Viva La Musica!

Music- that liquid beauty that seeps into our hearts, our minds, our ears, our fingertips and that drips from our lips and our tears.

Since I was a young girl of 5, I have been using music as an outlet ... so much that it has come to define me over the years. Growing up in a household of trained musicians and music lovers, it started with mere exposure to everything and anything from classical, to jazz, to rock and roll. Little did I realize how profound an effect all this exposure would have on my little untrained ears. Here I am, after 20 years of training in piano and various other instrutments, a music degree, and lots of experience performing and teaching that art I call mine. During my training in music, I became so engulfed in the academic and stressful side of it all that I began to lose sight of the true reason I ever decided to extend the training I had and enjoyment I once knew and make it a profession. Music was no longer simple--it was a whole other system, a whole other language, a whole other discipline ... most of which I had yet to embrace, even after the 15 years of training I receieved before entering university. As Aaron Copland once said: "Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific." This is the type of thinking that continued to present itself throughout my university years.

All that has come full circle for me since this crazy war was waged back in September. I was able to take a step back and allow music to give back to me ... and boy did it help. I have been turning to music more and more to deal with stress, to relate, and as a form of meditation, whether it be through singing, playing the piano or guitar, or through listening to music. I remember writing a whole chapter in my honours thesis back at Dalhousie U in 2004 about the relationship between music and self-expression, emotion, and feeling. I had no idea what I was writing about until now! Music has the power to ease or minds, touch our hearts, and speak to our souls. It is a therapy which we should all embrace in times like these (take that, Aaron Copland!).

So, although I have found myself complaining at times that I may have "wasted" the past year musicially simply because I was not teaching, studying, or performing, I now choose to look at my "break" from professional activity in music as a chance to regain my love for it and to use it to my personal advantage. It certinaly has helped me through some very tough times.

With all that said, I have decided to add an mp3 player to The Pink Diaries, through which I will play some of the music I enjoy that has helped me along this crazy journey. Some of the songs/ pieces are simply therapeutic, while other have lyrics I cannot help but relate to. You can simply turn the player off (just press the stop button!) if it is an annoyance.

Hope you enjoy!



"Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken." ~Ludwig van Beethoven