When Yolanda Bruno started playing the last piece in our Music for Your Blues session, I could not place what I was hearing. It was so familiar, but so fresh on her fiddle. The theme came together into focus in a few short phrases,
Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here
I did not just call her "little darling..." but those were the only words I blurted out. She told me the title Here Comes the Sun and I went "Oh" and behind the scenes I didn't tell her that my choir performed this tune off book and on virtual choir too. So I should have known and was totally taken aback that the only thing I remembered about this tune was "little darlin..."
The tune was a great ending to a 30 minute performance I booked on her Instagram schedule for a series of free music that she was offering to play for anyone feeling blue in January. On her page, I was following her adventures as she played for kids, for families, for a classroom setting, for collegues, for mentors, for her dad (who uses hearing aids like me), and now, she played for me.
The experience of being played to by a real-life concert musician was unreal, because I've forgotten what it felt like to hear and enjoy music on the spot. It's much different from live streams or prerecorded music in that we could interact, and she told me some stories about where she was going with the music selection, and her ideas of wanting to perform, to draw on themes of home/homecoming, of self, of forgiving yourself and of artisanship and music as a form of kinship, therapy, and discovery.
Throughout the session, her sound was focused and open. There's much to learn from her sound, but I'm not here to talk about technique in the here and now. I remembered her story about Piazzolla, about how he hid his music, only to discover himself musically when he started playing his own music his own way: his own compositions and in his own style. That's when he started to live musically.
I shared a little bit with her about my musical journey through the lens of hearing loss. The idea of self-forgiveness, about creating something new - these themes I could hear in her own stories, and she told me about her collegue and friend Stelth Ng who's going/is blind and is creating a new pathway for musicians who are also blind. We are paving the way, each and every one of us. Yolanda with her online music series where she plays unencumbered and with courage for people - for anyone who books a time slot! That's very courageous! Stelth with the Toronto Institute of Music for the Blind (new website!). Myself with my "tips for deaf musicians." We are all discoverers, and music is at once the reason and the path we travel.
So what happens next? Where do we go from here?
I'm sorry to learn of the passing of my grandmother in Taiwan. Just before the new year, I played a few tunes for her over Skype: Josefin's Waltz, Sally Gardens, into Westphalia Waltz. I was planning and programming another session for her, consisting of Spotted Pony, Eighth of January, McFall's March. I didn't get to play for her anymore, but today I dusted off the coatings of rosin and went through the program, and did some extra practice with the two Hardanger fiddle tunes that I've been learning.
I've been hesitant to invest more into music over the last year with the pandemic in the way. It turns out that I should be investing more.
Yolanda told me of the spot on the neck where the violin meets your heartstring and told me to listen to that feeling when the heart and fiddle are pulsing together, to catch the calm.
Today I am sad, but my heartstring is slowing and calming. It'll be all right. I know grandma is out there today listening.
I'll be playing.