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One mandolin lesson for 2 briquetts

At the moment I am damn busy. (great!). My main preoccupation is currently to make Music CD’s for the trip (wedding anniversary). For that I dug out some recordings (from my hard disk) which I made with the computer several years ago, pop songs of the thirties, which Inge was to take to Germany for my two sisters. That was quite a successful exercise. I still had all those pop songs in my head, from the old record player to which I jived around the room when I was between 4 and 8 years old, and which I played to death! That was my first and almost only musical training. Like I said, they were pop songs of the time. My favourite was Zara Leander with a voice that you could feel right in your marrow, singing “could love be called sin?”. And I was often asked to perform this myself! Later on when I was auditioning for the church choir, I was very embarrassed. Not that I couldn’t sing, oh no, my brother Willi had taken great pains , morning and night in bed, when he made me sing the scales and intervals up and down! But my embarrassment was due to the fact that I was not able to choose out of my repertoire a single song that could even get close to being suitable for the church choir. Well, the Choir Master despite this must have been satisfied with my knowledge of the scales and intervals and allowed me to participate. This was an important period in my musical development. I learned to read music. After that I taught myself everything. (Apart from a one hour lesson on the Mandolin in 1946. But the nice old man wanted me to bring two briquettes along to the next lesson. Well, I didn’t have any briquettes. And it wouldn’t have entered my mind to ask my mother for some. After all, music was my own hobby. And I was well and truly aware of what it meant to provide for our family, seeing as I was the family’s black-market driver…I owned a bike!)
Back to these pop songs (I loved to kiss the women; The old finch cock; the old canapé …and so on ), I still have all the details in my head, not the text, but the melody. And this I composed using the computer…with full instrumentation (for my beloved old sisters…now over 80). The Quality was quite passable, for those days, on cassettes. But for CD’s this was not good enough. So I reworked the entire collection, putting the music computer right next to the sound equipment, so that the cable didn’t have to be too long. Hedwig now has to watch her TV programs through the remaining slits. And now I have first-class recordings with moving fiddles, merry piano, seaman’s squeeze box, all totally authentic. And sentimental. I will send you a copy, when I have completed them. See…this work is what I love best: Aping around and Theatre. Directly after I had created the original cassettes, before Inge left for Germany, I had my heart attack. Hedwig now watches like a hawk, that this won’t happen again! Despite the fact that music has been for ever my one and all, something that Suzanne (Chinese astrologer) totally confirmed. And you could say that the Stomach Ulcer which I only just survived in 1958 via emergency surgery at 1am in the morning, could be blamed entirely on my obsession with Music!
But it actually has nothing to do with Music. I just happen to be someone who dares the impossible, even if it costs me the shirt on my back. Because of this, obsessive learning becomes an obligation. My entire career was full of nightmares, in that respect.

posted by Inge @ 6:48 pm