Music Adventures Intro

L

et’s be honest: every now and then, being an old fart has its advantages.

One is that nobody will judge you anymore for the kind of music you like to listen to, and if they do, you don’t give a rat’s ass and will happily go on with your life.
Young(er) people have a tendency to make sharp judgments (with pretty much the same harshness of a life sentence) on people not listening to the music they are familiar with.

I know from experience: I’ve been there myself, launching soul-cutting comments at other people more or less my own age who had, in my friends’ eyes and mine, the misfortune to like other singers or bands that we liked the most.

This kind of discrimination should be sanctioned by law.

The passion for music, begun in my childhood years (i.e. quite a long time ago…).

My grandmother was a more than decent pianist and could read a music score at a glance (much faster than she could read a newspaper, in any case).
She tried to teach me as well, but she had already lost her hope while trying to teach her daughter (my mother, that is).

I don’t have the so called “perfect hearing”, which means that I cannot tell just by listening to a sound, if it’s a C-sharp or a B-flat, or anything else in between.
On a good day I can tell you if a chord is a Major, a minor or a 7th, but nothing more.

Moreover, all those tadpoles on a music sheet just confused me and made me wish I had to go to school (go figure…).
So I’ve never learned how to read music, but I seem to possess a natural tendency to catch a melody, find it on a piano and even manage to put together some chords to go with it.

One of my greatest musical ambitions has been, for quite a few years, to be able to play the initial piano score of “Firth of Fifth”, by Genesis.

I partially succeeded in that, meaning that I could play (maybe I still can, if I do my utmost best) a decent amount of the right-hand section… and miserably screw up the rest with my left hand.

After some biting frustrations, I came to the conclusion that a musical career was not the most probable way with which I was going to earn my daily bread.

I still enjoy tampering with instruments (god bless all synthesizer and sequencing software, like Reason, by Propellerheads™) and I can still get some coherent sounds out of a keyboard, a guitar or an alto saxophone without making all the dogs in the neighborhood start howling (my human neighbors may not entirely agree with this statement).

Read more on Musical Adventure #1

I CANNOT KNOW WHAT I WOULD BE IF I WAS NOT ME…