{"id":2962,"date":"2022-04-30T19:52:58","date_gmt":"2022-04-30T19:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?p=2962"},"modified":"2023-05-14T20:33:08","modified_gmt":"2023-05-14T20:33:08","slug":"taking-baby-steps-in-her-shadow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/taking-baby-steps-in-her-shadow\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking baby steps in her shadow"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

As a little boy, one of the figures I remember learning to draw was a Treble Clef. I thought it was just a funny spiralling capital “S” that had something to do with music.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I’m pretty sure that my Mum taught it to me. She could read music, and had once been a talented pianist and opera singer. I’d seen a Treble Clef in Sunday newspaper funnies whenever Schroeder played Beethoven on his toy piano. I could recognize musical notes in drawings, but I didn’t know what they actually said or meant. They were part of some mystical other language – and judging by the old music they usually represented, the language must have belonged to olden times.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There were little reminders of a musical past in my maternal grandfather’s house in Victoria too: a tiny black toy piano, or a ukelele sitting in the corner gathering dust. Down in his basement, my grandfather had a full-sized upright piano that had been damaged years earlier when his hot water heater blew up. It was covered in boxes, and other than a couple of pokes of its keys by his curious nine year old grandson, it hadn’t made a sound in years.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Around December of 2021, while going through files of my mother’s early photos and papers, I rediscovered a high school handout from her early music training. It was a collection of ten typewritten pages that might have been a correspondence course of some kind. It mentioned preparation for a provincial exam, and it covered musical notation, scales, and staffs. In it, I finally read the explanation of the Treble Clef (known as the “G Clef”). As I read on, I was delighted by the idea that at 55, I was finally tracing some of my mother’s youthful footsteps.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I remembered enjoying learning the notes in Grade 6 music class, and trying to play the recorder, ukele, and guitar. In the forty years since, I can still recognize quarter, half, and whole notes, but I’ve forgotten everything else. I could probably learn to play music by ear and practice, but sheet music itself had never come to life for me – it had remained a silent visual language from a culture I’d only visited or observed, but had never lived in. I felt regret in that realization.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So a couple of weeks ago when I started reading my Mother’s old high school music notes, I wondered why I hadn’t tried to learn to read music years ago. Could I have become a musician like her? Looking at her pages, at the grand staff and its two sets of bars, I started to understand how the layout of a piano keyboard matches the staffs in sheet music. Schematically, a piano seemed to be a much better match for musical scales, and better for learning music and music theory than a guitar.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Learning about reading and playing music might help me to connect to her\u2026<\/p>\r\n

\"image_pdf\"<\/a>\"image_print\"<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a little boy, one of the figures I remember learning to draw was a Treble Clef. I thought it was just a funny spiralling capital “S” that had something to do with music. I’m pretty sure that my Mum taught it to me. She could read music, and had once been a talented pianist … Continue reading Taking baby steps in her shadow<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memoirs","category-relationships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2962"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4297,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962\/revisions\/4297"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}