Music

Daejeong, le 11 mars 2021

Most days, I listen to music. Since I have taken over the household chores, I spend more time in the house. I have had a nostalgic call for some music I listened to in my youth. I started with French Canadian (Québécois) songs from the sixties and seventies, from Pauline Julien to Robert Charlebois to Offenbach, Octobre and others. I then moved on to more internationally popular music from my teenage years. Music I discovered with my High school friends Claude, Sylvie, Michel, Denis… Genesis, Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac… My good friend Michel passed away about four months ago. I like to remember him by going back in time.

Favorites on family road trips were Melissa Etheridge, Michael Jackson, Colin James, Annie Lennox, Al Green. That’s without mentioning the Harry Potter and Agatha Christie audio books with the kids.

When I really am into it, there are the classics, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Bach and, my favorite, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

When our three oldest daughters were still in elementary school, I took them to a concert given by a local harmony band of children who were learning to play wind musical instruments. After the concert, my daughters all wanted to join this band and they did. After their third lesson, they each came home with a clarinette to rehearse. Stephanie and I looked at each other thinking this would be a very long weekend. It was actually quite pleasant and became more and more pleasant as time went by. Eventually, all of our five daughters learned to play at least one instrument: clarinette, saxophone, trumpet, flute, or some piano. Two of them joined performing bands. Our oldest, Jaya, plays the baritone saxophone in a Big Band. That band played twice at the Montréal International Jazz Festival.

Some years ago, while listening to one of their outdoor concerts in our neighborhood, I met an old friend. He asked me if I sang. He had recently joined a choir and they were missing some male voices. I didn’t sing but decided to give it a try. Just to see. I loved it. It was a small choir of about twenty mostly singing popular music in both French and English. This was so much fun that in 2018 I accepted an invitation to join a much larger choir. I became a bass signer in the Michel Brousseau International Choir. There were 153 of us. We rehearsed one song for more than six months.  In the summer of 2019, we sang the fifty-one minute Mozart’s Requiem in its original Latin in Salzbourg and Vienna in Austria and in Prague in the Czech Republic.  We gave nine concerts in six different churches. The churches were absolutely grand and always full of big time Mozart fans. I had the privilege to sing the Requiem in the church where he was married and in the church where this piece was played for the very first time, at his funeral.

Listening to music can put you in a mood or change it, it can make you happy or sad, it can make you dance, it can make you cry, it can bring back memories. Today, I listened to Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem played by l’Orchestre Métropolitaine de Montréal under the direction of Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin in memory of my dear friend Michel Perrier. He just loved the l’Orchestre Métropolitaine de Montréal.