Further Ramblings in the Key of G minor

When I was still practicing and performing classical music on the flute I really cherished the minor keys the most for their dark and mysterious sonority and luster.  I could feel them in my brain and bones and all the way into the very core of my emotions in ways the major keys could never reach.  They felt like the blackened skies of Seattle rain and wind had mated with the fluid in my spine  and drew me down into the netherworld of tone.  Adagios.  Fugues.  Lamentations.  Largos.  In and way down, spiraling and stirring, down into the soul of the unseen.

I was on a path then that had no hope for realization.  Seventeen and with very little human support from any direction I left the rain behind for a false sun.  I thought I was heading for a freedom where I could be the musician I had always dreamed of being.  I thought my family would understand why I broke away from the violent alcoholic home and i thought that they would keep supporting my musical dreams but no, they stopped as soon as I was gone so I completely lost my whole identity, my natural musical direction.  I gave up practicing and playing my flute but as a result I began to learn how to really listen to other musicians.

For many years I thought this was a tragedy that I stopped playing, that I bought flutes and then sold them again whenever I needed the money to keep going.  I hated to let go of them but this was also a part of learning how to really listen.  I had no idea at the time that I was learning anything.  I thought I was losing something.

So I continually attended many kinds of musical performances, rock and roll bands, jazz bands, punk rock shows, avant garde chamber music, folk concerts, anything and everything, every musical genre known to humans.  These events became my food and blood and reason for being.  I no longer had to blow a flute in a symphony to receive the gift of musical sound.  I had become a vital part of any  music simply by listening, by feeling it fully and remembering.

Over all these years since I was seventeen I have still felt my innermost connection with the minor keys, the dark and eerie symphonies, the deep black southern blues, the keening.  I live to listen to them, in protest songs and ballads, love songs, the laments of broken men and women, the search for justice where there is none.  I am a minor key of G and I have learned how to stay alive by listening.