I’m sorry but fair warning – this is another one of those “go grab a cuppa and visit the bathroom before you start reading this post” posts. 
I’m not sure how well this is going to go tonight. My hands are shaking from pure exhaustion. I’ve had a bout of bad insomnia the last few nights … no awful reason for it … actually if I was going to blame anything they would be good reasons so apart from being unable to stop the incessant yawning I’m feeling fine. It’s just me. It happens (shrug).
Music. It runs through my soul and there once was a time I thought it was my life’s purpose. The thing I was destined for. My ‘one’ thing. And I was right and it should have been. But through life and circumstance however that has changed. Sadly. Still, it courses through me, sometimes slows to a trickle, sometimes lays stagnant and forgotten, but is always there.
I’ve been surrounded by music since the day I was born. My Nanna was a piano teacher and had a passion for music. My father played guitar (I use past tense because, although he is still very much alive, I haven’t seen him play for years). The stereo was always playing – old lps of The Beatles (particularly Sgt Peppers), Donovan, Cat Stevens, Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues. Two oddities I remember were one Hare Krishna album, and one moog album. Yes, my Dad was one cool cat. And still is – he remains a huge Pink Floyd fan.
My introduction to playing music myself was a ukulele I was given one Christmas. I have no idea how old I was… I think maybe 8? Anyway. A few years later I graduated to guitar. The beauty of a ukulele is it is perfect for small hands, and has only 4 strings, but similar chording to a guitar, naturally. It is an excellent starting point for kids to learn guitar on. My father showed me a few basic chords, taught me how to read a chord chart, and left me to my own devices. I had a book – “old south” songs (Old Susannah and the like 
) so off I went. It was fun, but I was never obsessed with it.
When I was 13. When I was 13 everything changed. I remember 13 because these are important memories. I had always been an extremely shy and timid child, an oddity, but at 13 I was painfully painfully shy, withdrawn and sensitive. A loner, more than an oddity – I did not fit in anywhere. Then my Nanna’s old piano got delivered to our place. It was one of those beautiful old German things that take 6 or more men to move. With it came a a ‘kindergarten’ learn to play piano book. I have this sharp image in my brain of the first time I sat down and opened that book with the intention of teaching myself how to read music and play the piano. Extraordinary to have such a crystal clear memory of that defining moment.
I spent every spare moment I had at the piano. If I had time before I was to go to school, I was playing. I played from the moment I got home from school until dinner time then straight after dinner until bedtime. My parents noticed how devoted I was to that piano (how could they not lol) and how quickly and easily I picked it up.
Somehow my parents learned of an old man who taught piano for free. Just for the joy of teaching it. He didn’t teach for the Australian Music Examination Board exams. He taught to impart love of music. So I started lessons with Mr Hunt. An oddity himself. A gentle gentle old man, a professor of mathematics. My notes all came on the back of paper that had tiny and tidy extremely complex equations written all over it. I suspect he was a genius. The perfect teacher for a child such as I. I flourished under his wings and within 6 months I was playing fourth grade pieces and was moving on to 5th grade pieces. So, I was playing with an ability that usually took 6 years of lessons to achieve, only I got there in 6 months.
Admittedly I was playing day and night. But I was a bad student really. I never practised my scales or exercises. I only played the things I wanted to play. The pieces I loved and could lose myself in. I cloaked myself in music. Music was my only friend. I played the Moonlight Sonata, my Nanna’s favourite, most often until I fell in love with an LP of Glenn Gould playing Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique and I had to learn how to play it. I had dreams – I wanted to be a concert pianist. A bit of a problem for somebody who could not even perform for members of her immediate family. Performing made me die a million deaths.
At this stage I was in the second year of high school, and in those days you had to choose electives to take until the end of high school. The only thing I knew with certainty was that I had to choose music. This was before the piano and before the love affair with music. It was just something I felt I had no choice in. Strangely. At some stage in my lessons with Mr Hunt, he realised what he had on his hands with me. I became his special pupil. He came to the high school to meet with my music teacher, and discuss my gift and the best way to handle it. Unfortunately I think the teacher didn’t know what to do or just plain didn’t care to know. School was a bitch. Piano was my comfort and salve.
Then the most awful of circumstances. One out of my control. My father got a new job in Sydney which was hours away from where we lived and meant we had to move. No more lessons with Mr Hunt. I hated saying goodbye to him. As soon as we got to Sydney my parents talked to the parents of the other students in my new elective music class and found a man who was an excellent teacher. He insisted that I was going to do exams. That caused problems straight away – my terror got in the way and so I frustrated him greatly. He was a very proficient and technically excellent teacher. In normal circumstances. But of course I don’t DO normal, do I? There was none of Mr Hunt’s gentleness and sensitivty, no sense of joy in the music. No soul in at whatsoever. And so the passion dwindled.
When asked I usually say I don’t have any regrets in my life. Things happen for a reason and even the worst of events you can learn lessons from. But now I realise I do regret something – I regret, deeply regret, letting my passion and gift slip away. I’ve tried taking up piano since and it’s not the same. You see, if you don’t use your gift, you can lose it after all. My parents told me not 6 months ago that it is one of their biggest regrets that they weren’t able to find just the right teacher for me. What could have been? Where would I be now if just the right teacher had been found?
Then in year 11 (16-17 years old) I became friends with a girl who’s father was the conductor in Australia’s best concert band (small orchestra without a string section). She played percussion, they needed more percussionists, so I came on board. What an amazing thing a pair of drumsticks and a practice pad can do for your social status 
(never mind that it classical music we were performing – they didn’t know that). All of a sudden I wasn’t that weird lonely girl. I was the girl with the punk haircut and the drumsticks and I was kinda cool. All because on Thursday afternoons I had to catch a bus to the place where we had band practice and someone noticed drumsticks poking out of my bag, so word spread. How ridiculous. I took to percussion like a duck in water. I loved it. Snare and timpani especially, those freaking heavy cymbals not so much. Adored the timpani, and the snare was so cool. I learned to do rolls in no time flat .. percussion is a blast. They were such fun days. We’d often perform outside on the boardwalk at the Sydney Opera House. We recorded an entire album at the Sydney Opera House. I don’t know what happened to that record come to think of it. Fun fun days.
I also took up flute at this time and played in the b-band. I had lessons with a gorgeous gorgeous young man (who I had a bit of a crush on) who was really into jazz and contemporizing and improvising. That was also rather short lived.
Because then I made it into the working world and I just did not play music any more. Too busy, controlling (now ex)fiance, all sorts of excuses. The music stopped. Just like that. I didn’t have a piano anymore. Someone else had my guitar and my flute. Gone. It was a crappy guitar anyway and now I have two much better ones.
There was no real music for my soul in my life until around 5 years ago. I have a sister who loves to sing. She joined a local ‘Sweet Adelines’ chorus (for those not in the know – 4 part harmony choruses for women. Dreadful stuff LOL). She somehow managed to con my mother and myself into joining. I thought it was a bad joke because I couldn’t sing to save my life. But I went along anyway, and you know what? I thought I couldn’t sing because I was trying to sing like a girl!!! 
I was put in the bass section and with the lessons and exercises we had at every practice night, I found I could indeed sing. I actually sang well enough that I was asked to be the bass in a quartet and we were very very good. I did actually enjoy performing in the quartet. It WAS fun, and I will shamefully admit I got an egotistical buzz out of it. I would always have people coming up to me afterwards exclaiming at what an itty bitty little thing I was with such a beautiful deep voice. Such a contradiction – androgynous me. A little girly looking thing with long hair and big boobs, yet a big deep and husky voice. Singing a man’s part. Interesting thought … I can’t perform solo. I’m too terrified by it. But put me in a group of people, and I love it. I get off on it.
Barbershop gets very old very fast. I left. I took up lessons with a local teacher. Again .. the case of an excellent teacher, but not for me, who needs a deeply soulful teacher or I just don’t feel right and I won’t do well, sensitive organism that I am. Last year I started singing in a new chorus that started up, meeting at the local Steiner school. Men and women, no barbershop – but ancient germanic latin hymns, secular latin chants, some celtic stuff, an aboriginal lullaby or two – beautiful music. Beautiful musical director – a woman you want to work for as hard as you can to please, a dynamo of a tiny woman who is a kindred spirit. She talks in images. And guess what? Although my range is now to 3 octaves, I’m singing tenor, a men’s part (sigh).
So now, I’m a singer. The voice is my instrument. I plonk on the keyboard occasionally. I play the guitar not nearly as often as I should. I haven’t sung (performing or practicing) with the chorus since December last year. We were disbanded for this school term just gone due to the musical director being too busy. We were supposed to start up again next week and I hope to God we do. Singing with the chorus is an amazingly uplifting thing to do. It is the biggest stress relief I know of. I bliss out in it. I’m learning it is necessary to my being healthy. I need to sing .. the lack is starting to show.
So. The length of my posts are legendary. Yet another long long thing from me. But the writing of this is probably more for myself, than for the benefit of anyone reading it. I haven’t set down the story of my musical journey in this way before. And I have felt a niggling urge to journal it for quite a while. It’s part of a process .. a process no-one else sees and even I can’t fully comprehend, but a process of looking back and moving on. Particularly in relation to the “why I fuck up” post about giftedness earlier. A look at where my particular gift lay, how I squandered it, what I do now to try and reclaim some snippet of it. All part of this whole existential theme that’s permeating my thoughts these days.