Stories: Music

And so, here's an attempt at collecting all the stories I have heard in my life. I understand they make no sense to others, but since my senility is wiping out so much of my past, so quickly, here goes, just for myself:

"When she was a kid, T says the most exciting days were when the piano tuner came home (New York). He would spend all day with his wrenches tightening things, testing the hammers, checking the tension in each string, and in the evening when he was done, he would play the piano to check - and he would play lounge music and jazz and Frank Sinatra. All of which was taboo in a house where only Chopin and Mozart and such were allowed - her mother is a Hitlerian purist if ever there was one, that's why T grew up and became a hippy and wore "beggar's clothes" in her mother's words, and wandered off to India. !

And she would be thrilled listening to this different kind of music, which she really liked and which opened up new possibilities. Her mother couldn't say a thing because it wasn't exactly easy to find a piano tuner who could also play Beethoven!

And then she played different notes on the piano for me, and tried to explain all the musical mathematics to me. I loved that feeling of delightful incomprehension.

When she was younger and used to go to this music school, she had the keys to the room where the Indonesian instruments were kept, in an amphitheatre kind of split level place, with the biggest gongs at the top and the many tinkling water-sound instruments of that region in descending order of size. She would go in there in the middle of the night, and hit those huge gongs in the darkness, which would reverberate forever, through her and beyond her, just for the fun of it. Wow.

And how the music teacher would take them to churches with those huge organs, where the kids were allowed to actually walk into the huge pipes, they were so large. She once went recording church bells in France, and would often stumble upon old empty churches inside which someone would be playing the pipe organ all by himself, the sound resonating up to the high vaults.