Music has always played an important role in my life, and I have always found comfort in it during some of my darkest hours. In particular, I have often listened to songs that I feel reflect me as a person, regardless of whether I like them a great deal as songs, during times of crisis, as a means to remind myself who I am and what I fight for. This has led me to what I think is an interesting artistic experiment: putting together a playlist that represents, not necessarily my tastes for listening to today, but me as a person through my personal history.
To put it another way: if I was hosting an Olympics, what would the opening ceremony look, and more importantly, sound, like? Or, if I were designing a Voyager probe record to give a person I’ve never met a taste of what me means, what would it focus on?
I could easily spend a great deal of time compiling, editing, and rearranging a truly epic playlist that would last several hours. But that misses the point of this exercise. Because, while my interest in listening to my own soundtrack bight be effectively infinite, that of other people is not. The goal here is not to compile a soundtrack, but to gather a few selections that convey the zeitgeist of my past.
This is my first attempt at this. I have chosen four songs, each of which represents roughly five years of my life. I have compiled a playlist available for listening here (Yes, I have a YouTube account/channel; I use it to make my own playlists for listening. Nothing special). The songs and my takeaway from them are described below.
1997-2002: Rhapsody in Blue
If I had to pick a single piece to represent my life, it would probably have to be Rhapsody in Blue, by George Gershwin. This piece was my favorite musical piece for a long time, and I remember during our visits with my grandparents when my grandfather would put on his classical records, and I would be thrilled when this song came on.
Rhapsody in Blue is perhaps best known as the United jingle, which is part of why I loved it so much. It represented flying, travel, adventure, and being treated like a member of high society as we flew in business class. I also reveled in knowing the name of a song that everyone else knew merely as a jingle. The energy and strong melody of the piece still captivate me to this day, and remind me of the feeling of childhood delight with each new adventure and horizon.
2002 – 2007: Pack all Your Troubles Arr. Mark Northfield
Aside from being one of my favorite arrangements of any song, this particular arrangement captures many of the conflicting feelings I have towards the first part of my schooling. I was indeed happy to be in a learning environment where I could soak up knowledge, but at the same time I often found the classes themselves dreadfully dull. Additionally, while I was initially quite happy with my social group, within a couple of years I had gone from being at the center of all playground affairs to being a frequently bullied pariah.
This song juxtaposes the cheerful, upbeat World War I song with a musical soundscape of a battlefield of the same time period, becoming more chaotic and pessimistic as time goes on. This also reflects my general experience in primary school, as my social life, my overall happiness, and my physical health all deteriorated over this time from a point of relative contentment to a point of absolute crisis. (2007 was the first year in which I genuinely remember nearly dying, and the first time I was confronted with a bona-fide disability.)
2007-2012: Time, Forward!
If 2007 was a breaking point in my life, then the years following were a period of picking up the pieces, and learning how to adapt to my new reality. Time, Forward, by Georgy Sviridov, captures much the same feeling, which makes sense considering it is frequently used to represent, the Soviet 20s, including at the Sochi games. This period in my life was chaotic and turbulent, and of the things I have come to regret saying, doing, or believing, most of them happened during this period. Yet it was also a formative time, cementing the medical habits that would ensure my survival, and meeting several new friends.
During this time was when my family moved back to the United States. With a fresh start in a new hemisphere, and several new disabilities and diagnoses to juggle, I was determined above all not to allow myself to be bullied and victimized the way I had been during primary school. I threw myself into schoolwork, and tried to avoid any display of vulnerability whatsoever. This, I discovered, did not make me any more popular or liked than I had been during primary school, which yielded a great deal of angst and conflict.
2012 – 2017: Dance of the Knights
You’ll notice that this song is both pseudo-classical, in the same vein as Rhapsody in Blue, while still being known as a work of Prokofiev, a Russian, and later Soviet, composer. In this respect, it is somewhere between the 2007-2012 period, and the 1997-2002 period, which I reckon is a reasonably accurate assessment of the past five years. The great highs and lows between late primary and early high school, which often involved grave medical threats to my life, have thankfully (hopefully) given way to a more predictably unpredictable set of obstacles; not only medically, but socially and psychologically, as my friends and I have grown up and learned to handle drama better.
The commonalities between the earlier pieces also reflect the change in priorities that I have worked very hard to (re)cultivate after seeing the distress that my existentialist focus on schoolwork brought me. I have in the past few years, begun to reprioritize those things that I believe are more likely to bring me happiness over mere success, harkening back to the things I held dear, and found so intriguing in Rhapsody in Blue in early childhood. At the same time, the piece, partly as a result of its context in Romeo and Juliet, has a distinctly mature, adult air to it; something which I struggle with internally, but which I am nevertheless thrust into regularly as I age.
If anyone else is interested in trying this project/challenge, please, go ahead and let me know. I can imagine that this could make a good group prompt, and I would be very interested to compare others’ playlists with my own.
