Month: June 2023 (Page 1 of 2)

As I mentioned in Part 1, I had decided to become a professional pianist.

However, my stint at the boarding school and the divorce of my parents, destabilised and confused me.

Although I had a wonderful piano teacher at boarding school (it was the only nun who was nice to me), I was disoriented  about life.

I had many unanswered questions.

a. Why was I sent to boarding school 10 minutes away from where I lived? It was of a religion I had never heard of.  My father was an aetheist, my mother wasn’t practising anything. I only got into that school because of a friend of my parents.

b. Why was Mother Superior (the headmistress) always nasty to me. She used to say that I was a sinner as my parents were both divorced from previous marriages and were now separated to be divorced again.

c. Why did I have to kneel daily in the Chapel at 5.00am whatever the season? Reply was always, because I was a sinner.

Once in the outside world, I decided life was going to be on my terms. I knew that it would upset my mother terribly if I didn’t play the piano, so I STOPPED for a few years.  And so, my standard deteriorated rapidly. Can you imagine the pain in my heart from that decision? I loved the instrument.

I still play today but infrequently as I never achieved the standard I had reached in the early years.

If YOU have a passion for something and had stopped for whatever reason, when you recommence …

Be kind to yourself, be loving to yourself and take it slowly.
You will get back into it.

Video to come……….
Me, now, experimenting with my iPhone playing 2 minutes of “La Paloma”, “The Dove”.

It’s a popular Spanish song that has been produced and reinterpreted in diverse cultures, settings, arrangements, and recordings over the last 140 years. The song was written by the Spanish Basque composer Sebastián Iradier around 1860 after a visit to Cuba.

The AIM of this site is to
UPLIFT, INFORM, INSPIRE

Music

I didn’t know that music in its generality existed until I was about 10 years old. The people we boarded with had a pianola, which if you used the pedal, produced melodies from a reel of paper in a little cabinet above the keys that had indentations which produced the melody. The keys would go up and down in keeping with the melody, you just sat and watched/listened. The melodies were usually sing-alongs and everyone just sang to the melody. No skill was required

The other migrants had various instruments which were part of their culture but, I didn’t link that with “Music”. They were mostly used when the variety of nationalities joined up in public parks and danced and barbecued.

A few houses up from where we boarded lived an elderly lady (Mrs Cran) and her adult son (Arthur). He had a health condition and all day he sat in a chair and listened to the gramophone player and listened to records.

Everytime, I went there, I heard these sublime melodies. I asked his mother what it was, she told me, Classical Music. I had never heard of that before. He could only speak for short periods before he gasped for breath and collapsed with exhaustion. I was introduced to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach,  Handel, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, to name a few.

I used to go there as often as my parents allowed after school, and on weekends. One day I went, and I saw Mrs Cran crying. She told me Arthur had died. He’d had a stroke. Apparently, he had extremely high blood pressure and, in those days, the doctors didn’t know what to do about it.

I had never experienced someone dying that I cared for. I couldn’t believe, I would never see him again, nor listen to music with him, or taste Mrs Cran’s cakes. She always baked a fresh cake for me.

Not long after, we left the area as my parents had bought a house .

Music

1. The Piano – Beginning
   Part 1

A slight introduction is necessary.

In 1952, I arrived with my parents in Australia. That is 7 years after World War II ended. All I had seen till then were bombed cities, bombed countrysides and many dead bodies.

First Australian port was Fremantle, then Adelaide, followed by Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. You can imagine my surprise when nothing was destroyed here. This was followed by the long, slow train trip to Townsville where the person lived who guaranteed for us to arrive in Australia.

We stayed there a year before moving to Brisbane. Now, building a life started in earnest. We boarded with a family before my parents bought a run-down house that needed massive renovations.

No one had any money so, all the migrants exchanged services as house repairs were needed, roof repairers, plumbers, concreters, electricians, my parents did their own painting. and so on. People grew their vegetables in their back yards and joined consortiums to buy other foods cheaper in bulk.

When I was about 12, my mother decided I should learn the piano. Up the road from where she had her dressmaking shop/business was a piano teacher, an elderly lady. Once a week I would go there for a lesson. She was strict and often hit my knuckles with a ruler when my hand position was not to her liking. But I liked her, and I grew to love the piano.

After 4 years, my father regraduated from medical school and could earn money, and so my mother closed the shop. My father had been a doctor in Europe, but Australian law dictated that all such professionals had to redo their studies.

I was sorry to leave my piano teacher, but my love of the instrument was cemented for life.

Fast forward

As a result, by the time I was 16, I had decided that I wanted to be a professional pianist when I grew up. I went to the Music Conservatorium to engage in advanced study. My teacher and I strongly disagreed in many things. Also, my home life had become a friction factory, no one got on (they soon divorced) and, I decided, I didn’t need another source of friction with my piano teacher.  I was then placed into boarding school.

The photo above is me at the Steinway Showroom in 2011 in New York. Physical tours no longer are offered but, you can do a virtual tour if you follow this link.

Me playing the Steinway grand at the New York showroom in 2011.