Music Was My First Love

They say it is better to have loved and lost, than too not have loved at all.   I'm not so sure.   When thinking of falling in love, rather than the many other uses of the term, I can say I have only done that twice.   I know some people only do it once or even not at all, but for me it is twice, and on both occasions I ended up proposing.   On both occasions the object of my love said yes! and on both occasions they still ended up leaving me.   I will not criticise, I think they both had good, valid reasons, even though I may have been troubled by their decisions these are hard decisions that sometimes need to be made and actually need to be made selfishly.   The problem I have with both of these is that in neither case have I actually fallen out of love.  If either of these ladies were to want to have me back, even as I am now, I would go.

Of course I do have other loves, I love my Daughter in a way that I never thought possible, and that is something special between a parent and child, this is the relationship I prize beyond all others, maybe that makes me a bad Christian as I should value my relationship with God higher, but I believe He wanted to be called father so that as parents we could understand the depth of His love for us.

All this is a little beside the point, my first love, the one that has never let me down and that I expect to be with me all my life, ~ Music.   Now even though I do not come from a home where music was a constant I can't remember a time when music was not an integral part of my life.   I used to sing, I started performing as a chorister went on to piano lessons and attendance at the Arthur Davison Family Concerts, little thinking that a few years later I would be playing in them myself.   As a singer I made up with enthusiasm what I lacked in talent, and I have been doing the same as an instrumentalist since starting to play back in 1970.   Playing music has become such an important part of who I am that I truly believe there have been times when, quite literally, that is what has kept me going.

I have been lucky, I have at times been able to make a living from music, and now as an amateur I get to play great music with great people in wonderful places.  As I get older I struggle to conceive of a time when I might no longer be able to play, in the mean time I intend to make the most of it, and am looking at new ways to perform, I want to conduct more, and play with more orchestras (and if some of them will pay me all to the good) I will be playing a concert with the London Euphonia Orchestra on the 10th May and another with the LGSO on the 29th June.

Sunday night's LGSO concert was a bit of a triumph, the excitement of the orchestra came over to the audience who received us with enthusiasm, personally I might have felt a little under prepared, but that just added to the excitement.   As a post script I decided to wear my silver strappy sandals, but when it came to walking across the platform with my trombone I just didn't trust myself, so stuck with the lower black courts I had been wearing during rehearsal.