Dear friends,

Everyone has their cultural artifact that identifies him or her as a part of a unique

community. Whether it is something simple like an action figure or something bigger like a car,

it is beneath the surface of their face value. My cultural artifact is the piano. This instrument has

been a part of my life for about twelve years. I have attended many piano competitions and even

won some of them. In that experience, what I valued most was the people I had the opportunity

to meet. A piano can be something played as a hobby or something played competitively.

Whatever the purpose is, it all comes down to the fact that a piano is a form of art, specifically

the art of music.

The piano has led me to the music community. I went to Daejeon, South Korea, one

summer to better myself in piano and perform for a local contest. I attended a tutoring place for

piano, which is the go-to for piano-related things in Korea. It is a building filled with piano and

students who come for lessons or practice. Walking into a place full of musicians, especially

pianists, was a first-timer for me. It was nerve-wracking at first, but everyone in the community

was welcoming and humble and kind, which immensely helped me calm down. From what I

heard, the music community was toxic. The media, especially movies, portrayed the music

community as a very harsh environment. Take, for example, the film Whiplash. Whiplash is

about a drummer who gets into his dream school for music, but he is welcomed with torture and

abuse of his teacher and peers. In the modern age, examples like these portray the music

community as a virulent or pessimistic group. Portrayals like these have brought questionable

reputation to the community, but I can say that this portrayal isn’t accurate.
 From what I heard and seen on media, my previous thought of a community of musicians

was that they would act very highly of one another and be arrogant. However, I was corrected.

When I was in Daejeon, all my peers would give constructive criticism and help me find the right

fingerings or rhythm of a given piano piece. To be clear, no, you do not need to be a musician to

be a part of this community. This place is full of people with varied skills and with one shared

goal: to become better. The piano calls for a collaborative form of art, it calls for the creation of

art, and its melodic tunes bring the people together.

Thank you,

Eric Won
 Composer’s Memo

In this letter, the audience I address is non-musicians skeptical of going into music and its

community. I first started introducing my cultural artifact and went on talking about my trip to

Daejeon. I used this experience because this was my first time going out of my comfort zone and

seeking a community of musicians to be a part of. My purpose to this was to empathize and

relate to my audience: to say that I, too, have been in the same boat. I wanted to let them know

that I feel what they are feeling and how it worked out for me. The audience may look down on

the community, so I attempted to be a mediator for that by saying my experiences of it. The

stepping into the community, I’d say, is one step, but since I only have one example, which is my

experience, the audience may feel like there’s insufficient experience from others even though I

may relate to the audience. Also, my ethnicity is Korean, so the step into the music community

might have been smoother since my experience of it was in Daejeon, South Korean, and given

that the majority of the people there are Korean, that commonality could have been a more

significant factor to why I fit in so well. I chose an email/letter composition to demonstrate that

this text follows through the letter genre. I started it off by addressing my audience as friends to

give off a more welcoming tone, hoping I gave a good impression of the community. I wrote this

letter as if I was talking to my audience and narrating my experience to them. I believe that my

writing style, where it seems as if I was speaking to my audience, is the choice of composition

that helped demonstrate that this text was related to the letter genre.