[One Sip of a Book] INFP Doctor's Hyperrealism Challenge to Music College

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A doctor, a literary award-winning writer, and a person who has donated blood 100 times. This is the violin challenge story of Kim Minseop, the director of a hospital in Gyeongju. After learning the violin as a hobby for over 10 years, he transferred to the violin major in the orchestral department at Daegu Catholic University and earned a bachelor's degree. He says it was two years of true comfort and joy. He confesses that he learned how to save others through medicine and how to save himself through the violin.

One evening on a weekday, I took a sonata piece and went to that professor’s house with my mother after a long time. It was an apartment called Samik New Town in Seo-gu, Daegu. In the living room, there was a grand piano, and a male professor with very curly hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses was waiting for me. This professor was originally quite strict and did not accept young students as his lesson disciples, but he said he became curious when he heard I was a boy. He told me to play anything once, so I played a Mozart sonata. After listening to my performance, which was less than a minute, he looked at a musical symbol written at the very beginning of the piece and asked if I knew what it meant. Of course, I didn’t know. None of the piano teachers I had attended so far had ever taught me about such musical expression marks, and I had never asked about them either. When I whispered that I didn’t know, he explained the meaning but said that he had been doing the opposite of that meaning. He added that music is hard to do alone and that you need someone beside you to teach and help you. (From the teacher’s perspective, this was a very natural statement, and in fact, it was true. But at that time, I felt a strong rebellious spirit inside. Maybe it was because I was an adolescent.) After the short lesson, on the way back home, my mother asked me if I really wanted to take lessons and pursue music. The intention behind that question was to say no, and I could clearly understand that.

From My Musical Life

Mozart’s Concerto No. 5 is sometimes slow, sometimes fast, and the bright and lively rhythm unique to Mozart continues throughout. My goal was to practice hard for a year to make this sheet music my own, to freely control my left hand, and to express my own emotions on top of that. I took lessons from Teacher Jennifer once a week, progressing line by line like that. Some parts went well, some didn’t, but the progress continued steadily. In the first week of lessons, I thought that at this pace, I could do well enough, but as time passed, the amount I had to keep up with increased exponentially, and I repeatedly struggled to keep up. Still, the progress continued. Of course, progressing doesn’t mean skipping the parts I did at the beginning. I practiced and took lessons overwhelmingly more on the earlier parts than on other parts, starting over and over again from the beginning. The fact that the sound I heard was not very satisfying was truly difficult.

From Minseop, You Did Very Well

Doctor Violin | Written by Kim Minseop | Bookcroo | 350 pages | 17,000 KRW