The music is in me

How do you get your music nowadays?

I have a passion for music. It's something I listen to everyday, without fail. There isn't one single day that goes by that I haven't listened to at least a few hours of music, even if it's a background to something else I might be doing. It's always there, always revving me up, giving me something that fills and heals and can be sunny or sad. All of it is something I can't do without.

Music has always been around for me. I grew up with my mother's albums played on various degrees of better record players and stereos. Every evening after dinner, in the back room of the house where we grew up, she would sit at her sewing machine with Tony Bennett, Petula Clark, or Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. She would play scores of Andy Williams, Perry Como, and Vicki Carr. I remember the latter being so dramatic and thinking that, if this is an example of how it should be done, she was committed. I probably carried that with me going into teenage years and early twenties when I lived and breathed theater. I couldn't and wouldn't, for all the world, get away from the music.

My dad sang in the church choir. He would go up with the group to the loft and pipe organs above while the rest of the family sat below in the center of the church. After each mass he would ask, "Could you hear me?" It was a choir of blended voices but I could pick his out of the crowd. He would smile back at me when I strongly nodded my head in a definite positive. He wanted to be heard even in the crowd. We practiced songs together while he drove around in the car doing every day errands. Over and over we would sing the same tunes trying to perfect the harmonies, laughing at missed notes, and trying it again. It was always acapella and sometimes he would start or sometimes it would be me. We always gave it the Vicki Carr commitment.

It was many years later while listening to the radio with a co-worker that I realized not everyone could pick out the different instruments playing in songs. I thought everyone could hear the horn, keyboard, or strings that would float through a piece. When I realized not everyone tuned into music that way I couldn't help but think if what they heard was only a mash of notes. What did they actually hear or did they hear anything at all? How could that be? The years of playing piano taught me to read those notes and understand their placements, and timing, crescendos and decrescendos. It didn't hurt to have it all around me with a brother that became a virtuoso at that keyboard or the brothers that picked up 6-string, 12-string guitars, banjos and sang. We were all a fearless bunch of happy racket makers. But what a joyously wonderful way to make noise.

The music stays with me all the time. I played it over and over while painting this room. I play it each night in the kitchen while making dinner. It's on the deck while we relax and sit outside. It's with me on runs, long or short. There are different ways to get it these days instead of large vinyl record albums or only on the local stations of radios. But with all the technology, it sometimes get's hard to figure out where to pin it down or how to find something new. I only know I have it and it's never going away.
TT