Every Friday since sophomore year, I would rush from the library to my hour-long composition lesson with Bright Sheng, grappling with my manuscript paper and my freshly-printed scores while wrestling with my backpack as I clumsily knock on his office door. He would then look up from his desk, or from his piano if he was demonstrating something to his previous student, and slowly saunter over and let me in. He would always be dressed in the same black jeans and black leather sneakers with white soles, and either a particularly stylish mint/seafoam green wool sweater or a black sweater with a medium blond trim along the sleeves near the collar. Pretty trendy for a Chinese-American in his sixties.

“How are you?” would always be his first question, and I would more often than not stammer out an answer about how overworked and tired and stressed out I am, to which he would usually give no visible reaction and ask no further questions. Sometimes, he would comment on how much work I am doing and how it is a good thing to be busy. I guess that teaching at Michigan for more than twenty years essentially desensitizes you to all the anxiety and angst that young musicians get on an almost daily basis. That’s not to say he does not care, though – on the days when my stress level noticeably exceeded my usual threshold or when I was so overworked and tired and stressed out that I actually got sick, he would genuinely try to help, like when I got the flu earlier this semester and was coughing all over his office. Bright offered me the fruits his wife bought for him (“These are very expensive, very good quality dates. Very soothing for your throat.”) and the familiar-to-most-Chinese-people Chinese cough medicine that he keeps in his office (“Go on, don’t sip it – gulp it down quick so I can give you another spoon.”). This was one of my happiest moments in college. He was showing that he cared about me the way Asian elders showed they cared – not by stating it explicitly, but through little actions that unexpectedly make your day just a little bit better.

If someone had told me before my sophomore year that that would happen, I would not have believed them. Bright had garnered himself a reputation in the university that was difficult to pinpoint. A friend of mine showed me an alignment chart they made of the composition professors at Michigan, and Bright was a “neutral evil”, and I can see why. Apparently in last year’s auditions he didn’t shake any of the auditionees’ hands. He also would sometimes express rather controversial views about certain composers or composition practices in our seminar. One such example, which caused so much of a stir that one of the students published an op-ed in the Michigan Daily about it, was when he accused Pierre Boulez, a considerably influential composer and conductor in the 20th century, of ruining generations of composers, because Boulez rejected the study of all pre-20th-century music. Bright himself, despite working in a musical language that is obviously post-19th-century, is a fierce proponent of “studying the classics”, and he is often quite vocal about it too – he often laments to me about how young composers only listen to living composers when doing pre-compositional research, while ignoring pieces by masters like Beethoven and Bach and Brahms who had “proven” hits that worked. “師古不泥古”, he told me once, “learn from past but don’t imitate the past”. He was often quite headstrong about this and frequently brings it up in interviews, and I often wonder how one is able to have such strong views about music when it is such an abstract form of art. I admire Bright’s self-assurance and confidence in what he believes in, even though some might misconstrue it with “evilness”. These are traits that seem miles away for someone like me, who often feels quite overworked and tired and stressed about his own music and never knows whether it is any good or not.

Bright exudes confidence to such a degree that even my parents, who had only met him once, could feel his “aura”, as they put it. He is not tall, perhaps hovering around the 5’6”-5’7” range, but his presence often commands a room. Perhaps it is the way he walks with his head titled slightly up and to the side on his very straight spine, his toes pointed outwards with every step. Or perhaps it is the way he sits. In our lessons, he would lean back on his black swivel chair at a (to the inexperienced swivel chair user) dangerously obtuse angle, sometimes resting his feet on the spindle of my inferior non-swivel chair as he pops almonds and walnuts and other trail-mix-like snacks into his mouth. Or perhaps it is the way he talks – he rarely uses filler words and phrases, and gets straight to the point. His emails are a great example of this. I once emailed him two paragraphs stating my concerns about a drastic change he suggested I should make in my music. I included the proposed roadmap of the piece and asked whether it was indeed what we discussed in our lesson, and presented a couple of questions about pacing and emotional impact the new configuration would bring up. He replied with “Your understanding is correct. Best, B”. That, I thought, was a sign of a person who knew they were good at their work – not the (frankly) disappointing and somewhat frustrating one-line answer, but when they can sign-off their emails with a single letter.

I, on the other hand, have always signed-off my emails with my full name, and very occasionally (if I felt like being “casual” and “friendly” or I was addressing a friend) just my first name. I have gotten myself into the habit of slouching, looking at the ground as I tread from one place to another (the freezing weather in Michigan is also partly to blame – growing up in sub-tropical Hong Kong, I am very much inclined to minimize the contact surface between me and the harsh snow). I do not own a swivel chair, and have been drilled by various teachers growing up to never lean back on a chair’s back legs (“There was a very promising goalkeeper on the Liverpool F.C. youth team who broke his back that way and never walked again,” said Mr. Bailey in second grade). I catch myself using “like” and “um” and “uh” and other filler words, and my sentence structure is rarely succinct, often stretching out to an extent that it becomes a five-to-six comma run-on sentence, often using multiple synonyms to get my point across, which, although sometimes is useful and beneficial to the reader to get a clearer idea of what I mean, can quickly become excessive and unnecessary, tiring out the reader as they try to decipher and understand what I was really saying.

This meandering quality of my speech and writing sometimes bleeds into my music too. There were two or three pieces in the past year-and-a-half where Bright suggested that I should cut rather substantial chunks out as they “don’t really say anything – I’d much rather you get to this high point in a more straightforward manner”. This was when Bright had the most fun in our lessons. He would jump up from his chair, grab his red colored-pencil and my music, plop down on the piano, and start playing the sections that he deemed to be structurally weaker. “You don’t really need that,” he would say, playing the piece while omitting the section in question, “you hear how the preceding and succeeding sections actually connect perfectly?” I would then (often) agree, and he would then gleefully grab the red pencil and draw a huge “X” on the offending bars of music.

The first time we did this was also when he cut out the most music, although he was not the person who instigated the change – I wrote eight-and-a-half minutes of music for a choir that could only perform a six-and-a-half-minute piece in a competition. We had to remove two minutes of music – easily two weeks of work! But Bright showed no mercy. He drew red “X” after red “X”, occasionally ripping the paper with the amount of force he asserted on the pencil, making decisions that I would have taken days to decide in mere seconds. I remember myself laughing in disbelief after listening to the new version – it was so much more streamlined and effective and there were no “floating” passages that did not belong anywhere. However, during that lesson when I looked on, jaw agape, as Bright literally tore apart my music, I was reminded of one of my lessons with Professor Kristin Kuster, my composition professor freshman year.

Professor Kuster is basically the opposite of Bright (I genuinely do not know why I am using “Professor Kuster” to address Professor Kuster and “Bright” to address Professor Sheng in this essay. Professor Kuster actually told me to address her as “Kristy” in our first lesson and I would never address Professor Sheng as “Bright” in real life. I still call Professor Kuster “Professor Kuster” though – maybe it is my Asian upbringing, but calling a professor by their first name just seems wrong). She is tall (amplified by the fact that she often wore black high-heeled knee-length boots, which were often paired with black skinny jeans, a black button-down/blouse, and a black shawl, which blended her entire being into a long, looming shadow), blond, white, and usually pretty cheery and bubbly in our lessons. Basically, the opposite of myself. Not that we did not get along – quite the contrary, in fact. She is highly popular among the students – despite Bright being a “bigger name”, Professor Kuster usually has twice the number of composers in her studio. “Never cross out your music!”, she exclaimed as she pointed out one place where I did so in my manuscript, “there is never ‘wrong’ music, it’s just music that’s in the wrong place!” She then told me to always circle the offending section, and draw a little looped tail on the edge of the circle. “It’s not bad, it just doesn’t belong there!”

Whereas Bright helped me a lot with my music writing and laying down a good foundation of craft, Professor Kuster actually helped me a lot with coping with my confidence and self-esteem problems. I started composing relatively late compared to my cohort, and was amazed and terrified to hear about the accomplishments of some of them during my first week at Michigan – they were commissioned by a professional string quartet, they got their work performed by an orchestra, they put on an original musical, they went to Juilliard pre-college. Me, I have never even gotten a single piece of mine played by actual musicians. I only knew one other composer my age during high school, and he was not the most motivated person – he finished a bunch of his college application essays in class, two hours before the deadline. So, I did not have anyone my age with which I can compare myself before college, and as a result I had no idea where I stood. It did not help me psychologically when, out of the ten schools I had applied to in the U.S., Michigan was the only school that accepted me (it was, however, my first choice, which was such a stroke of luck that I still often express my disbelief to whoever I am talking to whenever the subject of auditions or college/grad school applications gets brought up).

Once, I was having a particularly rough week and did not bring anything to show Professor Kuster. She graciously offered to end our lesson early and told me to spend the free hour resting and recovering from the hectic schedule I was on. As I stared into my exhausted reflection in the glass table in her office, the culmination of self-doubt and anxiety and stress and culture shock of living in a different country and missing my family and the horrible weather and the creative block finally hit me. Before I can stop myself, I blurted out:

“Why am I here?”

“What do you mean?”

I told her about all the awesome things my peers were doing and how I was only accepted to Michigan and I listed all the awful things I felt about myself and my music. As I was explaining, I started to see a sliver of a grin starting to form on Professor Kuster’s face.

“Every year freshmen ask me this question, and every year I’ll tell them that I won’t answer them.”

Not expecting this response, I pressed on and asked her why.

“If I tell you why, then you’ll just hold on to that aspect of your music and not develop anything else. Trust yourself that you are here because we think you deserve to be here.”

It was genuinely quite reassuring to hear that my professor had faith in me, and I was soon able to dig myself out of that rut.

Yet, as anyone who works in a creative field knows, frustration never ever truly goes away. During my sophomore year, I found myself having another rough week, but for a slightly different reason: I was finding it hard to like the music I was producing. For the very first time, composing started to feel like a job, and while I’ve been warned multiple times by my family and friends and composers’ interviews on YouTube that that might happen, I was truly in shock about how much I dreaded walking into a piano room and taking out my pencil and manuscript. I walked into Bright’s office that week with less music than I would have hoped, and all we could talk about the music was covered in a mere fifteen minutes. After he finished, there were a good thirty seconds of awkward silence as he turned to his iMac to check his emails while I pondered about whether to end my lesson right there or tell him about the roadblock I have hit recently. I chose the latter, and knowing that Bright is not the type of person who would remember my music during my audition two years ago, I opted to address my insecurities through a different route.

“Are you always happy with the music you write?”

He stopped scrolling through his emails and swiveled his chair towards me.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just that I have been feeling not the best about my music lately, and I’m wondering whether you have had the same experience where you had written something that you are not happy with.”

Bright started furrowing his brows and leaned back steeply on his chair, head titled to one side as he tried to formulate a response. “I’ll tell you what, let’s go to my website and go through it work by work and we’ll rate everything out of a 100.”

He pulled up his website, and the familiar red and black color scheme, the photos of his latest opera, and his recent headshots (one was a close up of him seated in front of a Steinway in his black sweater, resting his chin on his baton-clad fist; the other a medium-wide shot of him leaning on one leg in a green field, laughing away from the camera in his black winter coat and black jeans) greeted me – I had perused it countless times during college application season and the summer leading up to studying with him. He clicked on his works-list and started rating every piece.

“That I’ll give a 97. That a 95 – I wasn’t too happy with the structure. Oh, this I have a lot of problems with and I’ll probably revise it soon – I’ll give it a 93...”

We soon went through all eighty-something pieces. He did not rate a single piece below 93. I pointed this out to him.

“Well, you have to be happy with what you put out! Just revise it until you feel good about it!”

Compared to what Professor Kuster said, this was obviously less of a quick pick-me-up. But I learned a valuable lesson that music is never finished – it just gets performed and there is always room for revision. Hearing him say that he would be revising a piece he wrote in the late-80s/early-90s put a lot of pressure off of trying to make my music perfect the first time around. However, even after these two conversations I had with Professor Kuster and Bright, the tiny voice that says “you’re not good enough” in my ear appears every now and then. Sure, it is now a whisper rather than a shout, but the feeling of “not good enough” still lingers on, sometimes enveloping me like a giant greenhouse, trapping me in an inescapable cycle of doubt and fear.

Chinese New Year came around not long after that, and I, along with two other Hong Kong composition majors who were studying in Michigan, were invited to Bright’s house for New Year’s dinner. We arrived at his mansion, thanks to his wife picking us up from the music school. He sauntered out, head titled and toes pointed outward, of course, to greet us. His seven-year-old daughter was not far behind, hiding behind the door frame, wary of these three complete strangers entering her castle.

As we entered through the front door, I was quickly reminded of the reason I applied to the University of Michigan. On the mantlepiece next to one of his Steinway grand pianos (“There’s another one in my library so I can write while Fayfay [his daughter] is practicing, and one in the basement if my wife needs to practice as well.”) were pictures of Bright with various world-class musicians and politicians. There was one with the cellist Yo-yo Ma, for whom he has written several pieces; there was one with Leonard Bernstein, arguably the most influential American composer-conductor ever, with whom he studied and worked as an assistant for the last five years of Bernstein’s life (Bright’s full title at Michigan is actually “the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition”); there was one of him shaking hands with Aaron Copland, “the Dean of American composers”; and there was another one with him shaking hands with then-president Bill Clinton – Bright received a special commission to create a new work for the White House state dinner that year. The list of important and influential musicians (and people in general) on that mantlepiece was absolutely mind-boggling.

With great difficulty, I pulled myself away from the mantlepiece. As I turned around, I was met with a giant, colorful, and (for the lack of a better word) bright 8-feet banner, one of the press materials for his latest opera, Dream of the Red Chamber, which was premiered by the San Francisco Opera in 2016. That was not the only opera-related memorabilia in his house. There were also several pictures of the production of his 2003 opera Madame Mao, which was about the life of Mao Zedong’s wife. Bright grew up during the infamous Cultural Revolution himself, and was sent to Qinghai and the age of 15, a province bordering Tibet. He worked as a pianist and percussionist for a music and dance troupe there for seven years, studying folk music, and, secretly, Western music. He became one of the first students to be admitted to the Shanghai Conservatory after the Cultural Revolution ended. Bright then moved to United States to get his master’s in Queen’s College and his doctorate at Columbia in the 80s, where he was students with what we now call the “first-generation” of (highly successful) Chinese-American composers: Bright, Tan Dun (best known for writing the soundtrack to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Zhou Long (who won a Pulitzer), and Chen Yi (who has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters). He soon became an American citizen, winning numerous grants and awards which elevated him to the position he is in today.

Once, during a lesson, I asked Bright about him “making it” in the United States and whether he has advice related to forging a career as a composer. I was rambling on about my concerns of (possibly) being an immigrant composer and working against a traditionally white-dominant field that (frequently) equates diversity with tokenism, when Bright stopped me mid-sentence.

“It’s good that you’re thinking about all these things, but the first question you should figure out is what kind of composer you want to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like what sort of music you want to write, what sort of things you want to do.”

One could hear a pin drop as I concentrated to think of an adequate answer to this, admittedly, basic, but often overlooked question for a lot of young composers. I must have had a pretty quizzical look on my face because he then went on:

“It was actually Leonard Bernstein who asked me this question when I was studying with him, and I told him I wanted to compose and conduct orchestras – I wanted to be like him!” he said as he got up from his swivel chair and walked over to the little station stacked with boilers and cups next to the grand piano to pour himself some recently brewed tea.

After Bright said that, I knew my answer to his question immediately. I want to write beautiful music for the best musicians in the world. I want my music to influence people. I want to use my music to open up conversations about controversial topics. I want a commission to write an opera. I want to prove that someone who is not white or of European descent is capable of making it in classical music. I want to have three grand pianos in my mansion, one for me in my study, one for my beautiful child, and one for my loving wife. “I WANT TO BE LIKE YOU!” I almost screamed at the top of my lungs – but I did not. Maybe it was because I did not truly believe in myself that I was able to achieve that lofty goal, or maybe it was because I did not want to seem like a fool grasping at straws in front of the person who knew the quality of my music best. What I know for sure was that I did not say it because I was embarrassed – whether because of myself or of my admiration of Bright, I still do not know up to this day.

This conversation happened a year ago, and I do not know whether I would have answered Bright’s question honestly even now. Yes, compared to where I was last year I am now in a way better position in my career, thanks to the mercy of a couple of judges in several composition competitions, and the good friends I have made who trusted my music so much they performed it multiple times. But despite all these “achievements”, I still feel unfulfilled. Do not get me wrong, I was definitely happy and excited when they announced that I had won the so-and-so prize or when audience members reacted favorably to my music, but that feeling was, always, so fleeting. I would soon be back in my natural self-doubting state after a couple of hours. “Did they really like my music?” “Was I awarded that just because they saw who my professor is on my CV?” It almost seemed like I wanted to feel miserable, and that I was afraid and suspicious of success.

And so, I would continue to scramble my way into Bright’s office and be stressed and overworked and tired almost every week, and the frustration that accompanies the pure, unadulterated joy of putting down notes on a page would always be there. I’ve already accepted that the little voice that whispers incessantly “you’re not good enough” and “you’ll never achieve your dreams” would never go away. Yet, slowly but surely, I have started to see these things as old friends – old friends that keep me in check so that I never become arrogant or ungrateful about all the wonderful things that have happened to me so far. And meeting and studying with Bright is one of those wonderful things – so here’s to more expensive fruits and cough medicine in the future.