New York Stories: Piotr Orlov

Despite a near-complete awareness of the emotional manipulation that, say, a John Williams or a Howard Shore score is trying to impart upon my being, the moment that the movie reaches a tender late-in-the-fifth-act denouement and the accompanying strings start to crescendo, my eyes begin to tear uncontrollably, even as my reason curses the machinations that have deceived me into this fragile state. Recently, I’ve started trying to think more clearly about the cause and effect of this phenomenon, and think I’ve found the culprit. I blame New York.

Some background may be in order: I arrived at JFK Airport as a displaced seven-year-old foreigner, thrown into the deep end of Elmhurst, Queens (then to Jersey City, the West Village, and South Brooklyn), without a lick of language and with no capitalist-ideal advantages. My main tools of assimilation were a cultured pair of ears and a deep empathetic streak, so music became a natural gateway.

Classical pianist Jeremy Denk recently gave some insight into his education: “The daily rite of discovery... is how learning really happens,” he wrote. I too adapted by soaking the city in, sponge-like, person by person, neighborhood by neighborhood, sound by sound. And while the diversity of my playground made it easy to encounter the baggage carried by the wider population’s diverse musical choices (much less the sonic-critical discourse being unpacked in the then-great Village Voice), for a long time, it was a chore to tell genres and their social trappings apart.

Why did some kids insist that “disco sucks” but listened to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”? Why did teen boys quit the basketball team, suddenly adapt uniforms of black mascara and sad dispositions, all the while failing to laugh at Morrissey’s jokes? What did knowing which color fat laces should be worn on a specific kind of Fila sneaker have to do with enjoying Whistle’s “Just Buggin’”? How come Bruce Springsteen isn’t cool, when a stadium full of people says he is?

I was oblivious to the social contracts being signed and the mores being practiced by my peers, even as I was beginning to understand the radical differences the stories their music choices told. My own pop blanket covered them all equally, just as, it seemed to me, New York had room for all of their voices, be they tired, poor and huddled or ecstatic, stoned and immaculate. The self-satisfaction I began to feel at my attendance and understanding of diverse experiences – late-night gay dancefloors, freestyle rap ciphers and hardcore matinee mosh pits – almost made it feel like I was a native. Except that, of course, natives don’t usually feel equally at home in all of those settings.

Something happens when you fully lift the dam to audio stimulation and let music penetrate you beyond reason, allowing it to flood every bit of your emotional space. It is a state at once outside of being – and if you could simultaneously remain cognizant of the physical narrative playing out all around – completely in touch with the present. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose – especially when abetted by light psychedelic stimulation and not fiddling about with media-fueled excitement. And once the floodgates are open, they are very hard to close at will.

I have not seen the inside of a cipher or a mosh pit in a long, long time (dancefloors are another story). Having grown older and more restrained, I have been forced to refine my music consumption – not least because catering to those habits has changed so drastically in the digital era. I still try to listen to the city and its music the way that the younger me once did, but honestly, I recognize this is impossible. I’m too often focused on the history instead of the finished pieces in front of me, be it a sample or what a particular location might have been a decade prior. It probably has something to do with the endless yearning for youth, a topic that I’ll save for my therapist’s couch. With maturation, my emotional openness and extreme connectedness to music has waned.

There is one listening practice that does remain completely in place, where the defense perimeter has not been so fully rebuilt: the corny movie scenes and their sappy accompaniments. Be it rom-com, dramedy or a Bildungsroman – regardless of if I am rapt or inattentive – once the emotive moment comes, the tears begin to flow. This has also become a lesson in itself. As growing older and tougher has made crying more difficult and less frequent, I have begun to enjoy this feeling of being overpowered. It may be a false emotional tonic, but I like to think that it speaks to a humanistic quality – one that reinforces my need to not forget to listen, to hear things without prejudice and to not decry sappy endnotes. Like this one.

A version of this article appeared in The Daily Note, a free daily newspaper distributed in New York during the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy.