The Camaraderie of Music

I've been a musician all my life. I started playing the piano by ear at age three-and-a-half. I don't remember it, but I've heard the story repeatedly about how Mother heard my older brothers' piano lessons being practiced and discovered it was little me, not tall enough for my feet to touch the floor.

Music is at the core of my being, as it is with most of my friends. We meet in this chorus or at that concert, and we seem to cling together, with the pedalpoint of life underscoring everything we do.

I've organized my Facebook friends into lists so I can keep everyone straight in my mind. The majority of my friends are musicians; Washington musicians, Tucson musicians, and Ohio musicians are the three biggest lists in my profile.

I love that we've all struggled through the same college classes and the same pressure, as kids, to practice. I love that we all know the same people. My conductor in Cleveland used to work with my conductor in Tucson. My son's mentor in high school was my conductor in Akron. Our little musical world just spins.

A while back, I saw a musician on Match. We met for coffee, and had a thousand points of commonality. He had gone to YSU and knew, quite well, my closest friends here. He had taught at a conservatory where several of my acquaintances teach. His daughter had graduated from the same arts boarding school as my son, a year behind him. It was too funny and fun.

We all share the same love of tunes, of notes, of remembering passages from music, of seeing applications for snippets of tunes in everyday life.

When I sang the Star Wars in Concert performance in Pittsburgh, there was a holding room for the chorus. We went on stage for rehearsal, came back and ate the dinner that had been provided for us, then waited for the appropriate moment to process onstage again. As we started, single file in our long black dresses and tuxes, down the backstage hallway, a tuba player, waiting for his moment to go on, started playing a march. It brought such humor and lightness to the moment. Choral musicians passing by orchestral musicians, all buoyed by the fact that we were going out to make be-YOO-tiful music for an arena full of people. It was the kind of moment that stays with you.

You read various tales I tell about PianoLady. We've been fast friends for 41 years now. It all began at Florida Technological University, now University of Central Florida. We were two of the four piano majors at the fledling university. The movie "Camelot" was new to the big screen. We sat down at twin spinets in the music building and started playing "If Ever I Would Leave You." PianoLady was playing from memory; I was playing by ear. And yet we played in the same key, with the same harmonic progressions, with the same crescendos and ritardandos. When we reached the end of the piece, we played the exact same tag on the ending. We looked at each other and just laughed with joy. A lifelong friendship had been born.

The music in me is, absolutely, a gift to me from the universe. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if I had not been given that music.

Or all the friends who came from that music.