It is a story, of a boy and his tryst with music. Much like mine, but more vibrant, more poignant, more larger-than-life. It ought to be - it is a movie, after all.
My romance with music started when I was about 12 years old. It was in an isolated IAF camp in Gujrat. I'd had a keyboard since '92, but had only fiddled a little here and there. I remember figuring out a few hindi songs at the Javalikars' house in Bangalore. I didn't know it was a song, but I was playing whatever came to mind, and a chum informed me I'd figured out some then-popular Bollywood hit tune. I didn't pay much attention then, and we switched the keyboard off and moved to serious business - GI Joes.
A couple of years later, my father asked if I wanted to learn how to play the keyboard. It seems there was a harmonium player in the ranks there, and he had come to my dad's notice. I forget his name at the moment, but he was a kindly old man, just about to retire, and played with metric precision. He taught me the basic hand positions, and a few tunes. I have forgotten them now, but one thing remained over the years.
From the key sequences I parroted, I learnt to associate tones with keys. And I learnt something that my sister - who also tried to learn - never could. I learnt to feel music. Not the way we hear it, but the way it heard itself.
Music has a structure, every piece of it. Music has a flow, a rythm, a hint of discovery, a dash of pride when the climax is finally revealed. It has spice in the serrated arpeggios, it has power in the major chords, it has a sense of longing and remembrance in the minor ones, and it had a sense non-conformity in the seventh-chords.
The teacher never taught me chords, scales, or even that there was a language to music, except for a very basic sa re ga ma finger exercise. He isn't to be faulted - he had a goal, to have me play a song or two so that his senior officer could see quick results. But this jumping over the theory-fence had a long-lasting negative effect on my musical journey. I believed for a long time that songs have to be memorised, that one can't play unless one knows the entire key-sequence by heart.
I practiced the songs I knew day and night, and I could play them perfectly on demand. I played for a number of cultural performances at parties, school functions and what not. But the sense of wonder and joy faded as I grew older.
Then I got my first guitar.
It was a very basic, robust, cheap, no-frills Hobner. I don't think it even had a model number. But my father bought it for me after I badgered him for a month or so, and so began my still-continuing, ever-escalating affair with music.
I had no guitar teacher. I tried to learn from the music teacher at school, but he just told me to take on the banjo instead. I still don't know why. He could play the guitar. I saw him play now and then. But he never taught me to. He would teach others, and I would pluck at the school banjo for a few minutes, and then settle down and read a library book for the rest of the period.
My first association of love and music, was in class 12. Just before we graduated, the girl with the shortest skirt in school asked me if I could teach her a song or two. And I practised for hours to learn the song, to just get it figured out somehow. I watched others play it, I tried to find videos on the dial-up internet connection I had at home. But I couldnt.
So I figured it out myself.
I stopped imitating the others I could see playing the song, and sat down and tried to reason it out. I soon had the basic tune going, but a scale higher than on the record. This was the first time I figured out a tune by myself, deliberately.
I taught her the songs, and those were some of the most pleasurable and memorable hours of my school-life.
Moving on, I started figuring out basic tunes and odd jingles on my own. In a few months I had quite a repertoire. I would sound out a tune or two, run to my parents to play it for them, and then bask in the approval. It was the second time in my life, the first being I had an uncanny knack for programming, that I felt I was more than who I was made out to be. That I was special.
Music has that effect on the person playing it. It is like a perfectly matched lover. It goes at your pace, it drags you to its, and the two of you go along the notes with a languor that a mere listener cannot feel. A musician identifies with every single note, no matter how fleeting, no matter how silent. People who do not play often listen to a piece of music and remember only the dominant melody. They miss or forget the accompaniment, the undertones, the fill-ins. But musicians soak in every single sound, and remember the whole song. And they never forget it, they can always figure it out in a few seconds, even if playing it after years.
I wasn't that adept then. There was a lot of pressure, what with the entrance exams for an engineering course in college. Finally, when I got into a decent (as it seemed back then !!!) college, again a part of my musical brain evolved.
Rohit was a guy who could play a very basic collection of songs. He had learnt them from others, and played the same songs over and over. The song he liked to play the most was the Eagles classic - Hotel California. I watched him play it a time or a two, and then started playing along with him. He played a clean, simple chord structure, and I started adding frills, trills, and tinkles from the very first time I played. It was amazing to see the look on his face when he saw me improvising fill-ins.
I never looked back from then. My first composition was two months later, and I have come a long way since that three-chord format. I have shifted to a blend of modern-rock cum classical western, and have my own sound. I can play anything that I can appreciate. My wildest fantasy was fulfilled playing the soul-bleeding solo from November Rain at sunrise standing on a rock in the War Cemetery in Dhaula Kuan.
I've stopped counting the number of songs I can play. I've written a lot of songs, some of them in a language I'd been learning for only six months. I've played with professional musicians, both Indian, and from outside. I've taught more than a dozen people. I've jammed with live bands in Malls around the NCR. I've stopped my car on the road and plucked the strains of Stairway to Heaven and Summer of 69 with people on the pavements. I've strummed on the subway in the US, in the Boston Airport, on the streets of Mumbai and Pune, on the beaches of Goa, on the rooftops of Delhi, on the hills of Nainital. I've dallied with the violin and the classical western piano. I've learnt to read music and essayed a little Mozart. And the music has never stopped, no matter what happened in my life.
And it never will.
No comments:
Post a Comment