betrayed me. Having flubbed my way to a nervy pass in the grade 7 exam, I didn’t hold out much hope for the next one.

Thankfully, the result was a pleasant surprise: a distinction. It was not so much the result itself that felt rewarding, rather, it was the fact that my love for the music had finally come through in my playing and was recognised. When I finished my last piece, a tango number titled “Retrato de Alfredo Gobbi,” the examiner looked at me and smiled kindly. “You like that one, don’t you,” he remarked, and I nodded shyly.

Following the exam, I deliberated on whether to continue lessons and work towards a diploma in piano. But that desire petered out as other life commitments crowded my world. The intense schooling system and other activities like additional classes, projects, and co-curricular activities left no room for the presence of art in my life. It was a pragmatic point of view: I’d finished the major exams; there were other mountains to scale. Hence the piano lessons eventually stopped, and I never saw Ms Wong again. I wish I had said a proper goodbye to this fantastic teacher.

The piano playing itself also slowly dwindled. From time to time, I’d get on the bench and tinker away at songs I’d heard—pop, movie soundtracks, game soundtracks—but the lack of structure meant it wasn’t regular. I was slowly losing the art, and I didn’t realise it. It was also during this period of secondary education that I found myself reading books for pleasure less frequently; it was full steam ahead for academic success, and any form of art was unconsciously seen as superfluous.

Fortuitously, months later I started learning how to play the guitar from a church friend. With this new skill I joined the church worship team. While in the band, I observed something interesting about the keyboardists, one of whom would be my future husband. They seemed to play a completely different style of piano altogether. Their style comprised chords and improvisation and—gasp—no scores. It worked perfectly as accompaniment to songs, and was so different from the kind of music I used to play. I tried to learn from some of them but couldn’t seem to fully grasp this obscure concept. So I simply appreciated this alternative, beautiful way of playing, and acknowledged that piano grades and exams were not everything. What was most important was that I had music and art in my life once again.

It’s been almost fifteen years since my last piano lesson. On the outside, all those years of piano lessons may seem like a waste. I can no longer play anywhere close to the same level as I did before. It’s not impossible, but it’ll take time to build competence again. Contrast this to my husband, whom I listen to with envy these days. He “only” learnt the piano till grade 6 and had gone on to learn the keyboard on his own. He plays worship and pop songs beautifully by ear, a skill that’s still on my bucket list.

Yet, I know this—what a gift piano lessons had been, and the biggest change had been inward rather than outward. Beyond the technical mastery, the music had filled my life with a richness like no other. It continued to feed into my later years: the way I would unconsciously turn on piano or orchestral music on Spotify as a constant background soundtrack, while I studied and did household chores. The grit with which I threw myself into junior college and medical school, knowing that doing time in something was one of the key ways to become better at it. How years later, sitting at a Hans Zimmer Candlelight Concert in CHIJMES Hall, I closed my eyes and smiled as the music filled and lifted my heart. The point was the art and how it made me a better person: happier, more reflective and appreciative of life’s beauty.

On quiet, reflective days like this, old memories illuminate my mind as golden rays in the afternoon: Mama singing along to my playing. Bobbing in unison with my cousins as we played duets. Teacher Jo and Ms Wong patiently teaching and encouraging me. A conversation with Mum on a long bus ride to class. Dad smiling at me as I got in the car after a lesson. There’s a symphony in my head, and it will never cease.

Tessa Lim fell in love with stories when she was a child, thanks to the cozy home she grew up in. It was one full of books, love and encouragement—the perfect setting for creativity to flourish. She enjoys writing creative non-fiction as it allows her to process life’s happenings.

Thank you for reading!

Pandan Weekly is a bi-annual zine and weekly email series produced by SEA Lit Circle, a community of writers and readers from Southeast Asia and the diaspora. At SEA Lit Circle, we inspire each other to write fresh, compelling work that’s true to ourselves, and we encourage each other to read and be more open to new works, stories, and perspectives within and beyond the region.

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