(Original posted on April 5, 2015)
A thought suddenly struck me, and I wanted to listen to music featuring the tabla, one of my favorite instruments from India. As I revisited various tabla music on my CDs and YouTube, I coincidentally came to know about the music unit ASA-CHANG & Junray.
As I started listening to their representative song “Hana,” I felt myself drawn in, as if grabbed by the collar.
Grabbed by the collar—meaning I was given a forceful trigger by the power of music. However, this gradually turned into an active experience, accompanied by the thought, “I want to keep listening.”
To change the expression “grabbed by the collar” to a gentler one, it would be like being greeted with a handshake from the other side, as if saying, “Hello, *you* are who I’ve been waiting for,” then having a shoulder leaned against yours, and both of you sitting down. And as you stay there, feeling that you cannot refuse it at all, even thinking that the option to refuse never even existed in the first place, the boundary between yourself and the music becomes blurred. I think it can be described that way.
Within me, as I continued listening, feelings like happiness at being immersed in the music, along with regret and jealousy (“Why couldn’t I reach this path – this way of making/expressing music?”) came and went. But at the same time, I felt a strong sense of gratitude that ASA-CHANG & Junray had materialized such a work with this much intensity.
A characteristic feature when encountering a personal “masterpiece” is the feeling of strong hesitation to stop listening midway through. Before judgments like like or dislike, good or bad, even come into play, you simply “cannot stop listening.” And by the time you finish listening, the song has already completely occupied a position of being important to you.
Who was it who said that encountering great music is always a surprise attack? In any case, I am happy that another important song has been added to my collection in this way.
