In tune

   As a child, being in tune, musically-speaking, was a foreign concept. I had gotten it in my head that I was not a good singer from a very early age and, therefore, was not terribly interested in musicality. I`m not sure how I even got the notion I could not sing, whether it was from friends, family or school, I have no idea. It could have been that claiming I could not sing simply got me out of singing, period.
   School, though, has a way of forcing you into situations which you might otherwise have avoided forever.
   At some point in Grade 7 or 8 I found myself a member of the school choir. I suspect that my presence in the choir had much more to do with the paltry number of boys (and girls, for that matter) in the small three-room public school I attended. I certainly would not have willingly joined the choir, given a choice. It, I think, became apparent to Mr. Buchanan that there were a handful of boys in the group who were going to require (re-choir?) individual attention.

NOT my public school choir.

   You need to remember that this was a time in a boy's life when his voice was as unpredictable as his complexion. We were all struggling as much with puberty as we were with musical scales and realistically being able to warble anything but a high-pitched squawk was pretty high expectations. In spite of this, Mr. Buchanan took the three squawkiest of us apart one day after all the other kids had left and laid upon us some individual attention.
   He had the three of us sing together and he had the three of us sing apart. He talked to us about our breathing. He talked about letting it all out, without reservation. He coaxed the note right out of us.
   At some point I became tired of all this and was pretty sure I'd just wasted a whole recess during which I could have been chasing girls or sneaking up behind my buddies, reaching under them, grabbing their scrotums and nearly lifting them off their feet. In other words all sorts of fun things.
   But then it happened. We'd been going over the same couple of lines of a song repeatedly and you'd never have known it wasn't three completely different songs. Then, suddenly and as if by providence, there was a miraculous melding of voice, cadence and rhythm and our three voices sounded like one voice! Mr. Buchanan's jaw dropped and I'm sure ours did as well. I can remember everything about that moment, what corner of the room we were in, which direction we faced, and the fact that I had one hair on my chest. Mr. Buchanan had us go over the same couple of lines once more and we sang it in tune again!
   This was my very first experience with the mystical "in tune" I'd been hearing about and I now knew what the hubbub was all about. I remember little else about the choir that year but that one experience and it has stuck with me.

My autoharp (or, really, one just like it...)

   Just two or three years later, in high school, I bought an autoharp. I thought this was kind of a cool and easy way to make music. We had occasionally used one in public school, for accompaniment, and all you needed to do was press one of the white buttons while you strummed. Couldn't be much easier and that's why I liked it. I played it constantly and wrote godawful teen angst songs, fashioning myself (I thought at the time) after Leonard Cohen.
   Eventually, though, the sound on the autoharp changed, the chords becoming almost unrecognizable. Yes, it was out of tune. At the time, I had little to choice but to traipse the autoharp downtown to Chapman and Hewitt's and have them tune it for me. The guy would always kind of look at me in a funny kind of way but then take it anyway, tune it, and call me a couple of days later. Substantially after this period in my life I got my hands on a book about autoharps and realized I could tune the damn thing myself! At this point, I understood the almost quizzical looks I received every time I took it downtown.
   Any time since I have tuned it myself and always enjoy the experience, how just the tiniest twitches of the tuning fork can bring it either into, or out of, tune. It is almost like a Zen moment when the two strings match each other and become one, almost. As you can tell from the picture, there are a lot of strings to tune and when they are finally all done and the chords are played and they sound the way they're supposed to sound it's a self-affirming experience.
   There is so much about music I don't know. I took clarinet in Grade 9 and was accomplished enough at making an acceptable sound with it. Our main task for the year was to perform all the scales for the teacher and I could never get the hang of this, though. My teacher was one of the least approachable ones I had and, being a niner, I would not force myself to ask for direction. My final exam in Grade 9 music was simply to sit down and play all those scales and I was unable. In a gesture of magnanimity, he agreed to pass me if I agreed to not take music in Grade 10. This was fine with me!

So NOW they tell me!

   As an adult, I now appreciate scales a little more and wish I'd payed a little more attention to them in school (like a lot of other things!) I wish I'd learned how to read and write music as well. I'm not that good at the technical end of things, however. I've sort of taught myself how to play a keyboard but I have no idea what chords I'm playing, the names of the notes or anything. This does little to detract from the enjoyment I get from playing, however. Not only that, but anytime I watch someone reading music and playing it, I often wonder if they can create it, as well. If I can only do one or the other, I choose to do the latter. And, hopefully, be in tune at the same time!