Shakespeare once wrote, “If music be the food of love, play on.” That could have been when music was considered as comfort, as art. Music also sprang from the trumpets and horn of Napoleons band, signaled war, signaled death. Just like literature, music has its own renaissance. It changes, it evolves, and forms meanings that match with each distinct zeitgeist. This course will be taking you through the history of music, from the 1500s all the way to contemporary music. Through listening, reading, interpreting and feeling, we will go back in time and retrieve the music motifs humanity has played.

My friend babbled on and on about his new “project that he was about to start”. I wasn’t listening. I had no interest in his words. I was thinking. I looked down on my two hands, pondering.  

Left or right? That is the question. 

I’m right-handed, and according to statistics, the majority are too. I bet most of us right-handers have tried sometime to use our left hand in daily tasks. I have. I failed. I tried writing with left hand, it turned up like works from Picasso. I tried eating with it, I turned up Picasso.

Why some of us are left-handed and some right-handed? Why can’t we all be ambidextrous? This oddness intrigues me. Is it because all humans are unbalanced in a way, or is it mother nature telling us that we cannot be perfect? 

My passion for music further intrigues in this question. Every time I put my hands upon the black and white keys of a piano, even after many years of practicing, I can feel that my right hand has more power, move more fluently, and in a way more “gifted” than my left hand. But I couldn’t blame my left hand, since I know that this is a condition that most likely everyone in the world have, and I need to adjust to it. While my left hand is not as dexterous as the melodious right hand, I just practice so that it can accomplish the low end and the harmony as needed in most pieces.

What playing piano (and dabbling a few other instruments like guitar) teaches me about dexterity is this: ability is not absolute but relative to the function. As long as I can perform the music, I need not to deem my mono-dexterity as an imperfection. Even Lionel Messi, the best soccer player, is mono-dexterous, i.e., left-footed, despite many ambidextrous players. In the end, it is about what we can achieve with our hands and other parts of our body coordinating as a whole.

I once read an article on mono-dexterity, which indicates that molecular mechanisms for epigenetic regulation in the spinal cord forms the starting point for handedness. In other words, mono-dexterity is not purely genetic, but a combined result of our environment and expressions of relevant genes. Of course, the science behind mono-dexterity, especially laterality, is much more complicated and I need to learn a lot more to really understand it.

In conclusion, while I wish to be ambidextrous, just like I wish to jump high, to have eidetic memory, or to own an angelic singing voice, I know I am not imperfect, and I am talented in my own way. We as humans are naturally set to have constraints, and what we need is to adjust to them and grow to create music belonging to our distinct ability.