Musical Therapy
Since my last post I have been productive, if not massively creative. I decided on doing some basic self-care, no, not bubble baths and rosé, simple basic care like going to the gym, making sure I ate my fruit and veggies and drinking enough water. Many of you will not be surprised to hear that a good sleep can change one’s entire outlook. For me one of these things we take for granted and yet make the biggest difference is music.
When we moved back to my parent’s place after a two-year stint away, Mum decided she didn’t want the antique baby grand piano in the lounge room. Can’t blame here, it took up about a third of it. So, the piano ended up in the sleep out at the end of the double car garage instead. This happened to be my bedroom for the next 3 years. For me this was more of a benefit than I could have known.
In our family, we all took lessons in multiple instruments. While piano was my most enduring instrument, saxophone and bass were the ones I would perform in front of others. Don’t get me wrong, bass was never a skilled instrument for me but I was just effective enough as a musician that my father decided to tell me what notes when with what strings and give me 40 minutes to sort out the rest before thrusting me up the front of church one day when the regular bassist didn’t show. After that it seems I had made the enviable standard of ‘you’ll do’ and was asked to fill in again until I became a regular fixture.
Piano, the instrument I took 11 years of lessons in, was never an instrument I played for people. I may have performed a handful of times in low pressure environments such as a church social but only when ‘voluntold’ by my parents.
My performance instrument was saxophone. I was never as good as my brother (he gained one of the top honours in music with the saxophone during high school) but I was effective and found a place in multiple bands and ensembles. One of these ensembles, the combined schools concert band, won the gold award at nationals.
I quit music altogether in the middle of high school, half a lifetime ago. I was burnt out, undertaking too many commitments in the area. As well as lessons in two instruments per week, I was taking music as a subject at school and was involved in 6 different music groups. I calculated that if I was doing what I should have been doing, it would have been four and a half hours of practice per night.
There is a difference between practising and playing. Practising is concentration, mistakes and technique. Playing is painting with sound. Those three years in the sleep out is where I first experienced depression. That evil, nasty, consuming feeling of being unworthy (those same ones that came calling when I was writing my last post) first visited me in high school. Playing the piano became a refuge. The sleep out was disconnected from the main house, and across a creek. This meant I was far enough away that I could play the piano in the middle of the night without waking anybody. When I was struggling to sleep, when I was stuck in that thick black cloud, I would sit at the piano and paint my feelings into existence. The impermanent nature of music, the transience of the experience meant that when the notes stop ringing, they stop existing. By the time I had played out how I felt, after pouring my ugly broken sickness into sound, I would come out the other end lighter.
Music allowed me to experience and deal with emotions without needing name them or create a logical framework for them. It was simply expression, then release. For those three years, the piano in my bedroom was my therapist. Piano became imbued with the intensely personal nature of such.
It was March before I got reliable access to keys again. Playing through my old sheet music was disheartening. I had imagined that somehow with a decade long break I would be able to pick up exactly where I had left off. The techniques necessary to be able to play songs I once knew by heart were once again unfamiliar and in need of practice. Instead of being reminded of what I no longer knew, I am working on music I never have known. Some of the pieces are crazy hard to challenge myself, some are a much more relaxed pace. The techniques I practice allow for greater play.
I hope that one day I will feel that I can play in front of people again. Maybe even to one day share on here to show my efforts beyond simply saying piano practice is happening. Until then, I have a decade’s worth of therapy sessions to catch up on.
THE RUNDOWN
Art – Playing around with salt and watercolours. Am going to need bigger salt to get the texture I want (8/100)
Writing – Book: 1139 Blog: 8321
Cooking – Went through and allocated about a third of the recipes across the calendar, will be working on allocating the rest before the end of the week, so as to ensure I don’t get a log jam at the end of the year.
Music – Half an hour of practice, an hour of play (5.5/100)
Photography – This week’s challenge is to photograph something that makes you feel warm. Tea, a book, cosy things and my cat, what more could a girl want?
Craft – I made a mess with the salt, does that count?