Sharing Writing Skills by Randwick Writers’ Group

Author:Randwick Writers’ Group
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-76041-891-5
Publisher: Ginninderra Press

I can’t imagine living in a world without music, notes filling the air, drifting into my ears like fingers grabbing the emotional layers of my being.

Some people just listen to music, others create it. I did both, and inside that world, I found many creative individuals.

My brother Phillip was responsible for the first song I remember when he came home with a relic gramophone that had a very large funnel. Out of it tumbled the deep voice of Paul Robeson, singing ‘Old Man River’, in a language I didn’t understand. Phillip told me it was English and that the man whose voice magically floated in the air was black, same as his friend who often came for dinner and played hide-and-seek with me – not many places to hide in the one dining room that served as an all-purpose living space.

Evocative folk songs reflect the places of our origins, making us prone to emotional outbursts when hearing an old melody. I return to my roots when I hear ‘Oif Dem Pripitchik’, an old Yiddish song that my father taught me. It’s about a rabbi teaching little children the ABC in front of a warm fireplace.

No one in my family was musical, not even one straggly singer. However, there was a friend of my father’s who came to us every Sunday morning to play cards with him. They had a glass of vodka, played bollot and had lunch. Somehow, I remember that he was called Mister Aronovich, except that he created a family fuss when he offered to sing at my cousin’s wedding and afterwards asked for payment. The following Sunday, when he came to our apartment to play cards, my father stood in the doorway and stonily called him a schnorrer (a kind of sponger); they never played cards again. Everyone agreed, however, that the man had a good voice.

My father promised to send me to violin lessons, but it was just a promise and never came to fruition. Luckily, it didn’t happen, because I can imagine the agonies that my family would have had to go through listening to hours of practice. Maybe a few interested refugee mice might have stuck around.

My mother loved opera; it had been part of her upbringing in Germany, and one of the melodies she sometimes sang during housework was from the operetta Die Fledermaus. Her off-tune warbling could drive anyone bats. Woo! A fledermaus is a bat. She sounded much better when she sang old Yiddish songs.

The notes tumbled through my life, preparing me for an eclectic taste in music; my collections included many genres, singers, bands, loud, soft, melodic, invasive, rock, country, vocals, classical; whatever took my fancy at the time. Popular songs from the charts, lyrics that had meaning, tunes which haunted and noises that defied description. I entered the new age with environmental sounds of birds, waterfalls, crickets and who knows what else that roamed the forests and fields. I had to learn to move beyond my childhood nightmares and go through a lot of growing up.

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