Dear T—–,
As your father, I want to welcome you to this world. I understand that you are only 16 months old, and so your ability to fully comprehend this letter may take some time. But, I wanted to write this now, while your mother’s pregnancy, your birth, and the newborn and infant days of your life are still so fresh in my memory. So much joy and suffering has already happened that I fear I will intentionally or unintentionally block out all the bad memories, and in the process, lose the opportunity to save the good ones. Or maybe I’ll just simply forget everything—the bad and the good—with the natural passage of time.
As I now attempt to bring you up to speed, to capture your essence in words, I feel overwhelmed: there is both nowhere to start and anywhere I could start. How do I write about you?
Writing about you is as hard as writing about music. What if you yourself were music? What would you be? You would be a formless soundscape of abrupt shifts and prolonged repetition, never truly starting or ending. You would be a vast array of mighty sounds that shake the earth, alongside others that are too soft to hear or even feel, yet somehow know are there. You would be an absurdist comic opera of bizarre gestures that never follow any logical syntax, yet somehow make sense through their consistency of use. You would be the saddest song on earth, filled with the fear of death itself, yet at the same time, a triumphant chorus that can inspire the will to live. Your music would be a series of paradoxes: your duration both long and short, your speed both fast and slow, your emotions filled with happiness and sadness, comfort and pain. But how do I write about this? How can you ever be captured?
The answer is I can’t. You are a beautiful thing that cannot be recorded. What I can offer, however, to you, and to anyone else who happens to read this, is a glimpse into my life as your parent, and how it has transformed my musical practice into something richer, more purposeful than I could have ever imagined.
I will start from the beginning of this journey, when your mother was pregnant. It is not my place to speak on her behalf, or share any details personal to her, but I will share my own fundamental shift during this period: it was the first time I truly prioritized my daily schedule around the life or death needs of another person. On a basic level, the months of pregnancy allowed me to build in a certain level of flexibility to my work flow. The inconsistent start and end points to my work sessions did not negatively affect my long term projects, and in some ways, enhanced and added meaning to them. While it would be nice to spend as much time as I want every day on my art, the forced breaks and unexpected interruptions often allowed me the chance to solidify my ideas and strengthen my artistic convictions. With limited resources, is this really what I want to be spending my time on? I would ask myself. Does this note actually work here, or is it a clever way to show off, to prove something to someone? Is this the music I want to be writing, and is this the type of piece I want to make people listen to with their own equally precious time? I began to really ask myself these tough questions, often. And believe it or not, your in utero needs helped me ask them more urgently than I ever had before.
And then you were born. Those early screams were some of the most gut-wrenching sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. We had to bounce, feed and change diapers day and night in order to soothe you, sometimes successfully, but most often, unsuccessfully. Most often, your voice of suffering was heard. No matter the sound buffer, white noise machines, music, vacuum cleaners, running bathwater, or noise canceling headphones, your voice would still find its way to our ears, piercing our soul and breaking our hearts. The soundtrack of life was relentlessly stressful–even the moments of silence carried an ominous expectation of the screams to return.
But there was some respite in the night. As unhealthy and unsustainable as it was, the hours of my shift with you, from 9:00pm-5:00am, were peaceful oases, in near silence and near total darkness. I sat there awake, with my phone at the dimmest setting and a piano keyboard set to the lowest volume. The only consistent light came from the small red dot on the keyboard’s on/off switch, and a small blue light that indicated the white noise machine was plugged in. You would not let me lose contact with you, so I stayed with one hand on your chest, belly or arm, and propping most of your body on my lap. With my one free hand, I would take shorthand notes on my phone’s notepad, only once an hour or so, with the screen dimmed to the lowest light setting. And I would play the piano with the same hand, only once every 15-30 minutes to check the sound of a note or chord, at the lowest possible volume. It was during this time that I realized how slow the world can move when you are forced to sit awake in silence and darkness for so many hours. Spending an 8-hour night with a single note or chord felt like an eternity, yet in the end, was just one day. Hearing you cry for 5 minutes straight felt like hearing you cry for a whole year, yet in the end, it was just 5 minutes. Perhaps it is because, for you, 5 minutes did feel like a year.
Needless to say, my musical practice changed so deeply during these newborn months. Before you came along, I practiced music efficiently: to achieve as much as possible in as little time as possible, treating time as part of the challenge. But since you came along, I now make music to pay tribute to the abundance of time, and how vast and endless any single sound has the potential to be. Surprisingly, this has made me more efficient.
This is the first piece I wrote as your parent.
As you grew older, your naps became more regular. And you became more interested in music. You’ve never been good at falling asleep, so when you fell asleep to music for the first time, I thought it was a miracle. Amidst the speakers blasting Yellow Magic Orchestra, and as I danced with you in the carrier, dancing hard and occasionally running to add my own live synth part to the recording, your head finally drooped over. Once you were asleep, I tried to turn the music down, or turn it off, or even just change to something different, but every time I tried, you would squirm and wake up. Nothing could change in your auditory experience before or during your nap. You couldn’t fall asleep in silence either–the smallest creak would startle you. Loud, danceable music provided the secret ingredient to your delicate balance for a peaceful nap.
This is what was playing the first time you fell asleep to music, and many times after…
You responded to the piano similarly. Abrupt changes in dynamic, articulation or range would wake you. Your naps taught me how to make music at the piano that develops gradually over long periods of time without ever changing too many variables at once. From these lessons, I now have a deeper appreciation for music with long and sustaining resonances, fixed or slowly changing pitch sets, and repetitive, subtly shifting rhythmic groupings.
This is a recently completed piece that works with the same soundscapes you liked as a newborn…
Your naps have also taught me how to listen to music carefully and more fully. Where I would have simply listened to one song or one piece by an artist I decided to look up, I now actively brainstorm in live time other artists, songs and albums that might relate to one another in sound profile. This new habit, thanks to you, has opened my ears to a wider range of music that spans time, place and genre, and a stronger ability to draw special sonic connections between them. Who would’ve thought that Selena Quintanilla is sonically similar to Dolly Parton? Or that Coldplay fits nicely with John Luther Adams’s Become trilogy? Or that drummer Tony Allen can smoothly lead into guitarist Tommy Guerrero?
These days, If I find a sound world I particularly like, and you seem to like enough, while you sleep, I will listen to the full album, and often, multiple albums in a row, sometimes even the complete works or complete discography of an artist. For example, on one such day, I went from knowing only one song of Selena Quintanilla, to listening to her complete discography in chronological order, extending my focus far beyond the day’s need for a nap. I would go as far as to say that, through your sleep habits, you’ve given me a deeper, more grounded patience for the unfolding of music itself.
Then, you began to figure out that you have a body. You started to open your eyes and really see things. You started to move your head up and down and side to side. You started to reach with your hands and flail your legs and twist and turn your torso until you rolled over. You propped yourself up onto your hands and knees, rocking forward and back. Then, you replaced your knees for your feet, and you used your hands to claw and pull yourself up. You stumbled and tried again, and tried again, and again and again. You hurt yourself countless times, but you never stopped trying (I really couldn’t believe you never stopped trying). And finally, you let your hands go and held the air with your arms, like a conductor without a baton, swaying to some imaginary music, while the music swayed with you… When you first stood up, I was horrified and worried for you. But when I think back to the memory now, it makes me so happy.
As soon as you stood on your own two feet, you started to dance. No longer did you ride along in a carrier to our dance moves, perhaps against your will, but instead you now had your own crazy dance moves to invent and share. Any new discovery, from squatting, to spinning, to jumping, you made it your own when dancing. When music anywhere came on, your body would respond, almost as if it was involuntary. You’d throw up one hand and bob your head whenever you heard a car with a subwoofer pass by. You would dance to music that wasn’t meant to be music, like a jackhammer on the street, or a thud from a neighbor’s wall.
You did the same with pitch. Whenever you heard me playing a subtly shifting, sustained texture at the piano–one of the same that helped keep you asleep as a newborn–you would sing along loudly until you matched an overtone (Ab4 and A4 were your favorite notes). The vacuum–the same one we used desperately to keep you from crying–was your singing companion, as you glissed up and down your vocal range, singing as loudly as possible, as I turned it on and off and on again.
You heard music, and your body heard it too, in virtually any sound with rhythm or pitch. You inspired me to make all sorts of wild noises with my mouth, voice and body that I would never have imagined to be a worthwhile listen. You inspired me to make music with anything and everything. In a sense, you freed me from my own sense of good and bad, right and wrong, when it comes to musical sound. I knew this to be true in theory, but never had I fully lived this mindset in everyday life until you came along and gave it validation.
All of these memories will be cherished for as long as I can remember them. And the weirdest part is that you probably won’t consciously remember any of it. It must be scary to first find out that so much has happened to you without you remembering it happening. Perhaps it is for the best that you won’t be weighed down by your earliest struggles.
Just as you have no choice in what you remember, I may not have a choice in what I forget. Perhaps it is also for the best, for me to not forget. I feel like my music will never be the same again, because of what I’ve learned while being your parent in these earliest years. I want this letter to be my expression of gratitude for you and to recognize how much you have already given to me, without even knowing it. I want you to know that, while parenthood has already been immensely difficult, your life has given me a whole new set of tools as a musician that have helped me further my craft, and take my work into new and exciting directions.
And even greater of a gift than any single tool or discovery, you have given new and deeper purpose to my music. I write music now with a sense of care and personal responsibility to the listener that I did not fully feel until now. You taught me and continue to teach me how to truly care for another, which I now believe is the most fundamental part of being both a good musician and a good person.
There is both nowhere to start and anywhere I could start.
Shi-An Costello
What if you yourself were music? ... You would be an absurdist comic opera of bizarre gestures that never follow any logical syntax, yet somehow make sense through their consistency of use. You would be the saddest song on earth, filled with the fear of death itself, yet at the same time, a triumphant chorus that can inspire the will to live. Your music would be a series of paradoxes: your duration both long and short, your speed both fast and slow, your emotions filled with happiness and sadness, comfort and pain.
Shi-An Costello
Does this note actually work here, or is it a clever way to show off, to prove something to someone? Is this the music I want to be writing, and is this the type of piece I want to make people listen to with their own equally precious time?
Shi-An Costello
Spending an 8-hour night with a single note or chord felt like an eternity, yet in the end, was just one day. Hearing you cry for 5 minutes straight felt like hearing you cry for a whole year, yet in the end, it was just 5 minutes. Perhaps it is because, for you, 5 minutes did feel like a year.
Shi-An Costello
Before you came along, I practiced music efficiently: to achieve as much as possible in as little time as possible, treating time as part of the challenge. But since you came along, I now make music to pay tribute to the abundance of time, and how vast and endless any single sound has the potential to be. Surprisingly, this has made me more efficient.
Shi-An Costello
Your naps taught me how to make music at the piano that develops gradually over long periods of time without ever changing too many variables at once.
Shi-An Costello
Who would've thought that Selena Quintanilla is sonically similar to Dolly Parton? Or that Coldplay fits nicely with John Luther Adams's Become trilogy? Or that drummer Tony Allen can smoothly lead into guitarist Tommy Guerrero?
Shi-An Costello
When music anywhere came on, your body would respond, almost as if it was involuntary. You'd throw up one hand and bob your head whenever you heard a car with a subwoofer pass by. You would dance to music that wasn't meant to be music, like a jackhammer on the street, or a thud from a neighbor's wall.
Shi-An Costello
You inspired me to make music with anything and everything. In a sense, you freed me from my own sense of good and bad, right and wrong, when it comes to musical sound. I knew this to be true in theory, but never had I fully lived this mindset in everyday life until you came along and gave it validation.
Shi-An Costello
I write music now with a sense of care and personal responsibility to the listener that I did not fully feel until now. You taught me and continue to teach me how to truly care for another, which I now believe is the most fundamental part of being both a good musician and a good person.
