Blog Post 1: GH

One of the most meaningful experiences since I’ve arrived in Lusaka was listening to music with my host sisters, Thokozile and Nandila who are aged four and six, respectively. I had been listening to music with headphones when they asked to hear. I switched on Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony and they took turns putting on the headphones. Nandila immediately closed her eyes and started conducting to herself. They asked me to play it out loud so we went to the sitting room. I warned them that the symphony was over 45 minutes long and they still insisted they wanted to listen to it. I asked them to turn off the TV and was surprised when they obliged since they usually insist on it being on all the time. Nandi and Thoko started dancing around the sitting room. The two of them were spinning around in their socks on the tile floor, trying to jump the length of the rug, and waving empty plastic containers around. Nandi closed her eyes the entire time, crashing awkwardly into the couches. Thoko insisted that I watch her every move, shouting at me every time I looked down to see how long they had been listening to the symphony. In these very short and magical moments, Nandi’s movements were synced to subtle and complex countermelodies in the music even though it was her first time listening to the piece. At the height of tragedy expressed in the piece, she stood in the middle of the sitting room with her eyes closed, arms raised above her head and hands outstretched. There was something very pure and raw about the emotion she expressed—exactly the type of emotion that musicians try to pass along to an audience, which she had captured in her own interpretative dance at only six years old.

Before this, we did not listen to very much music at home. I occasionally listened to “You Raise Me Up” with Thoko and Nandi as they belted the lyrics at all the wrong times in four different keys while hysterically laughing or heard Mami Linda turn on music to help her one-month old baby sleep at night. Since we first listened to Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony, Nandi and Thoko have asked to listen to music with me most evenings when I come home from work. Whenever I have internet, I search for new pieces to download for them. Nandi has started to remember the pieces, often requesting for the Overture to Romeo & Juliet as “the scary one.” I’ve never felt more at home than when I sat on the reclining chair watching Nandi and Thoko dance to Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony. It has been one of my favorite pieces after I spent over a year studying the score with a late conductor who was very important to me. He had convinced me to continue playing violin in college, constantly reminding me to remember what drew us to music in the first place and how the emotions of composer that lived hundreds of years ago could transcend through generations of people of different cultures and lived experiences. Seeing Nandi and Thoko exude many of the emotions that I feel when I listen to and perform that piece through their dancing made me feel more connected to them on an unspoken level. In these first two weeks, I’ve experience a fair amount of cognitive dissonance and anxiety as I engage in new and unfamiliar situations. Sharing these 45 minutes of being swept away by a piece so important to me reaffirmed these common human expressions of emotion between my host sisters and I, and made me feel more confident in my ability to engage with experiences that seem very different, but are rooted in similar cultural values.