December Posting Meme: Music

sanguinity  asked: "What's the role of music in your life?"

Music is not quite in the tier of things that I would not know how to exist without (like stories, the written word, are), but it's the very next tier down, where I theoretically could exist without it, but my life would lose so much. 

This is mostly because I don't like silence. I need background sound, and the normal city sounds (the distant hum of traffic, the occasional siren screaming by, my neighbors' chatter) do not qualify. When I'm home, the background noise is more often television than I'd like - I have a tendency to turn on Food Network while I'm doing things on the internet or bedroom-based chores, and once the TV is on I feel a strange resistance to turning it off - but when I'm in my car (a place I spend about 15 hours a week due to my commute) or in my kitchen (a place I keep trying to spend more time, because I do enjoy cooking and feel healthier when I cook more) I listen to music.

I like albums. I'm just old enough that I still prefer buying CDs and listening to whole albums to putting on Pandora or another streaming site, and while I have plenty of mp3s on my computer from back when Napster and LimeWire were a thing, I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from iTunes. (Actually, I don't have mp3s on my computer anymore, because this newest laptop doesn't have a disc drive and so I wasn't able to use my backup cds to load my music onto it like I did with my previous laptops. But! I finally decided to buy an external disc drive! So, soon!)

In particular, I like listening to one album on repeat until I can sing along to all the words, until I know it inside and out. As a result, certain albums are very strongly associated with the time period in my life when I was listening to them, and putting them on after the fact immediately transports me back to whatever feelings I most associate with them. The Wallflowers' Breach is the afternoon I spent studying for my AP Calculus exam with one of my important female crushes; Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing is the soundtrack of my Chicago dorm room, the pallid sun setting over snow-covered rooftops far too early for my SoCal raised time sense; more recently, the Lumineers' Cleopatra is what I was listening to the last time -- possibly the only time in my life -- I was actively happy, secure in my romantic relationship and fulfilled in my work.

(Because my romantic relationship fell apart pretty much immediately afterward, putting the album on now has a tendency to make me cry. But I hope that at some point that association will fade and I will be able to return to the uncomplicated happiness it was associated with before, singing along at the top of my lungs as I drove my winding canyon route to and from work with the windows down.)

So that's listening to music. There is, of course, also the matter of making music.

I grew up in a house with a piano -- a beat-up second-hand upright, perennially out of tune. My father played, having grown up taking piano lessons like so many middle-class American kids of his generation; my mother put up with his playing, not being particularly musical herself and not appreciating the way that he played with more gusto than skill.

I wanted to play. But my parents had many fine theories about how to raise children better than their parents did (as I suspect most moderately self-aware people who become parents do), and one of those was that they didn't want to force their children into enrichment activities that they would end up hating. So I asked for piano lessons in vain for what felt like forever (it probably wasn't more than a year) and finally they gave me a "Teach Yourself Piano" book and challenged me to prove that I was serious about learning.

So I did exactly that. I worked through all the exercises in the book, gamely playing simplistic versions of Frère Jacques and When the Saints Go Marching In until our neighbors must have been ready to shoot me. And when I finished the book, mastered all eleven or twelve of its songs and knew the C major scale and major chords, I got my piano lessons.

I had four years of weekly piano lessons, until I graduated high school. I took my music books with me to college in Chicago, and played in the ballroom/lobby of my dorm, on another perennially out-of-tune piano. But since then I haven't had ready access to a piano, and so only play occasionally when visiting my parents. My fingers still remember all my old favorites -- I like Beethoven and showtunes -- but I haven't learned anything new in a decade and a half.

Someday I will own a piano again. Until then, I will content myself with listening.