The power of Music: my Life in Sound
I have a special connection to music—especially classical music. To me, music is never just background noise filling the silence. It is an invisible force: a companion to my private sessions and a powerful driving presence at my events. I spend hours building each playlist, carefully choosing every single piece I play, because it is so important to me. But where does this fascination come from?
Like so many things, it begins with my own story. I grew up surrounded by music, immersed in it from an early age, and was fortunate to have a natural gift for acoustics.
Learning by Ear
In the school I attended, it was customary for most children to learn the recorder. I was 7 when I first started, which means I literally learned to play music before I properly learned to write. We had one recorder lesson a week in addition to our regular music class, where we learned one new song at a time. For me, that was never enough. I wanted to play every song we sang in the regular music class. So I did everything I could to make that happen.
At that point nobody had explained to me how music worked—that the distances between notes are not equal, for instance. I had no idea why some melodies worked when I started on one note but sounded completely wrong when I started on another. So I experimented constantly to get the sound and melody I was after. Without realizing it, I was teaching myself about musical keys.
I soon discovered that my beloved recorder had its limitations. Some songs simply reached notes the instrument couldn't play, so if I wanted to perform them, I had to transpose the entire piece into another key. I didn't think of it as anything remarkable—I simply wanted to play the music despite my instrument's limitations, and changing the key became part of solving the puzzle. Sometimes that meant adjusting a note here or there, and this became my own way of discovering major and minor keys, sharps and flats.
Outgrowing the Soprano Recorder
By the time I was about nine, I had figured out how to read sheet music from my music textbook. I could teach myself whatever came next well ahead of class time, much to my music teacher's dissatisfaction. Seeing my hunger, though, she entrusted me with the school's well-hidden alto recorder—a beautiful wooden instrument with a different range and technique than the soprano recorder I'd been playing. My fingers were still too small to comfortably reach the last finger hole, so even then I found myself adapting pieces to fit the limitations of my own body.
When I turned 12, I discovered proper classical sheet music. By then I had some pocket money, so I went to the bookstore and bought whatever scores I could find—Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Vivaldi, Chopin, Ravel. Some were already adapted for recorder; others needed polishing, which I gladly did using my self-taught techniques. Before long, I knew most of my repertoire by heart. I never performed in front of an audience, never played for anyone but myself, and no one ever told me I had talent.
Music as a Second Language
Music also carried me through school in ways I didn't expect. For example, I disliked history class with a passion, but when I played Bach, I somehow began to understand the tension between ordinary people and the aristocracy they lived under. The social and political conflicts of eighteenth-century Europe stopped feeling abstract—they had an emotional texture. I was never much for the exaggerated, self-inflicted suffering in Shakespeare's sonnets, but I could accept that same kind of suffering as part of someone else's life through the music of Henry Purcell.
A Working-Class Childhood
Sometimes I wonder where that path might have led. Knowing my rather stubborn personality, I suspect I'd be playing flute in some large European orchestra today, if only someone had recognized that this was more than a childhood hobby. But it was Hungary in the 1990s. I grew up in a working-class family with roots in the countryside, before my parents moved to Budapest. Culture simply wasn't something I was surrounded by as a child. We never owned recordings beyond whatever played on the radio, there were no paintings or photography in our home, we never went to the theater or to a dance performance—so becoming a musician was never a possibility anyone seriously considered.
The one exception was the year my mother received an annual ticket to the Budapest Opera from a friend. I was twelve, and I can still recall fragments of nearly every opera I saw that year—not every scene, necessarily, but certainly the atmosphere, the emotion, the feeling of being completely absorbed by the music. Verdi and Puccini dominated that season, and their work remains my go-to opera repertoire to this day.
Hiding Liszt Behind Blink-182
My love for classical music never disappeared. My classmates listened to Blink-182 and The Offspring—and so did I, because at that age fitting in mattered far too much—but I always found myself returning, quietly, to Liszt, Bach, and Mozart in the dark of my teenage bedroom. While the magazines tried to teach us about romance, I was privately shedding tears for Orpheus and Eurydice, and encountered the different approaches to emotions through the different playstyles of professional (and not so professional) pianists.
A Memory Built on Sound
Looking back, I realize how much my particular way of processing sound—something some would call an acoustic savant skill—shaped the rest of my life. During university, I had to work alongside my psychology studies to support myself, which left very little time to prepare for exams. Luckily, sitting in lectures was usually enough. I remembered what I heard with remarkable accuracy and rarely needed to study my notes afterward—the words, the intonation, the tone of a teacher's voice. Reading was never how I learned best; my memory has always been carried by sound, and that skill carried me to the top of my class.
It never occurred to me that this was unusual. Even now, I don't think of myself as unique—just someone who can easily recall almost an entire night of psychedelic music for a few days after I danced to it ecstatically. By now, my friends are more or less used to the fact that it's not sexy furniture that turns me on at a BDSM party—it's hearing an Etapp Kyle track at the last KV. My strange skill, and my obsession with music, simply became part of my everyday life.
Finding Classical Music Again, Through Flogging
It took many years for classical music to find its way back into my everyday life, and it was actually flogging that brought it back. Finger flogging is wonderfully meditative, but in the beginning it's also highly repetitive—and, frankly, sometimes even boring. To keep myself engaged while practicing, I started putting on classical music, simply because I wanted rhythm and melody, and the largest repertoire I had—the one I was most comfortable choosing from—was still the classical music stored in my memory. It didn't take long to notice that the music wasn't just accompanying my movements; it was shaping them. Rhythm, phrasing, crescendos, silence—all of it translated naturally into movement, turning practice into something that felt almost like dancing.
Another Presence in the Room
Ever since, classical music has remained an essential part of my sessions, events, and even workshops. Music has a remarkable ability to regulate us. It creates emotional movement, carries presence without demanding words, and quietly fills a room with an atmosphere everyone shares without noticing. During moments of intense sensation—pain, surrender, profound emotional release—it becomes something far greater than background music. It becomes another presence in the room, gently accompanying the experience, giving it rhythm, beauty and sometimes even meaning.
When I look back, I can see that music has quietly been present at every stage of my life. It taught me to listen before I knew the rules, to feel before I could understand, and to trust intuition before I had the right technique. Today, when I carefully choose the music for a session or event, I'm not simply selecting a playlist. I'm drawing on a lifelong relationship with sound—one that continues to shape the atmosphere I create and the way I connect with the people and fill the room.