How classical music found its way into my home
and why we can all be listening to it
When I was a kid we didn’t listen to classical music.
My mother taught herself to play chords on the guitar so she could sing songs (Skip to my Lou! Khumbaya!) to her primary school classes, and, when he was younger, my father taught himself to play the harmonica, a gentle pastime for when he was travelling around Australia as part of his work as a travelling minister.
But classical music?
It simply wasn’t something we came into contact with. How could we, when we didn’t go to concerts and we didn’t know anyone who did? Why would we, when there were other things to be doing?
We didn’t miss it, because it was never there in the first place. It simply wasn’t on our radar.
Until, that is, I started learning piano, and suddenly our house was filled with the dulcet (and definitely not so dulcet tones) of me practicing on the second-hand, very, very old, and perpetually going-out-of-tune piano my father managed to find.
By the time I reached high school I was playing French horn as well, singing in the school choir, and playing in student orchestras.
My parents now found themselves going to more concerts than they had bargained for when they first signed me up for piano lessons. At the time I was given the option of either piano or ballet, both good options for broadening the horizons of their very shy daughter, who chose piano because ballet would mean dancing in front of other people!
It still remained mostly my thing, until gradually my parents started buying more music to listen to at home, a few classical favourites on repeat and mixed in with the rest of their collection.
If ever my brother or I hear the start of one of those CDs I’m sure we’ll be able to sing every note.
Classical music is just…music
This is how it should be with any kind of music, I reckon. If you like it, listen to it, as simple as that.
The trouble is classical music can seem impenetrable, a little bit threatening. It can feel unfamiliar and inaccessible and as if you need a map before you can even begin.
Even the name classical music can be misleading. It makes it sound like one thing when the reality is that it’s a hugely diverse world of music written over hundreds of years by people writing music of and for the time.
Their time.
It’s full of different voices, different ideas, different combinations of instruments and voices, from a single cello or voice through to an entire orchestra and choir. And while some of it is polished and grand, a lot of it is messy and raw and deeply human.
And it isn’t waiting for you to pass a test and it doesn’t ask for credentials. But most importantly, it’s just music.
The more you listen…
Later on, not only did my parents have to live with me practicing at home and a full calendar of classical concerts, but they also had to put up with my band rehearsing in our house, and that was a different kind of music altogether.
But the thing about music, all music, is that the more you listen the more familiar it becomes. And the more familiar it becomes the more you anticipate every note, the more you love it, and the more it becomes part of who you are.
Just like my parents’ record collection.