So a few things have happened since we last met…um…a year teaching music in Afghanistan, a couple of books, and…oh yes, gender transition. Also, my mum had a stroke last year.
It was a terrifying time — she lay in a coma for a week with a fifty/fifty chance of survival. As she started to come to consciousness I wondered whether mum had had a stroke, or the stroke had had her. Her always vivid blue eyes were now milky, her mouth formed chaotically around once clear words. Who knew what strange reality had raged or trundled through her brain during that lost time? The weeks went by and Mum was moved to a long-term ward. Mum started to speak…in French. Her eyes cleared, every day a new blue, and her mouth, often grim from a tough life of divorce and some tricky children, had now softened into something unbearably surprising. A smile. A tender, cheeky smile. Mum was coming back.
So why am I writing all this? What has it got to do with music?
Well the first reason is that when it comes to our music opportunities, our parents are everything, aren’t they? As Mum lay there I thought about all the times she had “reminded” me to practise, all the concerts she had come to, all the joy she had created in me by giving me music. And I thought how hard it is to keep your child on the music highway. It’s time-consuming, it’s complicated, it can be expensive. How much easier to let your child not bother with practice, just let them give up when it all becomes too hard. The parents of the kids I teach are all working full-time, and yet they display such love by creating a place for music in their children’s lives. As Mum lay there, all I could wish for was for her to recover, so I could never stop saying thank you.
And the other reason — I had put some calm, particularly beautiful music on my phone for Mum to listen to in hospital. Chopin nocturnes, Mozart quartets, some bites of Bach. I put on the Chopin Nocturne in E flat major and Mum lay back into her pillow and closed her eyes. I wetted her lips with a little water, smoothed her hair and together we had the simplest of bonds — we listened. It was something we had done countless times before. We used to listen to concerts together, to LP’s, to the Proms on the telly or visiting soloists in the relative backwater of Shropshire. And now we listened to this music that Chopin composed when he was twenty, music written not far off two hundred years ago. The piece has such a gentle tread, a melody that goes around in a circle of sad delight. In one hand the music lifts you onto a safe escarpment of youthful love, and with the other hand the harmonies take you into the shadows of life, a reminder that as much as perfection can exist, only the slightest change of perception will change the mood and direction of your life.
As Mum listened, suddenly her eyes opened and she gazed directly at me, almost through me. In that moment I realised together we had experienced human beauty at its most powerful. And only music could have melded us together in such a traumatic time, with this my first visit from changing from Mum’s third “daughter”, to her second son. It was all forgotten, it was all so completely unimportant, because we had opened our hearts to music, and through that, to each other.
Listening to music together binds us in a mystery. I met my partner Carol through listening to music. I have reached a stubborn student through listening to music. I have reached myself through listening to music. You and I become family through listening to music.
And so all I can say is thank you for allowing me into your life, to share music with you every weekend. I think I understand more now than a few years ago just what music means. Music means love.
Ed Ayres returns to ABC Classic to present Weekend Breakfast from 6am, Saturday 19 January. He also presents The Art Show on RN (Wednesdays at 10am).