Music Lessons

by bsquared5@aol.com | Jun 2, 2015 | Thoughts

Back in the day, nice young ladies of a certain standing were required to attend “finishing school,” where they learned, among other things, how to sing and play piano, I guess in case they had to regale guests in the parlor at Downton Abbey.  I am woefully unfinished.

Those black lines and dots dancing across the tightrope wires–music, in other words–is an undecipherable language to me.  I attend a church where it’s customary to sight-read notes and sing acapella four-part harmonies.  You’re supposed to know which part you sing–soprano, alto, tenor, or bass.  I apparently was absent on the day the Sorting Hat placed everyone in their proper group, so I kind of hop from part to part, depending on how late I was up the night before, or how high the pollen count happens to be that day.

Once, when I was about five, I was belting out something or other around the house when my oldest sister said, “That’s a pretty song.”   I lifted my diva chin and told her matter-of-factly, “I know.  I’m a very good singer.  I probably sing better than—” (I searched my childish brain for the best there was) “the Virgin Mary.”

Even as I said it, I felt a stab of conscience, not from unchecked grandiosity but from saying out loud that I outshone the Mother of God.  I waited for some electric current to sizzle up from the floor and zap me for my brashness.  When none came, I flashed a smile at my sister’s shocked face and flounced to my room, secure in my smugness.

You know how it is at five.  Boys think they have muscles like The Hulk and girls just know, if they close their eyes and wish very hard, they can be mermaids.  Fast forward a few years and I was in sixth grade chorus.  In the back row.  And it wasn’t because I was tall.  That didn’t stop me from belting out the entire soundtrack of West Side Story and The King and I with some of my artsy friends.  My hairbrush microphone got quite a workout as I danced around my pre-teen room singing a soulful rendition of Olivia Newton John’s whispery ballad “I Honestly Love You.”  It always sounded better with lots of lip-gloss.

mom, at a recital

Nobody in our family played an instrument.  My father came from stern German stock (No music!  Eat your strudel!).  One of his brothers did play the sax, but that was an anomaly and about 20 years after my father’s time.  My mother had piano lessons at some point, although I never heard her play.  When we visited her parents, her mother would play harmonica, sing Elvis Presley songs, and break out the banjo.  I was fascinated.  What were these magical devices?  There was a small electric lap keyboard stashed in the back bedroom that I would pick out songs on, but only because the songbook was like a play-by-number beginner’s volume, no real musical notes on the pages.

The only halfway musical thing I remember doing growing up was when we’d pass the time on long road trips by singing a 1950’s song my mom knew called “Gonna Get Along Without You Now.”  My sisters and I would sing the verses in rounds of harmony (as best we knew how), while mom would keep time by singing ba, boom, boom, booms as the bass part.  We never got very far before we’d crack up at the faces she made while she sang.

Years later, when I met my husband, one of the things that impressed me most was his ease with music.  He was in the school choir, played piano, guitar, and mandolin, and marched with the band playing tuba.  He tried to teach me to sight-read, but mostly I liked listening to the timbre of his low bass voice, rumbling the church pew when he’d reach a really low octave.  Sometimes, when he has a cold and while he still has his morning voice, I hear him pad into the foyer and hit the keys on the low end of the piano, often reaching an E.  It always makes me smile.

Because of his genes, both of our children learned to play piano, and one spent a short year at school playing clarinet in the band.  For my son, music comes easy and seems to be an underlying soundtrack of his days.  It is a rare day when he’s not humming or singing around the house, often without realizing it.  He fills the house with his own kind of music.  The other day, when teaching him to drive, I had to ask him to please quit beat-boxing and concentrate on the road.   “This is how I concentrate!” he said.

I still love to jam to songs on the radio, and we do our own version of singing in harmony on long road trips. But I know I’m not destined for American Idol or even the front row of a sixth grade chorus.  I have a different version of formal music lessons.  Instead of practicing scales on the piano, I love to puzzle out how my son is feeling as he hums upstairs.  I watch how music magically knits generations together when my husband plays in the annual Tuba Christmas concert, in a group of musicians ranging from 11 to 93 years old.

Hearing the music of those who are truly gifted is one of life’s greatest delights.  I must have listened to Sarah McLachlan’s “Blackbird” five times today.  Beautiful.  Certain songs sung in just the right way can reach into the deep parts inside like nothing else can.

I’ll keep humming along to different parts of the church hymns without reading the music. I’m pretty positive when I enter the pearly gates, Mary will stick me on the back row of the angel chorus.  Touché.