OmegaMom

I grew up in a musical household.  When I was the age the dotter is now, we had a baby grand piano in the living room (with, at one point, a caught mouse in a little cage sitting on it).  My father, who had played piano from a very young age, sometimes playing hours per day, would play Beethoven and Bach and other composers.  At other times, he would pull out the banjo or the guitar and play folk or classical music on them.  And sometimes, his friend Ray would show up with his guitar, or his bagpipes, and we would get an evening of the two of them jamming.

Most of the time, I didn’t pay serious attention; it was like having background music to my life.

There was a point where I asked Dad to teach me to play piano.  This did not work out; he was very serious and intense, but his philosophy was that, if anyone really wanted to learn, that person would practice on his own.  Hah!  As you might imagine, this didn’t mesh very well with a little girl’s outlook on life.  The “lessons” lasted, if I remember correctly, about a week.  See, I wanted to immediately be able to play like he could; the very concept of starting basic, practicing, and developing into that kind of pianist was, shall we say, a wee tad beyond my seven- or eight-year-old comprehension.  And if I couldn’t play like he could, well, then, I was a failure, and we might as well forget the whole affair.

It took me an awful long time to get beyond the whole mindset implicit in that last sentence.  But finally, when I was 27, on a lark I decided to learn to play the piano at the local community college.

I loved it.  So much that–for a short while–I decided to follow the music program at the CC, including music theory (ack, so hard!).  I signed up with their best pianist for private lessons, and she was a joy and a delight to learn from.  She also had a Steinway concert grand in her living room, a piano that was made for wet dreams; the movement on the keys was buttery soft, and the sounds that came from that piano sent shivers down my spine.

But life–in the form of unpaid bills and a desire to have more money–intervened, and I moved off to the Bay Area to get a job that paid better.  The piano went bye-bye, but I still wanted Music.  One day I chanced upon an advertisement for the Berkeley Community Chorus, which proclaimed that you didn’t need to audition to join.  So I sashayed off to the first meeting of the session, and was hooked.

I can remember driving across the Bay Area to my job in SF with the practice tape in my car’s cassette player, singing alto along with Handel’s Messiah, or some arrangement of old folk tunes, or–best of all–Mozart’s Mass in C Minor.  (One of the nice things about being in a chorus is that when you practice in your car, no-one is listening, and when you sing in the chorus, no-one is listening to you; they are listening to the whole chorus.  And boy, does that make a difference.)

Yesterday night, for some reason, I wanted some Big Music, so meandered off to YouTube to listen to Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor, then Orff’s Carmina Burana, then Verdi’s Dies Irae.  The Verdi and Orff are choral music, so there were a bunch of other choral suggestions, and there was the Mozart…So I had to play some.

There is something very special about being part of a large chorus, to be one voice in a whole melange, to be part of a grand musical instrument.  The Qui Tollis in Mozart’s Mass is…amazing.  Being in the chorus when this is sung makes me break out in goose bumps.

The end result of this bout of YouTubing was that I went to bed singing in my head and realizing just how desperately I need some music back in my life.  Pop and rap and listening to classic rock with my dotter is all very well and good, but I need to be making music again.