A memoir about a lifetime relationship with music.  Third place winner in the prose category.

I close my eyes and let the tune fill my head. I feel my feet tapping gently to the rhythm as my fingers softly pick the strings of the guitar and seem to instinctively find all the right notes. It’s like I’m not even part of it; the music seems to flow through me into the instrument and emerge perfectly. I feel the body of the guitar vibrate from the strength of each chord. Or is it, in fact, my body echoing each tone? I can’t tell. It’s like we’re one.

I often have this kind of dreams about playing. In reality, I can’t play the guitar very well. I borrow my roommate’s guitar to clumsily strum some chords just to be able to back my singing. I never do a very good job, and yet I play every day. My fingertips are red and almost bleeding, because they’re not used to pressing the strings, but I still try. I try hard, because I enjoy the feeling of playing. Music is everything to me, and being able to produce music with an instrument is the perfect way to express my feelings. But it’s also frustrating. I can hear the music in my head, but I can’t play it out. I don’t know how to.

It wasn’t always like that. When I was younger, I played the violin for eight years. Music runs in my family: My dad is a music theory teacher in a private music school, and he plays the piano, the trombone and the accordion. My mother plays the piano and the clarinet a little bit, and used to give small children some piano lessons in the local community music school. My sister, who is three years older, played the cello. So, when the time came, my parents asked me whether I wanted to play an instrument as well, and just because I liked the sound of the word I picked the violin.

I don’t remember much about the first few years of lessons. However, I do remember the first student matinees I played in. I can still remember the melodies. And if I think of those melodies and close my eyes I can almost see the notes, the black dots bouncing up and down the page in rhythm with my racing heart, my feet trembling like crazy, and the eager and expectant faces of my teacher and everyone’s parents in the audience. But my hands never trembled. Once I started playing, I would calm down little by little and forget about the crowd and the teacher. I just let go, and enjoyed.

Later on it wasn’t that easy anymore. I was lazy, so I didn’t practice enough. Of course, that didn’t make the teacher too happy, and eventually it led to the point where I really had to make myself go to the lessons, and the teacher had to try hard not to yell at me. My parents weren’t too happy either, since the lessons were really expensive. As a violinist I was only mediocre, and due to the lack of practicing I also started to hate the matinees and the student concerts I had to play in. I also really hated the theory lessons, even though my father tried to teach me at home whatever I didn’t understand in class. I was a teenager, and there were a ton of things I would have wanted to do rather than sit in a classroom and learn about harmony analysis.

At that time, the only thing I really liked about playing was the different ensembles and the orchestra, mainly because I didn’t stand out there, and I had also made a lot of friends in the band. But the orchestra only rehearsed in the spring and in the summer, so it didn’t really help all that much. Still, I slacked off, and didn’t feel the joy of music anymore. Somehow I made it through the third basic qualification examination after eight years of playing, and I managed to get my music school basic-level degree. Then I quit. Later in life I have felt bad about that several times. I keep thinking how well I could have done if I had rehearsed enough. Had I rehearsed, I would have been better, and subsequently enjoyed playing more. After I quit, it almost felt like I had wasted eight years of my life.

I still have a violin. I didn’t have a violin of my own when I was taking lessons, so I rented one from the music school. But when I graduated high school three years after giving up the lessons, I felt like something was missing in my life: the violin. So, my parents bought me a violin as a graduation present. I was almost afraid to play it at first, because it had been so long, and the violin is not exactly the easiest instrument to pick up after a long break. But when I finally did, a rush of joy ran through my blood like a warm breeze: my fingers still remembered it. My bow hand held the bow just right, and my head was suddenly filled with different melodies I knew I could play. Yes, the technique was partly lost, but my fingers still remembered their places in each song, and it all felt so familiar I almost cried. Here it was again, the instrument with which I had spent half of my life so far.

I have tried various other instruments: my mother’s clarinet, my sister’s cello, harmonica, and the double bass, but none of them were really fun because I couldn’t play them well. More than that; I couldn’t understand the logics of the instruments, in fact I could hardly make a sound come out. Besides the violin, the only other instrument I was ever able to play (although somewhat wobbly) was the bass guitar in my junior high school band. I knew all along that it was a very simple instrument to learn, but even so I enjoyed the feeling of being able to play it.

And then there was the piano. To tell you the truth, the piano came to my life before the violin. It’s one of the first things I remember from home: there was always a piano in our house. Both of my parents liked playing it, and they would often play and sing for us, or we would all sing together. I always valued those family moments. I guess this is different for each family: some families would always have dinner together in the dining room with no television on; some families would go out hiking or skiing together; some played board games. In every family gathering we played and sang, sometimes in harmonies, and everyone was expected to take part. While we sometimes did those other family things, too, music was really the thing that brought my family together.

Sadly, music was also, in a way, the thing that broke my family apart. My father was very young when my parents got married, so he was still a student when my sister and I were born. He spent a few years working to provide for the family, but then went back to finish his degree in music education when my sister and I were little. He spent the weeks in a student flat and only came home for the weekends. His school was in Helsinki, the capital city of Finland, and gradually all the opportunities of the big city charmed my father so that he finally moved out when I was eight years old. He still visited us – I still distinctly remember the delightful scent of my father’s after-shave hovering in the hall when my sister and I came home from school, telling us he was home – but my parents finally decided to divorce when I was eleven. So my father left for good, but the piano stayed.

Yes, the piano stayed, and it was almost like it was part of our family. My mother, my sister and I became a strong team, and in my mind the piano symbolizes that. We would often sing together, my mother playing, and we did that especially if we were going through hard times, and we often were: A single-parent household often doesn’t have a lot of money, and at some point my mother lost her job and was unemployed for months. But I really don’t remember the hardship in my childhood. What I do remember is that my mother was always there for us, reading us stories, and playing the piano. My mother’s voice was low and raspy, and sometimes a little tremulous. The songs she played were quite simple; she wasn’t a professional like my father. But even though my father played better, it is in fact my mother that I nowadays still associate with the piano. After my parents’ divorce, my mother actually had her bed set up right behind the piano in the living room, because we only had two bedrooms in our new apartment.

But the moment when I really got to know the piano better came years later. I had already played the violin for some years, and could read notes. But the piano scores looked more complicated and tempting, and I took it as a challenge to learn to play a little. I loved feeling the cold ivory keys under my fingers, and hearing the beautiful sound they produced when played together. Suddenly, harmony made sense. Of course I had been ‘playing’ the piano ever since I was little, but never had there actually been an attempt to make music. Even though I read the notes very slowly, and had to memorize the entire piece to be able to play it faster, I enjoyed every moment of it. I have loved playing the piano ever since. I never took lessons, and I’m still not able to read the piano score fast enough. I’m getting better at it, but as I don’t have a piano, I only get the chance to try it whenever I visit one of my parents. I can play chords, but I can’t play with them; my left hand is just as incapable of playing patterns on the piano as my right hand is of picking the guitar strings properly. But I still enjoy it. I enjoy just touching the keys and, again, imagining what it would be like to actually play.

When I started at the university I got that same feeling of longing again. I wanted to do music; I wanted to be part of it. The violin I had in my room didn’t help much, because the only things I could play were classical pieces. Karaoke nights were fun, but singing alone just wasn’t enough for me. So I decided to join the choir in my school, the Tampere University Singers. That decision was one of the best ones I ever made. I realized soon that a choir is in fact a big instrument, played by the conductor. The harmony is there, and it’s exactly like playing chords on an instrument. Even though one singer’s voice doesn’t really make a difference in a choir, it gives me great pleasure to be a small part of something harmonic, something that beautiful. And really, my voice is not that of a soloist. And that’s okay; music, to me, is more about personal feelings and peace of mind than anything else. Of course it’s also about having fun and jamming with friends, and I really made a lot of good friends in the choir.

Back when I was a teenager I used to find everything music-related a little boring, especially if I had to go to a theory lesson or sing with my sister at yet another family reunion. But nowadays I can really appreciate my past with music. I am glad my parents gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with the world of music, even with the most boring theory lessons. I have noticed later in life that knowing all that ‘boring stuff’ makes playing any instrument easier, and helps a lot with new choir pieces. In fact, being a musical person even helps me with languages. I see every foreign language as music; like a song I need to learn if I wish to sing with new people.

I have found again that same joy in music than I did when I first started playing the violin and some years later the piano. The joy of making music was once lost because of the constraint; I had to go to my lessons no matter how I felt that day or how horrible the weather was, and someone else decided for me what I should play. But the choir and, more recently, my new roommate’s guitar have made me find that feeling again. Now I am in the point where I really want to learn, and I’m willing to work for it. But I don’t need to learn any tricks; it’s almost as if the mere image of playing is enough. I hold the guitar, I play chords; the sounds echoing in the body of the guitar. It’s a very satisfying feeling: I’m doing this, and if I can do this, I can do anything.