Onism
Jack Luo — 8 min read
The first warning came at the Banana Lounge.
I was messing around with Chopin, mostly the pieces a normal semi-classical person recognizes: the Ocean Etude, the Revolutionary Etude, the dramatic ones that make piano feel like a sport where the instrument might win.
A guy came over and listened. His name was Patrick. He was one of those MIT-type people who somehow has a serious technical life and still casually knows more about music than I know about my own schedule. I think he was in computational biology or neuroscience. We started talking. Then he played something I did not recognize.
Chopin’s Ballade No. 4.
I had no idea Chopin wrote ballades.
Patrick basically told me, pretty kindly, that I was not deep enough into classical music yet. Fair. I knew some etudes and a few obvious pieces. The ballades were another country. I looked up Ballade No. 4 later and got hit by this late Chopin feeling: controlled, strange, emotional without begging you to notice. It quickly became one of my favorite pieces.
Later, I tried to find Patrick online and learned he apparently had no social media. This felt absurdly fitting. Of course the guy who randomly introduced me to late Chopin in the Banana Lounge would exist like a side character from an old novel and then disappear from the internet.
That was the crack in the wall.
A few days later, I decided on a whim to go to a classical concert in Boston. This city is ridiculous for music. Berklee is here. New England Conservatory is here. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is here. Half the time you are probably standing next to someone who can play Rachmaninoff before lunch and argue about tone production after dinner.
I asked my AI assistant, Poke, to rank concerts for me using Michelin stars.
This was more useful than it sounds. One star means go if it is convenient. Two stars means make time. Three stars means rearrange the day.
Two names came up: Evgeny Kissin with the BSO, and Yunchan Lim.
Kissin made sense. I knew the name. I tried to get a ticket, but the student pass was sold out and the regular ticket was around $250. Too much for a last-minute gamble. I respect the art. I also respect my bank account.
Yunchan Lim was different. I had never heard of him. The concert was sold out too, except for a standby line. That made the whole thing more interesting. If a room fills up before I even know the person’s name, I am probably missing a whole world.
So I went early.
Actually early. Around an hour and a half early.
I rarely arrive early to anything, so I felt briefly proud of myself. Then I got there and saw people already lined up. Of course. Everyone had the same idea: come early, beat the line. Once everyone thinks that, the game changes. You have to come earlier than the people who came early to avoid the people who came early.
Classical music had become game theory.
The line was already alive.
Behind me were a French guy, an Italian woman, and a guy from Northeastern studying computer science who was also an audiophile. The French guy was especially passionate. He was an alumnus of New England Conservatory, and he talked with the force of someone who had lived inside this music for years. The Northeastern guy told me about speakers, especially French speakers, and how some of them have this verbose, robust sound. I had never heard anyone describe speakers like they were characters in a novel, but somehow it made sense.
Then the conversation went deep.
They brought up Richter, Oistrakh, Gidon Kremer, Perlman, Glenn Gould, Rachmaninoff recordings, Hungarian musicians, old competition results, violinists who had been dead for decades, performances from another lifetime. I kept nodding while internally speed-running Wikipedia pages I had never opened.
I was lost in the best way.
It had been a while since I felt that lost. Startup work shrinks your world if you let it. Everyone around you starts talking about customers, runway, distribution, models, fundraising, hiring, agents, product, speed. Those things matter, obviously. But standing in that line reminded me that entire worlds run beside yours without asking for permission.
There are people in Juba burning rubber and selling tires to make money. There are art school students trying to build portfolios for museums. There are finance people fighting zero-sum games every day. There are classical music people who can remember a performance from 1955 like it happened last week.
Same planet. Different operating systems.
The line taught me one idea I kept thinking about: in classical music, mistakes are less interesting than recovery.
A wrong note happens. A missed entrance happens. A phrase can slip. The impressive part is what comes after. Can the performer absorb the error without collapsing the shape? Can they keep the music alive? Can they make the risk feel intentional, or at least human? That idea hit me harder than another ranking of pianists ever could. Mistakes are cheap. Recovery reveals taste.
Then the staff came out to count seats.
The line changed instantly.
People kept talking, but the conversation lost oxygen. Everyone was doing math. I could feel it. The staff started counting from the front. One. Two. Three. Each number moved closer like a slow verdict. I glanced behind me and felt worse because the people there clearly knew more and cared more. I was the random guy who had followed an AI recommendation into a sold-out recital.
The number reached me.
Eleven seats.
I was number eleven.
For a second, I did not move. Then it clicked. I was the last person. The person behind me would wait. Everyone behind them would wait. I walked in with that strange mix of joy and guilt, like I had won something I did not fully deserve.
Later I heard some of them got into the second half after people left during intermission. Good. They deserved it. Probably more than I did.
The hall felt grand the moment I entered.
I know we were in Boston, but it felt like I had stepped into Vienna for a night. The room had that old concert-hall seriousness: high ceiling, warm light, people lowering their voices without being asked. Even the air felt trained.
I also learned the first rule fast: do not clap between movements.
At first, rules like that feel a little ridiculous. Then you sit there and understand the silence. The pause has tension. The music has not fully landed yet. People wait because the piece is still breathing.
When Yunchan Lim started playing, I had no idea what to listen for.
I tried listening to the whole piece at once, which is like trying to understand a city by staring at the skyline. Then I started hearing layers. A melody on top, something moving underneath, a third voice slipping between them. The voices kept crossing and dissolving. One phrase would turn, melt, and become the next. The transition between movements felt almost like water finding a path downhill.
The more I listened, the less I cared about catching every detail.
Images started coming.
Mountains first. Then a trail. I imagined hiking upward while small creeks ran down the side, cutting through rocks and dirt. The music kept pushing forward like water. Then it opened into a wider space. I imagined reaching the top of the mountain and looking out.
Then the music rose again.
The image changed. It felt like flying upward, awkwardly, like a bird still learning how wings work. Flapping, falling, catching air, losing it, trying again. There was struggle inside the beauty. That was what made it feel real.
That was the moment.
I had heard music before. I had liked music before. This felt different. The piano was making my brain produce scenes. Yunchan Lim was painting with his fingers, and the painting happened somewhere private, inside the listener.
The ending was not the dramatic part for me. The shock came earlier, when I realized classical music could make imagination feel physical.
This was also his graduation recital, which made the whole thing feel stranger. Yunchan Lim had already become a serious name, especially after his Rachmaninoff 3 performance spread far beyond normal classical circles. People knew him. Rooms sold out for him. Still, here he was, playing a graduation recital, standing at a weird edge between student and world-class artist.
That timing gave the night its charge. I was hearing one version of him. Young, exact, intense, still moving upward. Every artist has versions. The early version. The famous version. The tired version. The reborn version. I got a snapshot before the long middle of his career had fully written itself.
And somehow it was free.
The seat felt like it should have cost $150. Maybe more. The value was not comfort or status. The value was that I walked out wanting to hear differently.
Since then, I have been looking up more Chopin: the etudes, the ballades, the sonatas, the concertos, the nocturnes. I started paying attention to performers too. Hayato Sumino is especially interesting to me because he lives between serious classical technique and the internet world I understand. That bridge matters. It makes the whole tradition feel reachable.
I also started thinking about piano again.
For years, piano felt like an old part of my life that I could admire from a distance, like a previous save file. Now it feels active again. I do not need some grand identity around it. I can just return, practice, listen harder, and rebuild the muscle slowly.
I came because Poke gave the concert three stars.
I left thinking about Patrick disappearing from the internet, Chopin’s Ballade No. 4, the last standby seat, a Vienna-feeling hall in Boston, and a bird failing upward inside my head.
Originally published on Medium.