When you first made music?

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: JedMarum
Date: 22 Aug 99 - 11:19 AM

As a very young boy, pretty frequently my dad used to put us to bed and come and lie in my bed, or the bed of my brother, and sing with us. I understood then, the magic, 'the soaring spirit' of music. "Way down in Kilarney, many years ago ... " (one of our favorites) has stuck with me ever since, and still plays a magic chord in my heart when I sing it ... the first time I heard the expression that says the 'total is greater then the sum of the parts' I understood exactly how that seemingly contradictory phrase can be true; there is tangible, undeniable magic that happens when people sing - especially when they sing with others. I was blessed by discovering this fact early in my life!

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Laura Babberl
Date: 22 Aug 99 - 10:00 AM

There are so many, it's hard to remember. Probably the first was the old pump organ we had growing up. I was 4 years old and too little to reach the pedals. I would get down on my hands and knees and pump up the organ by hand and then climb up on the bench and plunk out "The Green Beret". By age 8, I had my very own portable chord organ. My mom still has pictures of me with that chord organ (some kids have security blankets) covered head to toe w/ chicken pox. My first guitar arrived around the age of 9. It was a big old Sears special. Anymore, it seems as if my musical genius comes in spurts. I remember not too long ago, I purchased a banjo determined to finally learn the instrument. I seemed to be doomed to just simply playing from tabs when all of a sudden, the song "Wreck of the Old 97" came to me. I was so excited- thought I think I'm actually catching on to this thing. Alas, I'm waiting for my next spurt! Laura

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: WyoWoman
Date: 17 Aug 99 - 10:27 AM

God, Jon, that would be pretty horrible! Kind of hard NOT to take something like that personally!

Glad you got over it!

WW

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 17 Aug 99 - 09:39 AM

I have just been reading through this thread agian and I read a couple of comments that got me thinking again.

One involved joining in. The session environmet is my favourite and to me, every time you get a bunch of musicans playing well together and really enjoying the music, it is a completely new and fantastic exerience - they are all different to me.

The other was a comment about debuts. My first experience of playing in public occured as a result of a few friends of mine dragging me up on stage during a folk night on a New Years Eve. A drunk in the audience decided he didn't like my playing and I ended up being dragged of stage (together with the guitar I had borrowed) by him. At the time, I (wrongly) blamed my musical ability as being the reason and it took me a good couple of years to feel confident about doing a floor spot in a folk club again.

Jon

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: WyoWoman
Date: 17 Aug 99 - 04:01 AM

Turned out just fine. Thanks for your support!!!! Wish you all could've been there.

xo/ww

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Banjoman_CO
Date: 17 Aug 99 - 01:56 AM

WyoWoman: Best of luck on you debut. I am sending all the good wishes and thoughts that I can think of. Just go and 'knock 'em dead'. Wish I could be there. Talk to you later.

Fred

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Bugsy
Date: 17 Aug 99 - 01:49 AM

I was 4 years old (1952) and singing in an open mike competition in the "Wintergardens" on Ramsgate seafront. The song was "Too Young" I have a photo of me standing there in my corduroy suit and beret with the MC holding the mike for me. A woman sitting in the 3rd row remarked to the lady sitting next to her "That's not a little boy, that's a midget!" Unfortunately for her the lady sitting next to her was my grandmother who not only gave her the edge of her tongue but something more substantial!

Oh by the way I won the contest, and have never been the same since.

Bugsy

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Rick Fielding
Date: 17 Aug 99 - 01:31 AM

At 14..confused teenager. Loved baseball, hated school. too shy to ask any girl out. Saw Pete Seeger live at Her Majesty's Theatre in Montreal. LIFE CHANGED! Learned guitar, banjo and mandolin. Still loved baseball, loathed school, found out that even shy guys who could sing "Barbry Ellen" and "Come all Ye Fair and Tender Ladies" could get dates! Still can't think of a better thing to do with your life. Not ONE regret!

Rick

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Jeri
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 08:36 PM

Music was always in my life, but the first time it felt like magic was when the teacher of my high school folk culture class took a bunch of us seniors to a festival. We all went to the party afterward, and there was a lot of acapella singing. I remember the air felt like it was vibrating from the harmony, and my head vibrated when I joined in, and it felt like I was connected to everyone in the room. I play fiddle and love lots of music, but I'm absolutlely hooked on being in a group of folks singing harmony to make the rafters ring.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Sir
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 07:59 PM

My first real good experience with music, aside from listening to my dad sing as we traveled in the car, was beginning band. In late elementary school I had few friends and was considered an oalf by my classmates and by my teacher. A big kid without brains or talent. Then came beginning band and I was assigned the trombone. Kids with long arms get to play trombone. My mother encouraged me and even though we lived in poverty she made sure I had private lessons. I started off sounding as bad as any beginner playing "Lightly Row" and "Abide With Me" but I did practice and even the kids who didn't like me acknowleged that I was the best in the class. I'm not a world class trombonist now, though I still play all kinds of music on all kinds of instruments, but being good at music made a difference in a big, insecure oalf. I didn't have to measure up to everyone elses expectations of failure. The encouragement of my mother and my band director and my own willingness to work made music the avenue of my self appreciation.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Felipa
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 06:49 PM

see also: what got you started?

'Your first time; be honest' (it's about singing, May 99) and a thread about the First Time playing in public are also related.
Among many influences on my musical interests I would have to cite my parents, a teacher named Fern Olsen, and singer Tommy Makem.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: WyoWoman
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 06:37 PM

I completely agree. Jamming afterwards would make it an absolutely stunning moment. Shy of that, I'll accept your good vibes and keep you all in my heart!

ww

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Allan C.
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 03:08 PM

WW, you can bet your last leaf of spinach we will be sending you every form of positive thought as you make your Wyoming debut. I just wish we could all be there in person. Then maybe we could have a "sing" afterwards.

Subject: Wyo Woman's String of Pearls
From: Sourdough
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 01:47 PM

Yours is a wonderful description of a "peak experience". Those moments change lives. Once you know what one feels like, you search for more. Your very fortunate to have found a way you can repeat it. I think it is the search for moments like that, to repeat them, that makes some people devote their lives to a process; painting, singing, acting, dancing, writing, even if it means sacrificing things that others hold precious such as family, security.

You are extrememly lucky, I think, to be in such close contact with what gives you that sort of transcendent rush. I hope that your "coming out" performance provides you with yet another.

Sourdough

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Margo
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 12:01 PM

I've been singing as long as I can remember. We used to sing in the car, my brothers and sisters and I. I have been told that I would cry when someone would sing out of key, though I don't remember that.

Singing with the records, singing with the choir, singing at home with the guitar. My dad bought the family a guitar when we were kids, a guild f-30. I have it today, and it's just right for me!

Margarita

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: black walnut
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 11:48 AM

where are you mr. fielding? i thought you'd have jumped right into this one!

(i'll submit my response when life is a tad less frantic)

~black walnut

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: WyoWoman
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 11:41 AM

I hold in my heart memories of perfect moments, strung together like pearls. Many of these moments involve music, so much so that I can't believe I ever let myself get away from music, ever let it out of my life, let it be silenced in me. But I did, for years and years.

I remember the first time I ever sang in front of people, when I was in the fourth grade and we were supposed to do show and tell and I forgot to bring anything, so I just stood in this circle of my classmates and sang "Catch a Falling Star." I went unconscious, in the way CarlZen mentioned above, and 'came to' at song's end to see the other children staring open-mouthed at me. For a minute I thought I had really messed up, because I had no real remembrance of even singing most of the song. Then the moment broke and they were all smiles and applause. I remember the rush of relief and pleasure, knowing I had NAILED it! And that's still the experience I have, performing. It isn't about their admiration, it's about having been the conduit for something *just right* and for not having gotten in the way of the music. Does that make any sense?

So tonight, I sing for the first time to a group of strangers here in Wyoming -- haven't performed here since I moved from New Mexico three years ago. It's my 'coming out' party. I'll be thinking of y'all and wishing you were out there sending me mental 'thumbs-ups' while I'm singing.

WW

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: teller
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 10:02 AM

So long ago that it's difficult remember - although I DO recall the first guitar I ever bought.....two quid from a school friend who was desperate for the money to take his new amour to the flicks!! But the feeling of joining with others, now THAT'S a different matter! Last time ? Ten days ago at the folk club when six voices were raised in wonderful harmony, singing 'Blackleg Miner'. Exquisite, even though I do say so myself...and I never tire of rediscovering that feeling. Teller.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Rita64
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 06:09 AM

Dance class at age 7 in lurid pink lycra listening to the tones the Village People doing "The Milkshake" and singing tunefully, giggling and performing feats of contortion that a young, elastic body can only achieve - all at the same time. I realised I was destined for the stage.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Ana
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 06:03 AM

I was just 4 years old, and in a foster home. I remember standing on my pink candlewick bedspread covered bed, and singing (in my sweetest possible voice designed to melt hearts) a self composed song about Jesus loving me (aaah) because I was sure somebody did!. Unfortunately it was a bit like the sky falling on Chickenlittle's head, because an unexpected hairbrush came crashing down (oops). My hosts obviously didn't appreciate my middle-of-the-night contribution, and the ensuing chorus from myself was a payment they bought upon themselves. Needless to say, today I am an agnostic, normally intact, and reclaiming the sweet sounds.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 05:18 AM

The was always a piano in my parent's house and I've no real memory of when I first managed to get a tune of some sort out of it but the first memory that sticks in my mind was being given a harmonica as a present when I was about 9 years old. I woke up early in the morning (say 5 oclock) and opened the present and tried to work out how to play it. I can't remember what the tunes were but by the time my parents got up, I was proudly able to play them a few.

The next one I remember came just before I was to start secondary school. My brother had been given a toy ukelele which somebody tuned and lent me a book on how to play it. Within a couple of days I had learned all the chords in the book so my parents bought me a guitar for my birthday.

I wish I still could pick things up that quickly but it seems to get harder as you get older. I also wish that I'd have known of jig's, reels etc at that time as I spent too many years just playing chords to songs like the Wild Rover. I had to wait until I was 27 to start playing the tenor banjo which is now my main instrument (I rarely play anything else) but one way or other music has given me pleasure for as long as I can remember.

Jon

Subject: First love, a Vespa, and Pete Seeger
From: Sourdough
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 01:20 AM

In a way, my first attempt at music and my love of motorized two wheeling are intertwined. My Vespa and I had a short but intense relationship. I bought it new when I was eighteen. I rode it around New Haven, Connecticut for about four or five months before I began a job in North Adams, Massachusetts at a summer camp. The 125cc machine changed my life in a couple of ways. I used to drive it, on my days off, back to New Haven to visit my first love, an exotic creature named Donia Adzima. Donia was a graduate student at the School of Music. She dressed all in black and with her fair complexion and her long black hair, she was a striking figure. On stage, her presence was formidable and her voice was so sweet and clear that my heart would rise slowly in my throat until I could hardly breathe. I was terribly in love with her.

After work, if I had the following two days off, I would head for New Haven. As the little Vespa hummed across the Pioneer Valley, along Cold River, and down through the Connecticut Valley, my thoughts would already be in New Haven, thinking of how happy I was going to be when I saw her. Much of the trip was after dark and in my exhilaration I felt as though I was seated on that beam of light spraying out from the center of the scooter's handlebars. It was like traveling on a magic carpet of sorts. I would get aboard it in North Adams, turn it up to full throttle and then sit on it, patiently, until it had turned the world enough that New Haven's streets rolled underneath the wheels.

Coming down long grades, I used to open the little engine up to its top speed and watch the tiny speedometer creep upward, 45, 50, 55, 60, 61, 62.... I had been doing this for a long while before I realized that the strange sensation of smoothness that seemed to take over at speeds above fifty-five or so was the little scooter rising up on its diminutive shock absorberss. The pan, the single piece of pressed steel that formed the shield in front of the rider's legs as well as the floorboards, at high speeds acted like an airfoil. An unexpected cross draft or the need for a sudden turn would have flipped me into a fearful accident. After all, at that time helmets were rare so I rode bare headed, or on cold evenings, wearing a knitted watch cap. I had no idea of how to dress to avoid road rash.

One chilly evening, I arrived in New Haven and went, as usual, to the home of one of Donia's friends named Cornelia Schwartz. Cornelia was a hefty figure, round of face and wide of hip. She dressed in a manner that seemed to suit her immensely. She wore peasant dresses with wide belts. Everything about her wardrobe was colorful, reds, yellows, bright greens. However, it was her home that was by far the more intriguing. It was a wood frame house on the edge of the Yale campus. The ceilings, not high to begin with, were almost obscured by literally scores of puppet heads she had made from a composite material, I think it was plastic wood. The heads were never painted, the ynever had hair added nor were they ever attached to bodies. They just hung upside down from the ceiling making it necessary to walk through the house with your own head cocked to the side to avoid hitting them. I never learned why she made them. It may have been some sort of compulsion because she showed no other interest in puppetry that I remember.

On that particular evening, I arrived at Cornelia's home expecting to find Donia waiting. Instead, when I walked in out of the cold air and began peeling off layers of clothing, Cornelia looked very startled. "What are you doing here? Were you invited to the wedding?"

That, literally, was my first clue that all was not well in my relationship with Donia. On the next day, she was to marry a biologist who was working or soon would be working at the Woods Hole Institution on Cape Cod.

I spent the night sitting up alone in Cornelia's kitchen feeling very sorry for myself. After a few hours of that, I noticed a record album lying on the table next to the hi-fi phonograph. It was Pete Seeger's Folk Singers Guitar Guide. Grateful for the chance to divert my thoughts from the painful ones concerning Donia, I took a guitar that was sitting on the sofa and began teaching myself how to play. I remember that the Seeger method was to begin by teaching the key of D. I learned the D chord, then the A7th chord and well before dawn, I had learned the G chord. Pete Seeger assured me that I was now able to play thousands of songs. I did discover that I was able to play "I Gave my Love a Cherry" and "The Water is Wide". They were sentimental and bathetic enough to allow me to express my heart full of emotions that evening and the pain in my tender fingertips seemed to be being deducted from the pain in my chest. I was learning what a wonderful companion home made music could be.

Starting that night, music, guitar, and then autoharp, harmonicas, dulcimer and 12-string have been a major part of my life. Music was a parting gift from Donia.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Pelrad
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 12:55 AM

Having grown up with musician parents, I really don't remember my first awareness of music. But I've had so many of those magical moments, and they are among my favorite memories.

Awaking in the middle of the night to hear Jim Mageean and Johnny Collins singing in my living room; that was amazing. (I was ten and had the flu; it was a rather otherworldly experience)

The first time I heard a bombarde and knew I HAD to have one. I felt like a rat following the pied piper; I followed the sound until I found what was making it, then harrassed the player into teaching me to play and telling me where I could buy one.

The time I spent an hour in a room with a harpist (the nerdiest guy in high school), listening to him tune and practice his harp. What a magical time.

But to top it all, the time I participated in the All-Eastern Chorus and discovered 400 other people who walked around singing to themselves all day and night long. Who sang in the elevators, on the streets, hanging out of hotel windows at 2am...who barely ate because they couldn't sing while they ate. Now that was amazing.

Outside of choral groups, I haven't "clicked" while singing with many others, mostly due to lack of opportunity. It's a big empty space waiting to be filled.

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: CarlZen
Date: 16 Aug 99 - 12:39 AM

WW- I can't recall the first time I had that awareness, but I do know the feeling of playing. The BEST is when there are two or more musicians together in that same ethereal, magical state transceding not just everyday life but the everyday "music" you make at practice and other times playing. I think that is part of what keeps a lot of us at it. Perhaps there is a certain tonal harmony that stimulates some part of our consciousness and takes over. I can never remember being in that state and actually thinking about "I go to the e minor chord, then to the..." It all just seems to be there.

As to when it first occurred, I'd like to think that some of the times when I was a kid and was singing with the family or with others in the course of play, perhaps the same thing was going on. Or maybe childhood is the natural state when we are in that realm, and music can, at times transport us there again. Maybe that's why, in spite of all the hard work that goes into making music, it is still referred to as "playing music"?

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Andres Magre
Date: 15 Aug 99 - 11:09 PM

I was in primary school when I first heared some of my mates doing elementary folk (argentine) music, and was delighted because this was proof that musicians not only existed at the radio and TV (B&W), and playing an instru- ment was not necessarily that torture that some other little schoolmates suffered because their parents forced them to study. More delightful was the discovery that my own voice could easily be coupled to the vibrations of the guitar at my very chest. I think the guitar (plain acoustic, of course) is the best instrument to encourage a small kid to sing and play, because of this intimacy. It rides you through the right notes, vibrates at your body, helps you to feel the music. Other instruments will not have the same effect. Although the violin and cello and harp vibrate close to your body, they are not usually played as a self-accompaniment. Many years after, my main musical activity is oratorio, lied and some opera, in a choral group and ocassional solos, however I never forgot that love relationship with the guitar. Best regards - [e-mail]

Subject: RE: When you first made music?
From: Bill D
Date: 15 Aug 99 - 10:10 PM

pretty late, I'm afraid...though I COULDN'T sing till I found folk music at about age 20-21 and decided I didn't care anymore..*grin*..played recorder (still little singing)with folkies till I found the autoharp and HAD to try..was totally intimidated by guitars due to a friend who jokingly showed me a barred F chord and told me to practice THAT....never forgave him!

Subject: When you first made music?
From: WyoWoman
Date: 15 Aug 99 - 09:56 PM

Folks,

I was talking on another thread today about the amazing moment I had last week when my weeks and weeks of noodling around on the guitar, 15 minutes here, 10 minutes there, finally resulted in something that sounded like music. IT was amazing, after a lifetime of being guitar-player-dependent, and has opened up a whole new possibility for me in terms of being able to even consider someday (a long way away, no doubt, given my practice time) when I might be able actually accompany myself.

But it started me thinking of when the music actually begins, when what we've been doing becomes music and not mere notes. I was thinking of a few times when I've been singing, or singing with someone and suddenly, it becomes something completely *other* than it had been, something much more of spirit than of simply notes. THAT's what I consider music, and it's simply sublime. I know for sure, after having lived without music for some time, that I have to have those moments, or I die.

What about you? What are some of your memories of making music? Maybe the first time you became aware of that magic, sometime when the harmony was so beautiful, or the energy so spectacular that it made the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up?

WW