15,000 songs
Liu, Yang

>>YANG: In high school I had the unique experience of being able to dabble with Irish music and specifically Irish fiddling. My freshman year of high school I had been learning violin for about eight years and for all of those eight years I was classically trained. So the orchestra director at my school thought it would be a cool idea to play around with the new Irish music a bit. We eventually formed a group at my school called "Irish Fiddle Fetish" and we would go around and perform and just learn about the Irish music. However, one major problem that looking back I realize I had was at that time I was very, very shy. I was so shy that I thought that introducing yourself, giving somebody your name would be enough and that was it; that transferred to my music as well. I had a really hard time expressing things through my music; it transferred over to the Irish music too. Irish music by its nature is very fun, it's exciting, you dance around, you smile, jump around, smile, have a really good time, and initially everyone else had the same problem. They too were engrained with this concept of classical music being very formal, strict, in that you stood still like a cold, lifeless, marble statue and just played. So I developed this tunnel vision about the Irish music and that I would do the bare minimum to get by in it expression-wise and the director, he wasn't satisfied with it at all. He wanted to take this as far as it could go. He would urge us to express ourselves and jump around; everybody else got the idea but not me. My junior year, the summer before my senior year, we went to perform in Ireland. So while in Ireland we performed at several venues, a bar, a festival, and at the very end of the trip we were slated to play at another park in Dublin, however, we got rained out. So the director set us up this impromptu performance at the Guinness storehouse of all places. Now me being kind of - I felt like I had expressed myself a lot throughout the performances and by the performance by the storehouse I felt sick of the trip I guess and that all seemed very nice and all to be in Ireland but at a certain point it just starts becoming normal and I guess I just wanted to leave. So I was thinking about the performance that this was just going to be another performance, let's just do it and get out of here. Little did I know that it would be a turning point for me. So at this storehouse we didn't really expect a crowd but it turned out to be probably the best crowd of any performance to date and I don't know how to describe it and something just clicked in me. The Irish music, the ambiance, the crowd especially, I finally realized that this music, I'm really taking this for granted. 

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