Tegucigalpa, Honduras—

I only remember our old wine red Honda, the sidewalk in the fancy neighborhood where my mom’s older brother lived, some grown men logistics discussion and a quaint parallelogram being loaded onto the humble trunk of our little car, followed by a frame of sorts. Then the ride home and me seeing the black and white keys twilit, an array of colorful switches, and the funny sounding word “Bontempi”. The next morning it fully dawned on me that we had acquired a musical instrument, and that it had been intended for my usage and instruction: it was an electronic organ. Up to this point, the point of writing this down, I never quite knew why my family took that organ from my uncle: did he want to get rid of it and suggest it to them? Did he actually take interest in my development and thought music would exercise my intellect and cater to my tendency to stay indoors and revel in the wondrous world of imagination? Did my family think that and ask for that heirloom as a way of allowing me to expand my horizons without breaking our meager economy? All I knew back then, as an oblivious six year-old, was that this fascinating apparatus was indeed an enticing object of exploration; the battered aqua and white user’s manual would mesmerize me for years on end, it was written in English and Italian as far as I remember so I was never quite able to parse the instructions, let alone the musical notation in the sample songs that came within; yet a kind adult who I’ve long forgotten – again, only when writing this down do I even presume their existence to fill this detail – took to writing down in a separate piece of paper which of the colorful switches I should press to get the appropriate sounds and, by numbering the keys, which keys I should press to play the songs they’ve played for me a number of times so I could at least memorize the rhythm. This keyboard was my first incursion into my own world of music, beyond the lame recorder lessons I eventually took in elementary school and which at least gave me the ability to read enough music to disentangle that part of the manual, and it filled many afternoons for many years until the organ was so run down it wouldn’t even start anymore and we had to give it away – 10 years, two cities and about four house moves after it came into my life. It’s one of the few memories I have from the two-year sojourn my family had in a different city my dad had moved us for work: an older cousin coming by and playing music with me, my figuring out of some christmas carols to play during a christmas eve party and then chickening out at the last minute, me adding my own notes to the fabled user’s manual, my little brother messing with it, my old and reliable “When The Saints Go Marching In”, first song in the manual, first song in my head, my pride and joy.

That’s my earliest memory of a life-long relationship with music: always a refuge, always a mystery, always a bridge to people close to me, and always being forgotten, overridden by the more pragmatic concerns of life: after the first couple of years of my fantasies as a keyboardist I scaled back to just playing the recorder and half dreading half loving the music class at school: it was a ton of memorizing facts about long-dead fellas wearing wigs.

A significant part of my journey in finding my identity back in high school had revolved around music: upon discovering my uncle’s Yamaha guitar and listening to my dad’s recordings of Los Indios Tabajaras – which in themselves were a memento of his own audiophile father – I became deeply interested in the instrument and spent many hours while visiting my uncle trying to extract sounds of its arcane mechanism of wonder while parsing his old battered guitar theory book. That same year, by sheer fate, the music class at school moved on from its recorder-only instruction to a diversified set of courses focusing on keyboards, guitar and the old reliable recorder for those who didn’t care much; I jumped at the opportunity to take guitar despite the minor quibble of my lacking such an expensive instrument knowing that fate would come to my aid again if my true calling was the guitar, and it did: another uncle had a very old guitar laying around which he didn’t mind lending me, and thus I came across my first paramour in a guitar with a bent neck making the action about half an inch high and the acoustics terrible, adorned with stickers and an inexplicable zebra print acting as a makeshift pickguard; but I didn’t care about the pain and risible ergonomics of such an instrument, I practiced with zeal, learning all the songs with a fiery perfectionism. Soon, as with all my learning endeavors that turn compulsive, I was looking for music to learn and fell into the temptation of Satan: despite being a fervent christian and having limited myself to listening only christian rock, I had been listening to “wordly” music before and knew that they, surely to seduce and ensnare the just, tended to have more texture and complexity in their musical arrangements; I approached one of my least satanic classmates and asked for a recommendation, he produced the Apocalyptica albums where they cover metallica – we still circulated cassettes back then, mind you, so most of my journey here involves good old magnetic piracy – and I listened in awe, making weekend trips to the internet café to download ASCII tabs, save them on floppy disks and then painstakingly transcribe them to notebooks because printing was an expensive dream in the internet café, reserved to important homework, and then trying to follow along with the liberally arranged Apocalyptica covers and miraculously learning Nothing Else Matters by Metallica in this fashion, interspersed with some riffs from Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

At this point, as in a Christian documentary against the evils of the world, I had fallen in the slippery slope of the music of the devil: no longer satisfied with a replica of Metallica, I started listening to the real thing and hanging out with the other guitar enthusiasts, spending our recesses practicing and talking about life (of which I had none so I just replied in uncommitted witticisms or fabricated anecdotes), in complete awe of both the music they were acquainted with and the lives they lived: I had unwittingly found a group I belonged to beyond just being classmates or fellow churchgoers, and despite our wildly differing life experiences, we connected with music every day.

One morning, sitting next to some kid I barely knew on the bus to school, I correctly appraised his ownership of a Discman, and was rewarded by my excellent sleuthing by being offered an earbud, a glimpse into his portable private world; curiosity and gratitude prompted me to lodge a still earwaxed piece of plastic in my sacrosanct ear canal and as soon as the music began I stopped caring about the dubious hygiene of this decision: this was rock, this was metal, but it was far more melodic and complex than my puny experience before it, this was fucking Iron Maiden. This was the good stuff, this was the hard drug of Satan and I could smell the sulphur and it smelled great. For the first time ever, I saved up 20 lempiras and asked the Discman man to burn me a copy of this glorious opus, and I listened to it in rapt attention in the sanctuary of my room blasting it from the tiny speakers of my hewlett packard computer (I didn’t dare use the sound system in the living room, lest I opened the gates of hell) for 30 minutes every afternoon after arriving from school before my mom showed up with my siblings, and then in my new fangled earphones as soon as I procured one, my obsession deepened, my acoustic guitar – I had finally convinced my dad to buy one, a $100 Suzuki with surprisingly beautiful acoustics and a bright orange body that made me both self conscious and proud for the rest of the first year of my tryst with music – wasn’t enough anymore, I had my eyes set on an electric guitar.

And thus by the end of high school, merely three years after I had first put my hands on a guitar, I owned a silver/black Hohner stratocaster replica, a small 10W Marshall amplifier, a Metal Zone pedal, a budding collection of devil music and more than two black garments, and a very deep conflict between my fate and the sensuous world of Baal. But it was in this cognitive, and frankly sometimes auditive, dissonance that I spent the three months between high school and college in my grandma’s house with the family having moved in there to nurse my mom’s multiple leg fracture completely devoted to discovering and enjoying more music, making more frequent trips to the internet cafés, broadening my horizons with the likes of power metal and its kin – Sonata Arctica, Nightwish, Therion, Stratovarious, Yngwie Malmsteen, Angra, Manowar, even extreme metallers like Children of Bodom – and allowing me to connect, always surreptitiously and in shy defiance of my faith, with interesting characters in church and the internet.

A word before the next stage: college in Latin America is an experience that may seem quaint to the American mind: we stay at our parents’ house, treat it mostly like an extension to high school, and under the aegis (and in conflict with) our family, we shed the cocoon of teenage angst and face the full extent of our identity: we clash with our peers, we forswear our belief systems, we grapple with the idea of having our own income and responsibilities beyond the sanitized cradle of the educational system. For late bloomers like me, who not only spent his teenage years in the double bubble of an all-boys catholic school and a very evangelical church of which I was an enthusiastic participant – the thirst to believe truly took part of it but I suspect I also clung to the ability to be exempt from facing such fearsome rites of passage as partying; it also meant a time of discovering the opposite sex face to face, without gods and schools in betwixt.

By the time I set foot in college campus, I saw myself as a metal musician, a badass guitarist, a guy that wore black but didn’t wear actual band tees because they were expensive and too risqué for my christianity. Music was my bridge, however, my way of condensing my own self and presenting it in a package that was understandable by others, and, if they chose to open it, a way in which I could find kindred spirits for my passion of not only listening to music but also learning how to make it, how to speak its language, how to find its traces in literature and science; I easily connected with another couple of guys in my introductory algebra class, but a girl I had been seeing for a few days in our vicinity, wearing, like me, dark shades but not going full metal and sporting a shy pentagram (actually the HIM symbol) on her blue messenger was a more interesting, and way scarier, connection to make. A couple of days later I concocted a plan to sit next to her, behind one of my metal buddies, and talk loudly with the latter about our favorite bands, hoping she would chime in. And she did, quickly becoming one of my closest friends – and opening an eight year relationship that would go through all sorts of travails before even becoming romantic years after we graduated and to end in all kinds of hurt and a thankfully amicable and absolute rupture. But back then it was the simple fact of a shy boy building a bridge with music towards a shy girl, and finding the treasure of the shared quest within: she was a far more experienced pirate than I had become at that stage, and we shared our ever increasing loot and discussed it at length until one day she mentioned that her dad was a big enthusiast of all things classical and I, wanting to impress her, said “oh yeah, me too, I’m totally into Beethoven and like Mozart too, they’re great”. She saw a need for me to delve into this world and, instead of more metal, gave me her sisters music appreciation class CD for me to hear samples of many centuries of fine art music. Stubborn and proud as always, I didn’t want to be told what to do and who to listen to when beginning my exploration of a genre, so half to prove myself as a smart music listener and half to impress her with my mad music arcana, I found non mainstream composers like Hector Berlioz or Dmitri Shostakovich and, soon, was hooked again.

True to my metal persona up to that point, I saw classical music as a boring but necessary precursor to melodic metal, a fossil sampled and remixed sometimes by my heroes, but never something worth listening in itself; how wrong I was: here I was, surrounded by exceedingly complex and pure soundscapes, with textures, timbres, colors and layers I wouldn’t have dreamed of, unaided by electronic gimmicks and not beholden to formulaic album or radio conventions; music that lived in pure form in paper and which any group of competent musicians could bring to life, music that encompassed the entire continuum of human emotion and could convey one to the depths of hell and the heights of heaven, a language that far surpassed the symbols that expressed it, the cultures that gave it birth, the people and machines that produced it, the very air it made dance; this was a language I wanted to speak, I was obsessed again. I was again conflicted. Not only did my faith continue to melt in a maelstrom of uncertainty, my interest in the guitar and metal had ebbs and flows of the security of my persona as a metal musician and my newfound obsession in the language of music and its more sublime expressions.

For a couple of years I gave both camps equal airplay, for metal connected me to my peers more easily – people from both church and college came to my house to jam, and to see my new Ibanez guitar – but at the beginning of my senior year at college a radical turn of events came to pass. For most of my teenage years I had been afflicted with ever worsening acne, and the rigors of computer science had wreak havoc on my face to such an extent that I consented to a course of treatment based on pills recommended by my dermatologist which required a commitment of 6 months, a heavy investment by my parents and came with a long list of side effects and precautions, with a heavy emphasis on the fact that my acne would be worse during the first few months and that I should avoid long periods of exposure to the sun. I took the first three months of my treatment as a complete withdrawal from people, rationalized as just avoiding the sun but frankly rooted in a plunging self esteem as the condition worsened, and found myself cloistered in a room full of music and books.

During the months of my treatment I started reading more music theory, bought music paper to transcribe Rachmaninov and Chopin to the guitar, continued the keyboard practice I had abandoned when I was 8 years old due to my younger brother always disrupting it with his youthful shenanigans, pirated the entire oeuvre of Beethoven to sit still in the dark listening to his symphonies, piano concertos and assorted pieces while applying cold compresses of soothing medication to my swollen face; discovered, via a blog called “El Cuervo López”, the likes of Bruckner and Kalinnikov, as well as the fascinating world of the rest of the Mahler catalog beyond the symphonies and how it could all change depending on the conductor: there I knew that Beethoven’s 9th by Karajan was basically a different piece than the 9th by Furtwangler or Klemperer. And, by way of the 32 piano sonatas by Beethoven, I eventually discovered the beautiful world of Glenn Gould’s Bach: a Bach that didn’t sound like old church music but that instead was music stripped to its very essence, a lone keyboard more mesmerizing than an entire orchestra, an interpreter with an intriguing story, a wellspring of creativity that moved me to write poetry, to paint with watercolor, to write short stories and continue to transcribe music and practice instruments, to seek with a depth unprecedented this same essence, now nude and patent, in arts I had erstwhile failed to understand as peers to my goddess Music: painting, film, the joy of human contact.

I emerged from my self-exile with an exuberance I couldn’t have predicted before, I realized that my moribund faith had to be put down and retired from church, I declared my love to my musical friend and was rejected and didn’t care much because I had found this joyous light withing, I reconciled metal and classical and listened to both as I drove to the gym, to the lab to work on my ambitious dissertation project, to my part time job as a programming lab instructor and my full time job as an intern for a budding software firm. My best friend at the time, also co-worker in the aforementioned firm, gave me Gödel, Escher, Bach as a birthday present and it seemed to bring together everything: music, computer science, my flirting with the arts. I signed up for piano lessons and learned how to play Chopin’s Prélude 15 (raindrop). I had been to what could have been the depths of hell in my lonesome company and was now in the heights of heaven, but saw it all as one crescendo as music had been with me.

Again, after an obsessive love affair with music, she took the backseat to the concerns of quotidian existence: my internship became a full time job, and then a startup I worked on while also teaching programming in my alma mater, my driving companion was no longer only music but also audio books on buddhism and self-realization by the likes of Erich Fromm with a dash of irreverent characters like Christopher Hitchens or the essays of Emma Goldman.

The startup became serious enough to be invited to New York City for a summer accelerator program and, living there with four other dudes in an overpriced apartment, sleeping on the mattress, books and music were my solace again: present in subway commutes, long nights coding trying to prepare a semblance of a prototype, and, most importantly, my first experiences with actual live music: my friend and I went to all the metal concerts we could afford, first of which was a dream come true: Apocalyptica at Irving Plaza, Children of Bodom at the Best Buy Theater, dancing while mildly drunk to electronic music in an indeterminate bar in Brooklyn – a feat of successful loss of inhibition I haven’t quite reached again, the Tchaikovsky piano concerto from the first row of the Avery Fisher hall, seeing the soloist up close (the seat was actually the cheapest in the house since it would have been a terrible vantage point for any other performance) and enjoying it so thoroughly that the lady seating next to me, a long time patron of the arts, commented quite excitedly about my enjoyment and shared snippets of her life during the intermission. Upon my return, I started going to the Philharmonic: I didn’t think a Honduran orchestra could have any comparison to the NYPhil but I went to see them anyway since they were playing Beethoven’s ninth, and was humbled, blown away and brought to the brink of tears by hearing such divine music played in an unassuming church close to the suburb where I grew up. Rachmaninoff was there, playing in my car after a date, for my first kiss, with the lady I met in college and with whom we dated till she confessed she wasn’t attracted to me and broke my heart once again. And even the first time I had sex, which occurred during six months later, yes, more than a full year after I graduated college – I told you I have been a late bloomer – had to do with music: me and a lady I met online while talking about music on twitter and who had eventually moved to the city and become part of my circle of friends started going out in the confusing and awkward manner that only I could pull off, one day we decided to go check out a chamber orchestra presentation happening at a venue close to where she lived, we dressed up, I was late but didn’t think much of it because it was so close, drove up, were promptly turned back by the ushers in the parking lot saying there wasn’t space and they were sold out, went back to her place to have some burgers and a movie and eventually succumbed to the temptations of the flesh in her couch after I initiated an unexpected but incredibly eager make out session. We had thought we were compatible because we both impressed each other with our musical taste, but once we moved beyond that and tried to explore a personal relationship, we found that even though we shared other interests and tolerated our personalities, we didn’t inspire each other, we didn’t seek the companionship of the other, we didn’t build each other up, we were mere acquaintances. We had used music as a persona, a mask, and time proved that to not be enough.

I went back to NYC the next summer, this time on my own, and tried to use all my meager earnings as an exploited consultant to see more live music: I saw Iron Maiden in New Jersey, my first time outside of NYC, I saw Roger Waters in the Bronx, I had my very first hangover by going all out with some friends I made in the newest iteration of the summer program I was now an alum of and, severely ill-disposed, still managed to go to the philharmonic the next day upon realizing that it was the last concert of the season; after visiting other friends in Harlem one night and experiencing the disconcerting experience of a subway train just deciding to end its route early, I helped another straphanger make her way out of the tangled rat-infested underground and realized she was a saxophone player from Kazakhstan; she invited me to see her at the Zinc bar in the West Village, I showed up, drank some beer, saw the exciting improvisation sets, hung around till the end waiting for her, not sure if she’d approach me, walked with her for a bit and got her number – a first for me – texted her the next day inviting her to the philharmonic and never in my life heard back from her. In a crisis about my professional future, I roamed the streets of New York just wandering, listening to Delirium – a Honduran thrash metal band – or one of the haunting violin concertos I was into at the time – mostly Tchaikovsky or Sibelius, though Schnittke may have been in rotation too – until one day I found the Strand bookstore and found myself lost in its myriad tomes, picking up my first Jorge Luis Borges. I met an interesting german lady who was visiting a good friend of mine, invited her to see the philharmonic play beethoven’s ninth in central park and was stood up again. Another weekend I let myself dawdle south until I reached Washington Square Park, and, lured away from the bench I had finally found to sit down and read on by the whisper of piano notes, I found the piano man of the park, who played Rachmaninoff, Chopin, and many other popular tunes in such a unique and sincere voice that I bought the CD he was selling by awkwardly dropping the requisite amount in one of his two buckets, grabbing the cardboard package and engaging in the briefest eye-contact salutation. I went back to that park many times, and one of those joyous Sundays I found a street market with people selling used stuff and managed to buy a couple of classical music CDs, one of which included the concerto for two guitars by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco; I eventually gifted that album to the grandma who was hosting me that summer, and I will always remember how she danced a little when she played it. Again, music had come back in the silent night of the soul. And outside of my brave but fruitless attempts to build a bridge with music again, towards the end of my stay, after having found peace in my private delectation of music – not needing to share it to fully enjoy it – my intense but slightly healthier tryst with books allowed me to start talking to a fascinating artist I met at a tech event, deprived of the safety of shared musical tastes and of the bombast that music had for me (it was a transcendent experience, so it made me feel exempt of the mundane) and instead confronted by the mirror held up by literature, she and I soon began to confide in each other without crutches, without enumerations, falling in love with a whole person without the mediation of the pizzazz I had carefully but deceitfully constructed with music. But by the end of my visit, this was all still in the future, and we only saw each other twice after our initial meeting – one of which was a rendezvous on my last night in the city at a café across the street from Strand which was interrupted by each of us having to meet with our mentors.

After five months, and a final ten days spent in the excellently located apartment of Alex, one of the kindest souls I know, getting my life back together to the tune of Delirium and Bach, I went back home. Nary two months after my return, bitten by the wanderlust bug and trying to disentangle myself from the confusion I had woven for myself in the romantic department, I used my limited savings to visit friends in Europe. I saw the dutch philharmonic play Prokofiev, Wagner and The Magic Flute in Berlin, visited the graves of Dvorak and Smetana in Prague, meandered along the wall of the Vysehrad while looking at the Vltava river while listening to the symphonic poem by Smetana himself christened after it, part of Ma Vlast; I used “Kundera” as the password to pick up my tickets to the Czech opera and saw Othello and Carmen. I remember my friends, I remember our adventures, but my most vivid memories are again invaded by music, by her whispers, her solace, her refuge from all in the world which demanded of me action, engagement, swiftness – she gave me a space to contemplate, to be part of the air, to make time stand still and then dance. I was ready to go back to real life.

Once again, upon my return I felt triumphant, felt as if I was ready to face the realities of life free from delusion, but even though I had seized the reins of my professional life, I was still in a haze about my relational life. And, mesmerized by music and nostalgia, I fell into the temptation of trying to date my first musical tryst again even though our first try ended in a year long silence full of animosity and despair. Our first date this time around was in a tango recital. This time, I’ll give it to us, it went better because we no longer tried to fabricate personae and our friendship deepened and for a moment there our physical attraction was real. But once again, after a year and this time in a more mature and dare I say loving way she again broke my heart telling me that once the emotion of having found her best friend again faded, she realized she wasn’t willing to pursue a relationship with me. We had bamboozled each other by seeing in a friendship initiated by a shared deep love of music and the arts more than we were both willing to offer and commit to. As with every funk in my development, I turned to music once again, buying a cornucopia of guitar books and guitar effects pedals and accessories of all kinds, even an unreasonably priced seven string guitar designed by one of my heroes, Steve Vai, in conjunction with Ibanez; I befriended a luthier and former rock star who helped me fix my older Ibanez guitar and gave me life advice. But this time I could feel that just turning to music wouldn’t be enough, that I couldn’t just escape again, find succor in music and come back to the world with renewed valor but ill-equipped to deal with the ever-increasing demands of life. I sought therapy, I came to terms with my depression and anxiety, I cleansed myself of my obsession to be loved, I successfully completed a course of anti-depressants, and started thinking of my one challenge still to fully face: building meaningful relationships from a place of strength, of confidence, of having accepted myself without resorting to escapes and bombast, I bought a book by a famous therapist dealing with that precise subject and, following its advice of traveling somewhere and spending time with oneself and with cherished friends before even thinking about seeking relationships again, I packed my bags and went to NYC. And there, fully feeling in command of myself, I found the love of my life in the one relationship I had somehow managed to build and maintain from that place of strength and honesty throughout these years: I had broken the vicious circle of using music as both an escape and a distraction device, we were free to talk or not talk music, and we even tried to jam once but got distracted in each other. By the time I left NYC I had moved on from my crises and have found a new kind of love, completely sincere and clear, beyond shaky foundations and insecurities, and, this time, moreover, I felt in peace with music, not needing to relegate her to the backseat anymore.

And here it is, my musical offering: I can look back twenty years and tell my life in terms of my relationship to music, and to my surprise I can go as far as relating the development of my character in terms of it. And I’m aware that even though I’ve been able to minimize the fundamental conflict between music as the enrichment of my soul and music as my escape from engaging life, there are still many more variations on this theme to come; and I say with the Bard, play on.