Music.

How to say the words? How can one thing be the most pervading part of all human societies and yet affect me so little. This is a lie, and a truth. It must have started when my sister told me that I was tone deaf, but I thought that she could not carry a note, so that begs that question is she tone deaf or is it a family affliction?

My mother learned piano as a child and when we were growing up and when we had a piano, we used to spend a night a week singing songs around it. Sounds rather rustic, but back then there was no cable where we lived and that meant we only had three channels for TV and that changed with the weather. I loved those nights.

When my younger sister got old enough, she was sent to get piano lessons, I was not. I never spoke up, that I wanted to learn, I wanted them, but the AS was strong and unknown in me then. This is funny, because a lot of my play in those days was around the piano. I played for hours, sometimes an hour at a time making sounds on the piano. I would try to make a story out of the sounds. But, my mom had lessons so my sister had lessons, boys did not get lessons. Boys had to do sports and such, which I hated and my sister loved.

When I was in grade five, my teacher played us this record that I fell in love with. I told my mom and she went to the store and bought it for me. She bought it for me because she shared a like for this kind of music and she wanted to encourage it in me. The sounds wafted over me and the sounds were so new and exciting.

Perhaps I should go back. My mother tried to push this music on us as children sometimes subtly. When we were younger she would borrow children's music from the library, but not traditional children's music. There were the Just So stories on vinyl and there was Peter and the Wolf, which was an orchestral piece. Then the was her record collection kept on a bookshelf on the lowest level with the record player, right at easy access level for children. We could listen to any of her music. My mother liked Edith Piaf, the Beetles, and classical music. The one that I liked to play the most was the score from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I grew up thinking this is what adults liked to listen to, that and that is what people played at dinner time on TV.

In grade 8, I had to select a piece of music and present it with some questions to the class I selected a piece and asked questions and if I had to do it again I might have selected a classical piece and asked my peers to listen to the music and tell me what they see from music, but everyone else had done current song and so I had to find a current song that I liked and there were a few, but for me music has always been a deep part of my soul and very private. So when I shared with them, I was sharing something about me and an AS person can sometimes not understand things correctly when people make comments. One person afterwards asked me if I really liked this music. At the time I viewed the asker as asking in derision, but perhaps it was admiration. The problem was that I did not know and I buried it within me and hid music deep inside me and promised never to show it.

Musical score has always mystified me though, so in high school I took art, even though all the girls I liked were in the band. Maybe if I had taken piano lessons when younger it could have been different, I have big hands that would have been great for a keyboard, but then again who knows. I could always learn now I suppose. Still when the Commodore 64 came out with a three voice music program, I spent hours testing and trying original compositions and dissecting some music trying to figure it out.

So when I got my first stereo in university it had a CD player and I started buying used CDs and some new CDs. I looked for the stuff that I always wondered about but never explored. I got Beethoven's Fifth, and his Fifth lead to the Fourth and Sixth, and soon it lead to the rest. The thing was I did not know what else there was, because I never learned and because I would never ask and never share. I picked up, thanks to Christmas presents, hated snippets of music, the best of series in classical music. I hate them because they are only part of a story and rarely the beginning. But they did allow me to look for the rest of the stories.

I found that my loves have moved around a little but there are some that will never change. I like 70s music like ABBA and Erasure which is not 70s music but is in a similar style. I love NIN, because he writes songs about my life. I like Gordon Lightfoot and Stan Rogers, because I grew up with them and because folk music tells me real stories. I love Tchaikovsky because the Romantic style of music that he optimizes is the sound of my soul. And I admire Ludwig van Beethoven as the transition from Classical to Romantic styles; the greatest of his era, born one hundred fifty years before he was truly appreciated the supreme master composer. For those that doubt, name another from any time that premiered five unheard albums worth of music on one day, in one concert including the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Add that he was rapidly losing his hearing…. Add that some of his music was considered unplayable by people at the time and has only now, in the past fifty years has his genius been realized. Some would suggest that a genius should be able present their ideas so their audience can understand them, but few rare people ask that their audiences rise to understand what they wrote.