Music Wallpaper

None of my walls are papered - yet. Although it's an old place with new stuff mostly, its present decor is mainly music, in my case, of the classical kind. Informal popularish music just isn't my everyday love. Jazz appeals but not quite as much. Then again, it's a classic in its way. When I was a small kid, no household didn't have a piano. In the days when there was no such thing as television and radio was the method of in-home entertainment, the piano, usually a great hunk of oak and mellowing ivory and ebony, sat like an elephant in the living room. When you had company (that's what we called them) come to visit, you gathered around the big oak, to sing while someone thumped out chords to the old tried and true songs we all knew.  Don't laugh. I hear the young singing together in the car, their favorite songs, earbuds in place.  Every kid, then,  had to "take" music and sometimes tap dancing, too. My parents faithfully paid Myrtle, my professional piano teacher, aged eighteen and with a certificate, to take us through the rigors of the conservatory with its scales and exercises and piano books grade by grade. My sister wisely opted out demanding to be switched to the popular music vein so that she could sing and play and be the star attraction amongst the aunts, uncles and endless cousins who came to see us. I sulked because no one could sing Mozart or Czerny and I couldn't sing anyway. I knew the wiles of Harmony III and a sour note when I heard it, but my vocal chords didn't know an A from an E flat. How I survived my choir years, was to the credit of my pal Joanie who had a hog-calling voice and the will of Elizabeth the First. She dragged me into the alto section and sang into my ear and that's the only reason I was able to don the little black fur cape of The Penguins, our choir sponsored by the local fur coat store. Even though I was supremely jealous of my beautiful sister who had a gorgeous voice and talent for entertaining, I am eternally grateful to this day, for the tedious piano lessons that make me appreciate those who play it so well. Every day of my life, I am surrounded with the sound of music within my walls wherever I am. I love the orchestras, the instrumentalists who play the classics because when I enter their sphere, I am transposed into a world of beauty that they create for me with their hard work and talent. I am taken away from the stresses and pressures and ugliness of a world that seems to dig up dirt with a need to smear it, while saying they are making it a better place. Is it a better place? Better than music, all music, that is understood around the world by all of its peoples no matter their religion, colour, culture or race and needs no language training to comprehend? We owe a debt to musicians who spend most of their lives training to make a music world, a place of refuge by their efforts while receiving very little for what they gift us.