music and art (i)

One thing many of my art friends don't know is that music and I go way back—earlier than my love for visual art.

My father was an excellent musician, a jazz drummer, and a phenomenal guitarist. My mother not only acts like an angel but also sings like one. They both listened to the widest range of music imaginable, especially when my mum was pregnant. I had no choice but to have music as a defining pillar of my life. So the plot twist for those who have long known me isn't that I'm an art person who knows a lot about music, but that I didn't follow the path that seemed so obvious to many—including myself.

I liked to play around with instruments. When I was a toddler, I apparently thoroughly enjoyed slamming drumsticks on a little drum pad. Much like Abba would say, I sang long before I could talk. I was brought up on the Suzuki method, where you learn music as you learn a language, and at age three, I started my lifelong affair with the violin.

I loved and hated it at the same time because I knew what I wanted to play, what I wanted the violin to sound like, but my technical ability as a child was still so green. This sometimes made me want to break that little wooden thing into tiny pieces. Vocally, I was there—I could SING, both classically and anything else I felt like. But with the violin, things came with ease but not quickly enough for my tiny, overly ambitious brain. It all started to click when I began to have enough of a skill set to play music that sounded the way I knew it was supposed to, when I started to match my skill to what I was feeling. And that's when everything fell into place.

So why don't I pursue it?
I don't know. I never did because I always thought I didn't have the face for it. I wasn't exactly thin enough. When people told me I was good, I chose not to believe them and instead repeated the voices of my middle school best friends who said I wasn't good enough, that they only picked me because my dad was far away. If those words were the only thing—but piled on top of academia as the only viable career option, my fear of disappointing everyone by becoming "just a musician" or "a wedding singer"...

And the more cemented my career path became, the more I left my music as a background hobby, which felt unfair, like a betrayal of my own soul. I felt in awe of musicians who made it big. I was also terribly envious.

You see, growing up in Lisbon, music isn't really a career path you even dream of. It doesn't pay well. Your odds of making it? Slim. My ambitions? Not slim at all. I was a good student, and I had it in my head that medicine or architecture were the only viable options for me to have some sort of success. This is one of the biggest problems in art and music education. Careers in these fields are not viable for people without incredibly rich parents or within walking distance from Hollywood or NYC without many, many hurdles to jump, especially nowadays, with attention being so sparse and distributed through so many different outlets.

This was so deeply ingrained in my mind that music became much like breathing—I never expected to ever be paid for it.

But perhaps that's okay? Music doesn't have to be a profession to be a profound part of my life… It’s more like breathing. It continues to inspire me, influence my work in curation and art, and it brings joy in ways that a full blown musical career might not.

Maybe the path I took wasn't a deviation but just another expression of the same creative spirit. And who knows?

The future is unwritten, and there's always room for music to play a larger role once again.