My two cents' worth: it isn't just significant others. I am estranged from my family of origin, like really estranged. There are some sound reasons for this which are outside of and beyond music, which I will keep private. However the music thing can't help but be connected. It is striking in my case because my family all but pushed me into music lessons. There was an instrument in the house; I started playing it by ear, very young, so the gift and the talent were evident. One of my elders was basically a frustrated 'Artiste' anyhow, maybe more than one of them. So the vicarious stage-mother thing developed, and there were family members living through me as I went from music teacher to music teacher, participated in musical organizations in public school and in the family church, eventually got a teacher who prepared me for serious classical-music auditioning, and ended up at university with two degrees in applied music with a performance major. My family had means, and paid for six straight years of university tuition, as well as all those earlier years of private lessons. I was grateful and let them know that I was. Now there is silence between us, after all that intense activity. One elder relative, I won't identify by gender or anything, was intensely shall we say 'invested' in the whole thing; would not make music in front of anybody; but had had enough lessons to make music in private. This relative could sit down at a piano and sing and play at the same time, and when this person had both time and privacy would do so in their own home. Nobody else in the room with them. Very intense and emotional connection with music, but would never ever do it in front of people. Loved their songs by Jerome Kern and the Gershwins; loved to listen to recordings of Chopin ballades but was never advanced enough to play Chopin themselves. Now me, I thrived on church choir and the school choruses. I sang vigorously in the groups, and very often accompanied at the keyboard. Before the whole adventure came to its end, I found myself at an opera company, NOT singing but playing the keyboard as an apprentice "repetiteur/regisseur," accompanying rehearsals, and spending performances in the wings. But my great love turned out to be, not opera, but two related areas: the classical "art song", solo voice and piano before an audience; and "traditional music" where instruments accompany singers who perform for audiences who are vitally invested in the words and their content as well as the music. I still love choruses too. My relatives, if I turned on the radio on Saturday afternoon, were aghast if the Texaco Metropolitan Opera was being broadcast live into their very own living room. One day I wanted to hear the great American baritone Thomas Stewart singing Hans Sachs, in English translation, in a Texas production I think it was of Wagner's Die Meistersinger. Talk about clearing everybody out of the house, I ended up all by myself at the radio, with my nearest and dearest relatives literally getting in the car and going for a drive. Shoot. That's more than enough. I guess I needed to get that off my chest. Sorry and thanks for listening.
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