By Ethan Liebross
A webcam stares back at him in his Philadelphia apartment. At eye-level stands a recording mic. He plucks up his violin and drags his twenty-nine-inch bow off his shelf, smooths the horse-tail with rosin, and lets the wooden chambers sing.
Emmanuel “Manny” Houndo was born and raised in Togo, a country bordering Ghana in West Africa. He played soccer barefoot and went to a private school where he spoke in French with his classmates. After school, he returned home to his peach-yellow house framed by a row of untamed and abandoned railroad tracks. Inside, the language of Ewé filled the spaces with that warm feeling of home. At eight years old, Emmanuel and his family boarded a plane for America.
Years later, in a Philly elementary school, a teacher approached Manny and asked him to give the violin a try. Soon, recognizing his talent, instructors took a special interest in Manny and gave him private lessons for free.
Manny is one of the 20 classical violin majors at Penn State. Shaping his own educational journey, he’s merged his interests with healthcare and has plans to graduate with a Health Policy and Administration degree. With two parents as nurses, he’s poised to follow in their footsteps but in his own way.
“Reality is so much more nuanced and complicated than most people think,” Manny tells me over lunch. He’s speaking to me about the recent push for doctors and administrators to look at new ways to solve problems. There’s many things scientists still don’t know—how cancer patients bounce back from illness into recovery, the miracle that is waking up out of a coma after nineteen years, how exercising can prevent early-onset Alzheimers. There’s a lost art to healing. An art desperate for a musician’s creativity.
Manny is a slim-cut, five foot six inch twenty-two-year-old with a stylish look and an infectious smile. He grips his violin in his palms, prepared, composed, and always ready to go. And on his face, swan-like confidence. This time, a roomful of animated eighty and ninety-year-old patients stare back.
“Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch.” —Debashish Mridha
What makes Manny so unique is that he’s not just a violin player. Described as “a social butterfly on steroids,” Manny’s equally charming, disciplined, and introspective.
He drags out his notebook hesitantly from his JanSport backpack to show me something.
I can sight read fine
I can sight read fine
I can sight read fine
I can sight read fine
I can sight read fine
I can sight read fine
I will play what is exactly on the page
I will play what is exactly on the page
I will play what is exactly on the page
I will play what is exactly on the page
I will play what is exactly on the page
I will play what is exactly on the page
“This is me, and this is how I train,” Manny tells me, flashing a grin. He somersaults the page of his 5-star notebook.
“Oh, and this drawing…” It’s a scribble of a man I don’t quite recognize.
“I had this weird vision of seeing exactly what the future me is going to look like. When you draw out your goals you’re forced to go after them.”
To this day, the thought of being from Togo puzzles Manny. Recently, when he was on a date with a girl and she leaned in and asked him where he is from, he hesitated for a second. Then, by routine he replied, “Togo.” To him, the word felt fake, almost like a fuzzy memory.
“The Manny in Togo, the Manny in Philly, and the Manny today, they’re all completely different people.”
His eyes gaze back down at his book.
“I couldn’t do any of this when I was in Philly. I can’t be showing that to my friends.”
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” —Albert Einstein
We walk across the energetic campus from the HUB to the Music Building, which lives on the far west-end next to the Forum Building. Every minute he passes another face. He knows them, and they know him. We walk down a set of hallways and face a wall of “High School Musical” chalk-white lockers, where Manny unlocks and tugs out his four-string Stradivarius replica.
At the bottom of the steps, we run into Kelly, a piano-major, who stops on her heels.
“Hey! How are you? Off to some practicing. Some warming up. We have a violin studio recital today.”
“Hey, that’s exciting,” she replies with real enthusiasm.
“Yeah, I mean, it should be fun. I’m doing a duet with Rachel Zimmerman.”
“Oh, what are you playing?”
“Navarra. It’s a really cool piece. Really hard though.”
We walk through the labyrinth of practice rooms where the sounds of flute, trumpet, and viola compete for my ears’ attention. In the musty and uninhabited room, Manny looks at himself in the mirror to hype himself up. It’s all part of the routine. The part of practice that is warming up the mind.
“Wow! I look amazing!” he tells himself, combing at his flattop.
He stitches his sheet music together with a roll of Scotch tape. The Spanish romance he is about to play is so long that it requires two stands to rest on. He tapes down the midline in such a way that he’ll be able to twist the pages over in one fluid motion midsong.
He sets one of many timers before confessing, “Being stressed and rushed is my reality.” He practices blindly without the sheet music in front of him, catching me off guard. Most musicians that I know use their music as a crutch like training wheels on the back of a bike.
“I can normally memorize a lot of the piece because I practice by ear. When I was younger, the only reason I was able to cover pop and rap songs is because I would learn the music very quickly. With pop songs, they’re slow enough that I can figure them out.”
Through a breezeway, we walk back into the architectural stunner that is Music Building II, passing more smiling faces staring up at Manny. He catches sight of his professor, Jim Lyon, “a dramatic violin soloist,” and gives him a big hug.
“So you’re very close to him?” I asked, somewhat jarred, realizing I’ve only hugged a professor once in my lifetime.
“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely!!”
Later that day, I catch Jim in the hallway and pull him to the side to ask him about Manny.
“Manny is one of those rare students that comes in beaming with energy. Every lesson, he runs in with a ninety-second pitch explaining to me everything he’s had trouble with. I really like this. It means I know exactly how to teach my lesson.”
Inside Esber Recital Hall, natural light pools into the voluminous venue from all different angles. After an hour of violin solos, at 4:15 p.m., Manny saunters out on stage to an audience of clapping parents, friends, and an assembly of older men in the front row whom I suspect treat coming to these performances as a hobby of sorts.
He’s joined by Ian Duh, a pianist, and Rachel Zimmerman, a gorgeous tall blond. They bow and serenade the audience with Navarra by Pablo de Saraste (1844-1908), a seven-minute-long piece. If a love letter was made into a song, this would be it. I watch and admire Jim the professor in the third row, all the way to my left. He has the biggest grin on his face as he sways his body to the rhythm and bobs to the violinists’ pizzicato. Plastered to his face is a pride that usually only a father can wear. Rachel and Manny look at each other throughout the piece, staring into each other’s eyes, their sweet smiles radiating across the room. They keep the synchrony alive through what I can only describe as a telepathy-like superpower.
“If music be the food of love, play on.” —William Shakespeare
In private, later that night, Manny opens up. “You know how intimidating it is? How intimidating it is to be in a lesson with her? Or just a one-on-one? She’s going in bow flying and I’m over here just trying to keep up!”
Following the recital, at 5:15 p.m., I follow Manny outside where he rendezvous in the parking lot with Kyle. The two of them lived together freshman year in a supplemental room in Simmons Hall with eight kids crammed inside. Kyle played the guitar. Their one friend John rapped. And Manny, not so surprisingly, played the violin.
“People heard us play and they just loved it,” Manny says in the car as we ride over to Kyle’s apartment in his silver Honda. I learned from them that it wasn’t just about the music they played. It’s who they were and what they represented together. They made it big the very first week of freshmen year after being featured on Penn State’s Snapchat story. Quickly, everyone began reaching out. Soon, Kyle and Manny found themselves getting paid to play at alumni events, THON, the Penn Stater Hotel, Indian cultural festivals, and more. That same freshman year, Manny became the only freshmen first violinist in the Penn State Philharmonic Orchestra.
Miraculously, he would balance the gentle classical music with covers of not-always-so-gentle rap, hip-hop, and pop songs. In high school, he posted these covers to his YouTube Channel. His pivotal moment came when Beyoncé, the icon and ‘Queen B’ herself, reached out in response to his “Drunk in Love” cover. Through these pop pieces, he was able to connect with people in high school on a different level.
“I was no longer ‘the immigrant;’ now I was ‘the violinist,’” Manny tells me proudly.
Back in Kyle’s downtown State College apartment, they were having their first rehearsal in over a year in preparation for a March 20th performance.
“This is literally the band coming back together,” Kyle laughs, reaching for his guitar off the pre-owned chesnut couch.
They had separated in Manny’s junior year. Manny was the one to make the call. As a music major, he wanted to push himself as far as he could go. Plus, he didn’t want to have to drag Kyle along if that wasn’t what he wanted to do professionally. But, now, since it’s Manny’s senior year and final semester, he reached out to Kyle to do one last performance together. Leaning forward, very earnestly, he comes clean: “This is more for me than the event itself.”
In the apartment, they take out their instruments and tune-up.
“Throw some chords on. Let’s just see,” Manny suggested to Kyle. Within minutes, they’ve composed the most beautiful, folksy-sounding, electrical, and impassioned symphony.
Afterward, they jump up and down screaming, “We still got it!!” And they have that smile, the type of smile that is impossible to shake off.
They finish the night running through a list of pieces they’ve assembled, ones they magically still remember through muscle memory even a full year later.
“There are plenty of talented people out there in the world making incredible things happen. What separates them from Manny is that Manny cares about people,” Kyle explained looking over, smirking at Manny. “There’s just something about him.”
Published in Klio 2021
Ethan is a junior majoring in neuropsychology and minoring in English. He hopes to attend medical school to become a primary care physician. He loves to read, drink (too much) coffee, run, and meet new people. On campus, he’s a proud member of Remote Area Medical and Outing Club. He also runs a non-profit that helps high school students, especially from low-income communities, apply to college.