This is an Ordinary Blog Post
written by Kai Ono
2019 GLFCAM Dave and Gunda Hiebert Fellow, Cycle 9
Hello, reader. Thanks for taking the time to read my essay. I’m Kai. I’m a composer and a pianist. I’ve been living in New York for the last two years, spending my days accompanying ballet classes and writing music, and spending my nights performing or socializing with friends. Besides music, I’m a long-time fan of games, reveling in the elements of strategy, technique, and luck, and I often also enjoy going on binges of random subsets of knowledge. Currently, I have been fascinated by Tulip Mania, and other cases of speculative economic bubbles. On my train rides to and from work, I study Mandarin, which I have been working on for the last two years. When I get home from a performance or hang, I eat my Thai curry recipe that I learned to make last year, cooked in bulk in my slow cooker. After eating, I spend a bit of my day either practicing, improvising, or simply winding down. Although I may have nights where I struggle to get myself to sleep at a healthy time due to wandering thoughts of insecurity regarding my career, as long as I brush my teeth within the thirty minutes before I rest my head on my pillow, I sleep most every night quite well.
It is by no means a special life.
I may be special for being in the arts, but there are just as few people in law and engineering. Furthermore, although I am a musician, I am but a single person in a pool of hundreds of thousands of musicians, just in this country alone. Perhaps I could narrow the numbers down by specifying instrument, or the fact that I both compose and perform, or the fact that I play and write in multiple genres or styles, or the fact that I’m Asian- American, but it’s hard to say if that necessarily makes for a special life. These factors of specialization and identity make everybody unique in the same way that it makes nobody unique. This is fine, however. I am perfectly content not striving for and not achieving what people may consider to be a special or unique life, but rather being a functional and necessary cog of society that helps other people live their lives.
The same applies to everyday life. I may post online about achievements, commissions, notable shows, and collaborations, but many of the hours of my life are neither exciting, poignant, or otherwise pivotal, but rather mundane. Waiting for the train. Cooking and eating. Walking around my neighborhood with my girlfriend. Going to work. Waiting for the laundry to finish as I pretend doing planks every week is somehow an effective workout routine. Listening to music. Taking a deep breath and sorting my thoughts. I like to think that these moments of mundanity are transitions in between my more eventful moments of my life, which is otherwise filled with actions that fill the days of so many other people.
“Music is basically a few great moments and really clever wasting of time in between.” One of my great music composition mentors told me this years ago. It’s as if we live our lives in a structured manner that parallels time-based arts, music included.
These ideas of mundanity have strongly influenced my worldview and my creative philosophy, as I consider my pieces to be my contributions to the music world that hopefully fills a void, even if it may not be so strongly individualistic, and the pieces are structured in such a way that I believe reflects the beautifully ordinary nature of our lives. I also just like to write my music about casual, everyday topics, generally. I suppose.
I’m really curious as to what my peers think of this. This is all open to discussion. Let’s talk.
Kai Ono is a composer-pianist, raised in the bustling suburbs of Irvine, California and currently living in the mosaic city of Queens, New York. He likes the color grey, the sound of laughter, and things that fly. Kai recently graduated from the University of Kansas with a BM in Piano Performance and Composition with distinction, and as a Presser Scholar. He is eternally grateful for his amazing mentors he’s studied under so far - piano with Dr. Scott McBride Smith and Chizuko Asada, composition with James Barnes, Dr. Forrest Pierce, Dr. Kip Haaheim, and Dan Gailey, and jazz with TJ Martley. Learn more from Kai’s bio page.