The purpose of this post is to lay some foundations for a series about the role of music in my life, so that future posts can take up specific themes in more detail. See the Music category for all posts in this category. Also see the music page on my website. An earlier post on this blog contained some photographs of musical scenes from my childhood.
Some comments about musical talent in my family. Mum plays piano and sometimes the flute, and during the last few years has taken up teaching music to primary school students at a local school. Her father used to be the conductor of the Maitland town band. My father is not musically gifted, and neither was his father, but my father’s mother played a bit.
I’m told that when I was very young, certain music had me entranced, particularly the Doctor Who theme music. I didn’t get interested in the program until I was eight, but apparently as a small child, whenever the theme music played I would drop whatever I was doing and run to the screen until the music stopped. I’m also told that a favourite toy of mine was a tortoise that played “I’d like to teach the world to sing“.
It’s lost now, but there was a cassette tape of a conversation when I was about three years old, the sort one makes to send to grandparents while living in a different country. It included my first recorded spontanous composition, which went like this: “The curtains, the curtains, the curtains, the curtains, the curtains, the curtains, the curtains, the curtains. And now I’m going to sing about the frog. The frog, the frog, the frog, the frog, the frog, the frog, the frog, the frog“. A potential best-seller, don’t you think?
I started piano lessons when I was six, and the ritual of music lessons involved a custard and pudding lunch at Grandnan’s place afterwards. I quickly developed an interest in composing music. My teacher, Mrs Gregory, limited the creative part of the lessons to the first five minutes, because composition did not come under the heading of things she was paid to teach. But I was never passionate about reading music from paper (although it helped if the music in question was culturally exotic) and after a few years I lost interest in the lessons and stopped.
I’ve had other piano teachers. Melinda was good, and offered a more tailor-made curriculum in which I could learn what I was interested in. It was she who introduced me to the musical modes, and set me the exercise of composing a tune that exploited them (I did so, and still remember the tune). But she left the town when she got married, so I didn’t have her for very long.
[Update: more on this here]
The instrument I played in the school band was trombone. I enjoyed this at the time, but didn’t continue playing the instrument afterwards. We did a tour or two around nearby schools and went busking in Adelaide once, playing Christmas carols, and one year I and one classmate played for the town musical.
At Grandma and Grandpa’s place was kept an electronic Yamaha keyboard that we’d bought, and was available for us grandkids to play when we visited. I got it after Grandpa died, and had it with me when I lived at the Bible College. I composed various songs on that keyboard, including some of the best stuff I’ve ever done. But sadly it died in 2000 from battery leakage.
Later I was given a much more sophisticated Technics electronic piano, which I still have, and use mostly for improvisation rather than true composition. Here’s a photograph.
