Musical Maunderings

Benedicamus Domino!

There can be no doubt but that music is an essential form of cultural expression to every group of humans living on this planet. I have not yet met a culture without its own kind of music and its own meaning or meanings behind music's place in their lives. We seem programmed to find patterns in chaos or to make them if we do not find them. Every culture, for instance, has learned how to make drums and flutes and stringed instruments. Every culture has a way of singing and of putting words to their song. Every culture at its roots is an oral/aural culture, with story, poetry and song needing to be spoken or sung as well as needing to be listened to by an audience.

It is believed that before language, hyrogliphics and pictures were the order of the day, but once sound came to be used as a way of expressing things, music was soon to follow.

For me, music has been a major life interest for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, I recall delighting in making sounds with my voice and hearing how the different sounds vibrated off the walls of my skull. I remember singing along with the radio as though it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn't understand how anyone could be tone-deaf, because for me, music was just there, just something I could do, and so I figured that everyone could do it just as naturally. Still, I was not always very musical. I did begin my long and intimate love affair with the piano by banging unceremoniously on any of the eighty-eight keys which came under my hands, whether they were on my mother's piano in our living room, or my grandmother's piano in her large and lovely rec-room.

Still, as time went on, I gradually learned that there was a method to how the keys were placed, and soon, with the aid of my first piano teacher, I learned to use the keys more correctly, and even to go beyond what she was teaching me. Suddenly, what was chaotic made sense. What was once just a large noise-maker became a medium through which I could create tapestries of rhythm and sound. Of course, this grand and lofty thought was not for a six-year-old's mind, but after many years of threatening to quit the piano, I suddenly fell in love with it. It suddenly became mine to command, rather than a huge monster with which I had to fight every day.

And no, before you ask, I am not a fine concert pianist, nor do I recall how to play much of the classical music I learned when I was a girl, but the piano is still for me a huge source of joy. I know when I've been away from it too long, because I feel all restless and my fingers almost itch with a need to just sit downstairs--not, alas, on a real and living piano (for I do consider them as being somehow alive, alive with the memory of all the hands which have touched them and all the music played on them)--but on a digital piano. Its touch is very lifelike, and even its sound is very right and proper, but well, it doesn't smell of wood oil or of that peculiar sharp scent of--well--discipline. That's what I think of when I sit at a real piano and feel my fingers commanding the hammers to strike the strings and smell that lovely scent of polish and pride.

If there's one thing that playing the piano has taught me, it is the right kind of pride. There is a good kind of pride, and it is the pride that is self-forgetful. One takes pride in the music that one is priveleged to play. One takes pride in the mastery with which one's teachers have guided one. One takes pride in the sweet and lovely tones of the beautiful concert grand that one is permitted to use, and then, when all else is taken into account, one lets a little pride fall upon one's own head like sweet drops of rain. The performance is over, but the best thing of all is that the piece has not yet been mastered. It, in fact, can never be mastered, because it is a thing of quicksilver which is always changing under the hands which play it.

My best piano teacher and the teacher I spent the longest time with did me a great favour for which I don't think I've ever thanked him properly. He never praised me undeservingly. His most common comment after I played a piece for him was: "Well, it's coming." I used to hate that phrase. I wanted him to congratulate me. I wanted him to acknowledge my work. However, the times he congratulated me fully, though few and far between, were always honest and were always completely sincere. He gave me a sense of self-worth that few others could have given me. He made me realize that to do something well took practice and also guts. He found ways past my various guards and walls and showed me how to put my heart into my music, and for that, I shall always be immeasurably grateful to him.

It's true that I have drifted away from the classical music over which he and I used to agonize, laugh, roar and sweat, but with every new thing I try, I always hear his voice saying: "Well, it's coming," and I keep trying that much harder, because I know what it's like to do something well and to be praised for it by someone who sincerely means what he says. It is true that I have lately lost that sense of hard work and guts which he instilled into me, but I mean to get it back, and music is a way for me to do it. I'm glad that I have not lost my love for both listening to and creating good music, and I intend to go on doing both for as long as I live, even if no one ever knows anything about it. Glory to God for all things!

Deo Gratias!