Parents Make Their Own Music
I think that the first piece of classical music that I ever recognized was the Bach Double violin concerto. It’s because I heard it live in my living room when I was five.
Both my parents grew up taking violin lessons. I remember that my mother, although she purported not to be able to carry a tune, had a rich tone on the violin. When he sang, my father’s voice rang out, but when he played the violin, the sounds he produced were correct, but timid. When they practiced the Bach Double in my living room, I could tell their violins apart as clearly as if they had been speaking. My father would begin his thin but valiant phrase – and then my mother would charge in, her robust tone all but overpowering him.
I must have been very young when they took me to my first concert. I had never seen anything like the red velvet spiral of the concert hall; we climbed up and up to our unbelievably high seats. Looking down, the musicians on the small wooden stage below were the size of dolls. When the lights dimmed, and the wash of baroque sonorities began, I daydreamed.
All of a sudden, I woke up. It was as if the musicians had spoken my name. How could those sounds that I had memorized from my living room be wafting up from those tiny musicians so far below? I listened, rapt, through the entire first movement. Then, abruptly, the sounds became unintelligible once more. (My parents had not yet progressed to the second movement). It was like climbing a mountain in the fog, when the sun momentarily burns through the clouds and reveals the valley below.
I will never forget that crystal-clear moment. It was profound to realize that music my parents made at home was the exact same music that all these people came to hear, in this red velvet seashell so exotically late at night, all the way downtown.
A couple of years ago, my teen-aged son asked me if I would play the beginning of Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood for him on the piano. He sat and listened. “I remember hearing that all the time when I was little,” he said, with an expression on his face I can’t quite describe. I guess that the Schumann Scenes from Childhood was his Bach Double.
We take our kids to music classes; sometimes we sing and play along. But if children see us playing and singing for ourselves – that is when they will truly know that making music is something that adults do for fun. And that may be the experience that inspires them to create music for the rest of their lives.
Kids may love the things we do for them. But they may love, even more, the things we do for ourselves.
Jan Boner Aug 29, 2012
Beautifully stated Eve! Actions always speak louder than words. I think I forget to enjoy the very art form that I teach! Let’s make music!