The Gift of Music

I seriously cannot recall a time in which music was not an essential element of my life. In fact, I have a distinct memory of my own personal first encounter with classical music—Mozart to be exact. My parents had given me a little record player (how much children miss these days! There is something so specifically friendly about that whirling wheel and the voice that comes out of it, carrying the world to the room of a five year-old child!) and my Daddy would often bring me records of his for us to listen to together, never dreaming, I imagine, that I would be bored or disinterested. Quite the contrary—such were our own special times and I loved them dearly! One night he came in with a Mozart piano concerto, No. 21 in C, and the minute those first elegant trills met my ears I knew that I was hearing something very special indeed. I felt honored, awed, and, more distinctly than all, terribly, terribly happy.

The moment did not make a child prodigy of me. I went on with my Muppets and Disney albums, and The Little Blue House. But it did make a permanent mark. Perhaps it awakened my sense of the beautiful, or at least made me aware of it, for we all have it. It showed me what truly great music sounds like, and my child mind and heart responded to it. To this day I cannot hear that loved concerto without remembering that day of sweet discovery and blessing my father for giving it to me. Thank God he did not deem me ‘too young’ to enjoy it. If children, in all the freshness of their bright and trustful lives, unmarked as yet by cynicism and suspicion, cannot appreciate and enjoy real music, then who can? It is the language of heaven, from whence they so lately came.

One of my next-earliest musical memories is that of hovering round an upright piano as my neighbor friend showed off her newest pieces for me. She was three years my senior and I thought that she hung the moon. Consequently, her renditions of Just a Second and Lightly Row were things to be marveled at! The thought that one could, just by striking a few keys, actually make music was joy unspeakable. The only thing I wanted in the world (besides an Adoption Doll, of course) was piano lessons. My friend’s teacher was the most respected in town, and thus my parents took great stock in her two mandates for future students: They had to have an interview, so that she could assure herself that it was the child and not the parents that wanted piano lessons, for she saw no point in teaching someone who didn’t want to learn. And they had to be eight years old.

I was crushed. But somehow or other those years were got through and at last one day I sat in Mrs. Brown’s studio, nervously swinging my legs from my perch upon the piano bench and gazing with a hungry eye at her beautiful Yamaha baby grand. I still remember the pride with which I carried away my brand-new Alfred 1-A and Discovery books, and the way that my Daddy laid on the sofa nearby the piano and listened to me plunk out those first painful tunes and scales.

And thus things went on, in very much the same way, for eleven years. My legs got longer and ceased to require a stool beneath my feet, my scales grew more elaborate and my pieces more complex and challenging. But always, Mrs. Brown inspired me with gorgeous music she knew I would love, and always Daddy would stop whatever he was doing to lay on the sofa and listen to me play. Only a slight ruffle in junior high, when long fingernails and cheerleading seemed for a time more alluring than an hour and-a-half each afternoon at the piano. My father (I bless him, again!) put his foot down. It may have been my prerogative to start piano lessons, but such would not be the case with my ending them. He insisted that I give it another year, and then I could do as I liked. This was wisdom indeed—after that bump in the road I never even thought of quitting again.

I began to understand that music was not only joyful—even the sad pieces—it was transcendent. Almost without my realizing it I began sorting out my troubles at the keyboard. It brings a lump to my throat even now to consider how many awkward teenage hurts were soothed by Chopin and Bach, how many inexpressible joys were carried on the flying passages of a Haydn sonata!   

When I was nineteen, Mrs. Brown fired me. I had already given my senior recital the year before (a curious blend of nightmare and delight) and, though there was plenty more I had to learn, she didn’t feel that she was the one to teach it to me.

“I’ve become like your grandmother,” she told me, with a teary smile. “You need a new challenge.”

The look I gave her was just as watery, and I don’t think I could say much at the time. I felt lost, bereft.

And then I discovered the guitar. And after that it was voice lessons. And then it was providing the piano for the Scottish music my friends and I loved to make. And singing with my girlfriends. Music is still—always will be—a vital language for me. Now I love to play jazz ballads for my husband as he lays on our sofa nearby our piano, or nocturnes, or haunting Scottish folk songs. When I’m home alone I indulge my taste for sentiment with a few delicious bits of operetta, The Merry Widow and The New Moon and Sweethearts. I’ve realized that when I’m too busy to make music, I’m too busy to be living properly. It’s that important to me—I wonder that I can ever forget…

And whenever I go to my parents’ house, I inevitably repair to the piano, and Daddy stretches out on the sofa (after tousling with Philip for it) and he listens to me play. As if I were a great pianist. As if I were even worth listening to! 🙂 And I praise God in my heart for a Daddy who gave his little girl the gift of music so many years ago. I cannot imagine my life without it.