A Love Affair

Just like Ravel’s Bolero when music starts so quietly you can hardly detect it and then very slowly growing louder and firmer all of a sudden becoming like a hart beat, just like that my love affair with music started. They say you love either with your eyes or with your ears, for me it’s definitely the ears. They are highly attuned my ears, like alien locators I sometime can pick up conversations in a different room or hear a few conversations at once, which I really don’t like because my brain gets quickly overworked. But music really relaxes my mind and it does not matter how many undertones go into a musical piece all will be detected and savored.
At the age of three I was singing love songs on a bus or a train to the amusement of my fellow passengers. Amused they were to see a child sing “I remember when I was young and in love…” with a very serious face. Mom was amused as well, so here I was loudly pouring my heart out. Between the ages of 4 and 6 I vividly remember my aunt and mom getting ready to go to out, putting their makeup on, spraying their perfume, running around in their underwear trying on different dresses and shoes all to the sound of ABBA and Bonnie M records. Oh those soft slightly scratchy sounds of record player.
Record player was always my friend and even at the age of 5 I could change records and clean needles. Even when the record is scratched or a little warped from lying on the sun, or when it ends and goes into an unexplainable muffled sound its music to me, it will automatically transport me back to those days, when I was in my first initial giddy stages of my love affair. But everything has to grow and change otherwise it will die so here comes ballet and with it an enormous ocean of wild classical music performed in class by an elderly woman on piano of course. How fortunate was I to grow up in a way that I did I only understood later, by then music was so deeply ingrained in my soul that now the fire was inextinguishable.
Our teachers took their job very seriously in every single area of studies and my ballet teacher was out to cultivate souls besides the perfect and at time excruciating plies, arabesques and glissades. She made us listen to the pieces before hand and then question our understanding of the feeling in these serious classical pieces. To dance beautifully besides having a good technical skill your soul has to be free. And your soul will not be free until you fall in love with music. We also had home work and listening to classical pieces was the requirement and that was besides once weekly music class that we all had mandatory in school where once again it was classical music listening, history, comprehension and discussion.
Whether I was overly emotional from birth or because of such an intense upbringing I will never know because somehow it all got so intertwined that it really does not matter anymore, all it matters is that when I feel something it goes very deep. They always say that classical music makes people smarter; well I think it makes people more open and in tune with this universe and that in turn makes people more curious and sensitive. Classical music is the base and at that it’s a very sturdy one.
40 hours a week of Vivaldi, Chopin, Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Bach, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schobert, Stravinsky, the list is long and as some kids would go crazy from this, I thrived on it, and it was my life. I learned to love with my ears.
Love affair continues…
My dear mother falls in love with a Frenchman who is an engineer building oil rigs and gas processing plant in our town. He is tall, dark and handsome and with him flies in an era of Edith Piaf, Jaques Brelle, Joe Dassen, Mireille Mathieu, Serge Ginsburg and countless other names I can’t recall anymore. This is when I begin to understand the pain that love brings, because essentially all French music is purely love songs. “Ne me quitte pas” (Don’t leave me) is on repeat a lot of the times in my household as mom and the Frenchman go through ups and downs, but my favorite is always Edith Piaf. There is so much strength and character in her voice, so much pain and heartbreak. I love her, I feel her and all my friends think I am crazy. No matter… Years later I learn of Edith Piaf fascinating life story and totally understand everything I felt listening to her songs. While I am listening to all this I must add that I am in love with a 12th century poet, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and generally a wise Persian man named Omar Khayyam. I love him so much I can quote my favorite Rubaiyat in Russian by heart. I am now 13 years old and ballet is still very important, but I am slowly drifting away from classical music. Away, into a world of music of the World, French, Italian, American, Indian, Spanish, Israeli, Hungarian and one of my real favorites Gypsy music. I become a citizen of the world just by listening to all these great melodies of life and love and all that encompasses it.
Years go by and my internal music library continues to grow every single day, it feeds me, it’s always there through pain and sorrow of leaving my home land, trough heartbreaks of love, through triumphs and bold moves I allow myself to make. Through numerous road trips across the country by myself or with a friend, music is always there for me. It never cheats, it always tells the truth, it’s always passionate, it makes me grow, it makes me better, it makes me sensitive, it makes me fly and sometimes it makes me cry. It is my only true love, it gives and gives and gives and in return I share it with as many people as possible.