Today is la fête de la musique in France. It’s a day music and revelry take over the streets of France, basically a big countrywide Dionysian party. Inebriated public tomfoolery is tolerated (or encouraged?) and everyone has a riproaring good time.
Today is also Father’s Day. I’m grateful to my father for many things but the coinciding celebrations made me think about the role my father played in my musical upbringing. I love music and I play the piano. But I didn’t always love music. Growing up, I had a complicated love-hate relationship with music because playing the piano was about winning competitions and playing recitals in dark, musty churches. Those recitals were traumatic — playing alone before adjudicators who were there to judge you and kids and parents who were praying you’d slip up royally so they could take home the glory and the first place trophy was unpleasant. And I just knew that one wrong note and the whole piece, built in my case from sheer repetition and kept together through muscle memory, would be unsalvageable and suffer a horrible, shameful, very public death. It was all a bit much for a self-conscious teenager.
But it was my father’s dream that his daughters play the piano beautifully. He’s a stoic, aloof patriarch who loves classical music. I remember often being woken on Sundays by his classical music blaring in the living room. I guess one of his dreams was to hear his daughters play that music for him live and so we were all ushered to the best (read: strictest) piano teacher in the area. The music we learned was very technical, mathematical — rhythm, counting, scales, and lots of practice – and certainly wasn’t fun. At the time, I resented my parents for forcing me to play the piano and as soon as I flew the nest, I didn’t touch a piano for 12 years. But then, I met Julien, who loves music and plays it beautifully, with so much finesse (and professionally at one time). He showed me another way of experiencing and understanding music, not as virtuosic flaunting but as a way to communicate and create with others, as something to be shared between musicians and with the audience. And that’s when I started to love the piano for the first time.
But the truth is, all good musicians need the strict, tedious technical training as well as the love and passion. If you don’t know how to count music, you can’t play with others and what you create will be messy, chaotic and unbearable for the listener. If you don’t have technique, you won’t be able to play much more than Mary had a little lamb. And so today in retrospect, I’m happy my father’s dream led us to suffer all those years of discipline and boring technical training because paradoxically, the technical ability and the strict discipline is what gives you the key to the freedom and beauty and magic of music. Thanks to him, now I can play and focus on having fun.
Has your father given you gifts, tangible or otherwise, that you treasure? What are you grateful to your father for?
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