Here, too, I started out as a child. I can't remember not hearing music in my home and the effect it had on me. My father was in the first generation of his family to have direct instrumental experiences that I know of. He played the trumpet in his school band and later in an army band (not his primary assignment). I have his trumpet now and hope someday to get it back in playable condition. My aunt played piano and it was always fun to go to her home and play on her piano. She played the piano in the little Baptist church she and my grandparents attended.
My mother also played piano and it was because of her insistence that we got a piano in our home when I was in junior high. My sister got years of piano lessons because she was still "young enough" and "wasn't too involved in other things". I had to beg for quite a while to get 1 year of piano lessons because I was already playing flute. From that point on, I just kept banging away at the piano until I finally figured out how to play it. I will always remember the first time I sat down and played "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" musically. What a rush!
Mom would sit at the piano and play quite a bit. She had a lot of sheet music from the 40's and 50's that she would play including such songs as "The Bells of St Mary's", "White Christmas" and her favorite, "Whispering Hope". Needless to say, I learned to play them, too. She also had a lot of "Etude" magazines that she had gotten from her father and I would rummage through those looking for interesting pieces to play. That's where I found "Jesu".
Both of my parents grew up on farms in southern Illinois during the depression, so opportunities for them were not abundant. But my grandparents and great-grandparents managed to give them all of the opportunities that they could. My mother's family was more artistically inclined with a legacy of art and music. Her father's family came from Scotland. Mom's grandmother studied voice in Edinburgh in the late 1800's and had to quit when her father decided that the stage was no place for a woman. She came back home to the village where they lived and played the organ in the parish church. When she left Scotland and moved to Chicago to marry my great-grandfather, her younger sister took over the post as organist. My grandfather was a mechanical engineer, but my great-grandfather and the other 2 children in the family were both architects and my great-uncle married a prominent artist.
Growing up, I mentioned in my first blog that my mother preferred more popular music and my father was the classical and opera buff so I learned a lot about different types of music. I really loved classical, though, and would lay awake at night trying to hear the radio music that came from the living room that my father was listening to. That definitely didn't help my insomnia! When I reached 5th grade, they handed me a flute and said I was going to take music lessons at school. I also got private lessons for the next 4 years. I would have liked to have had a choice in the matter, but flute did well for me. In 9th grade, my band director asked me to pick up the oboe, too, which I did and by high school, I was playing oboe exclusively (except for marching band). When my younger sister reached 5th grade, she was given a clarinet and she later switched to string bass in high school and she took lessons from a bass player who drove a Volkwagen bug.
As far as issues of music and faith are concerned, I think my father was more concerned with the music presented in the church rather than the minister, although the minister was somewhat important, too. The church I grew up in had a fantastic music program and I participated in the choirs from about 3rd grade on. When I left the children's program at the end of 6th grade, I was presented with my very own hymn book (which I still have and use) and that gave me more to work on with the piano. I sang in the choir in junior high and got to know the junior high church's organist well by going and sitting and talking with her about the organ. My father was a great organ buff and I listened to a lot of Virgil Fox records as well as seeing him in concert several times over the years. I really wanted to play the organ and finally gave myself a couple year's worth of lessons when I graduated college. Don't ask me to play today, though - I'm more than a little rusty!
My father also liked to listen to "Music and the Spoken Word", the weekly radio broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Organ from Salt Lake City. I really can't remember a time when I didn't hear the program on Sunday mornings. On one of our trips out West, we had to go through Salt Lake City to visit Temple Square and hear the daily organ concert. We missed the Thursday night choir rehearsal.
Music has always been important in my family. We never performed together, but each of us in our own way, played for the enjoyment of ourselves and each other. Especially now that my parents are gone, I remember the story that my mother saved as much as she could to get my father a complete recording of Handel's "Messiah" for their first Christmas on 78's. It must have cost a bundle even then. My sister has those records now.
