Music in My Life

“She shall have music wherever she goes.”

Music and I go back to my elementary school years. When I wasn’t singing to myself at recess, I was humming quietly in class, driving my neighboring classmates crazy.

Grandma tried to channel my musical bent with piano lessons, which I hated. My short fingers weren’t suited for the ivories, but I learned enough to be able to plunk out a melody that I wanted to sing.

Uncle Jack had a bit more luck teaching me to play ukulele, which suited my hands. I worked my way to playing a full-size guitar as I grew up. I played a lot of folk guitar in my junior high school years. When I joined Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, I used my guitar skills to accompany congregational singing in my role as a service leader.

I took voice lessons through high school, college, which complemented my B.A. in music. I got a new voice teacher when I came to San Francisco for law school.

I picked up recorder playing in my teens. After law school, my voice teacher introduced me to the San Francisco Early Music Society. I attended their week-long residential recorder workshops for many years. During my Lutheran period, I played bass in a recorder quartet that accompanied hymns at small services. Despite my small hands, I wound up playing the large bass recorder because I was the only one who knew its fingering and could read bass clef. I also helped establish the San Francisco chapter of the American Recorder Society, and played in a trio at the memorial service for my best friend’s mother.

However, the instrument I have played most consistently and best has been my singing voice. I sang in nearly every chorus that was available to me—high school choruses, the U.C.L.A. Madrigal Singers, the San Francisco Civic Chorale, the Bay Area Lutheran Chorale, and the Pacific Lesbian and Gay Singers. For a number of years, I conducted a small choir for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. The pinnacles of my avocation were touring California with the Madrigal Singers and singing the soprano solo in the Faure Requiem at Grace Cathedral with the Pacific Lesbian and Gay Singers.

“I hear singing when there’s no one there.” Some music is running through my head nearly all the time. I often sing a morning Psalm while making my bed. I have a thank you song that I usually sing when I leave the house.

If I read about or think of any words to a song I know, that song will be stuck in my head until another one takes its place. And I delight in singing snatches of song that happen to fit into a conversation or the current circumstances.

Music has given me so much in my life: a way to make friends, a way to fit in, a way to contribute. Song lyrics help me to express various emotions, and to measure my feelings against them. Listening to music can get my toes tapping, my head bobbing, and my whole body doing ballroom dance. Music sometimes washes over me in waves of its energy.

I listen to a lot of classical music these days, in part to mask noise from my upstairs and downstairs neighbors. While enjoying the music, I also try to name the piece, or at least to name the instrumentation or form of the piece. And if I can’t name the composer, maybe I can at least pick his country and century. Challenges and mysteries are two of my favorite things.