You are never far from your own shadow. Over coffee with a friend who now taught at the state comprehensive where we had met almost twenty years ago, I was reminded of an old ghost I thought I’d forgotten.
She was troubled. Chatting with a trio of her students, two had exclaimed it wasn’t fair – their classmate was Chinese, so she was naturally good at music. Intended as a compliment, it fractured their classmate’s smile. More than once, my friend had found this student in the practice rooms, crying because she couldn’t get a phrase right and felt she “wasn’t good enough.”
Just listening catapulted me back: quietly playing in orchestra and choir, overlooked for solos, left to my own devices, invisible.
“I didn’t know what to say,” sighed my friend. “What helped you when we were at school?”
What a question. I was deep into my training before I ever thought of myself as “good.” Surrounded by musicians, I progressed at the same pace as my peers – the same grades, the same repertoire. It took me years to notice that I could do things others couldn’t: improvise, work out phrasing alone, blend timbres within a section. These aren’t skills rewarded in music exams, which always seemed designed to intimidate rather than nurture. But there was another problem.
“Music, like few other areas of life, has a way of laying bare the lunacy of race as a concept.”
– Eleanor Chan
Like my friend’s student, I am half-Chinese. That comes with a whole set of assumptions: you’re good at maths and music, of course; you must have a Tiger Mother drilling you morning and night. You’re hardworking. In short, you are a “model minority.”
I am some of these things. But because of the stereotype, any genuine proclivity I had – or effort I put in – was invisible. To this day I feel its impact on my confidence. A vocal injury meant I never attempted a conservatoire or a professional career. Still, the sheer slog it would have taken makes me shudder.
On the surface, it might seem East Asians are well represented in music. But look closer: how many “make it”? There are no East Asian equivalents to Black composers Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Joseph Bologne, or Florence Price. In orchestras, I find faces like mine, but elsewhere the picture is bleak. Before the rise of K-pop, the only East Asian popular musicians I knew were Emmy the Great and Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda – hardly comparable to Beyoncé or Shakira. Opera, jazz, funk, and other genres fare no better. And expectations about which instruments East Asians play only add to the bind.
Race is a social construct, but it shapes us medically, politically, and economically. Being seen as “better at music” or “hardworking” does not improve your chances of winning a contract. It only raises the bar for recognition.
In many ways, the world has changed little over the past twenty years. What advice could I offer anyone navigating life in a racialised body, or trying to love music without being perfect? Faced with the ghost of my teenage self in my friend’s student, I could only offer the words I whisper to myself almost daily:
“Tell her she’s enough,” I said, “Tell her she’s always enough.”
Author: Eleanor Chan
Duet: An Artful History of Music by Eleanor Chan
Published by Duckworth Books
Available from 18th September (RRP £25)
Musician, art historian, and BBC Next Generation Thinker, Dr Chan offers a groundbreaking visual exploration of music history that transforms how we understand and experience music.
If you are fond of music, you may enjoy reading our interview with mezzo soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, and read about the career of legendary pianist András Schiff, winner of this year’s Praemium Imperiale music award.
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