Ed Ayres releases his new book, “Whole Notes: Life Lessons through Music” – Music Reads


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Ed Ayres, ABC Classic Weekend Breakfast host, musician, teacher and bestselling author, explores questions of life in his new book and album, Whole Notes: Life Lessons through Music. Take a peek inside with this special excerpt from the book.

To live the life of a musician is to live a blessed life. Doris Lessing talks about the ether-reality of artists and musicians, being able to hover a little over the world, a perspective apart. My friend Lizzie once said how sorry she is for the people who don’t have music in their lives. “What’s on their mind if it’s not a tune?”

Many years ago I was playing a quartet concert for a party at a posh mens club in Melbourne. We were playing background music so we were mostly ignored, but were able to rehearse songs for a gig we had coming up. At the end, people smiled politely and let us know, very kindly, that when we left, we could use the servants’ exit. So very polite.

We walked out the main members door (natch) and went to McDonald’s up the street. Even though we had just been paid we were still young and broke, so McDonald’s seemed like a good option. It was in the middle of another harshly long winter in Melbourne, and we were standing in our big coats and delicate concert shoes, awaiting our order. An older woman approached us, so gently, a pianissimo entrance.

“Excuse me, is this your cello?” She spoke with an Eastern European accent of wars and sonatas.

“Yes it is. We just played next door. They kicked us out of the servants’ exit. Just like Mozart!”

She looked down at the ground, then in front of me, to another life. “I wanted to play the cello when I was young. My dad, he wouldn’t let me.”

My hands were resting on top of my cello case, thick calluses on my left hand, right hand supple and bloody after an hour of playing. As the woman looked at my hands, I slipped them into my pockets, embarrassed. , guilty. My working hands were a sign of exceptional privilege, I had music in my veins, in my head, every moment of my day, and I could pick up my cello and play Bach alone, or play Mozart with three others, and the music kept my mind still and the music made a ray shine in the dark.

It was my mother who gave me this, and the Eastern European woman was refused.

Most evenings I speak with my mother on the phone in England, in a desperate attempt to thank her for giving me music. For not allowing me to give up and for reminding me to train every night after her long, dull days at a provincial civil service office. Since her stroke in 2017, mum has continued to live on her own, with the care of my older sister Liz and her family, and the NHS. The only piece of mom that didn’t make a full recovery from her stroke were her legs, but, as she says herself, she never really walked. She was always more interested in her brain, which is like doing cryptic crosswords. We talk about the weather (of course we are English), I talk to mum about my students, my horn playing, how much I love Anna her namesake, what Charlie does and how Happy the Dog is pretty. Over the months since I saw Mom, an urgency came over me to say everything I have to say, to leave nothing behind. Don’t let mom die with something that hasn’t been given, that hasn’t been thanked. It is a night reading of a piece of music, wanting to express everything that is written on the page and everything that is not.

As we age, a desperation can come over us to leave nothing behind, to leave nothing unfinished or unexplored, to leave no room for what could have been but to make room for what can be. Will we choose to play music or not? If you do that, if you choose the music, you can do it all. And you will just feel better about yourself. Few can honestly say that.

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting in a cello lesson with Edwina, the teacher of children with extra needs who makes curiosity a central tenet in her life. I just asked how her mom is doing as she was recently diagnosed with dementia.

“One of the things mom always remembers is the cello lesson. Mom always asks, ‘How’s the cello?’ It makes me very happy because it’s always a connection that I have with mom when there is a great loss of other things. But it’s something that she remembers, so we can keep that connection, because she’s still in reality. Mom talks about the past, or didn’t actually happen, so that gives me a lot of joy. “

Edwina was forty-seven when she decided to learn the cello. For the past three years, she has devoted herself to the practice – a daily, repetitive and attentive practice. After two years of playing on the cello of an abandoned school, Edwina bought her own instrument, a perfect three-quarter size for her tiny hands. She sits with it now, her left hand resting casually on the cello’s shoulder, her bow hand relaxed, holding the bow so lightly that it falls past her knee. Edwina says she doesn’t even think about her bow grip now – it’s as familiar as picking up a pencil. I reply that she doesn’t need to think about it, because it’s very good, unlike some of my younger students who, I wish, would think a little more about archery. Ho hum.

Ed Ayres: Full Notes

How can we stop long enough to repair ourselves? How can we make space and time in our lives become whole? Get Ed Ayres’ new book, Whole Notes, and the accompanying music CD included in the book.

Edwina drops her legs around her cello and starts playing. A slow ladder that goes down, to warm up: do (a stag) followed by ti (for two) rather than a re (sun). Playing scales up and down allows the left hand to settle and the fingers to settle, an orderly line of school children waiting for lunch. It’s reassuring, it’s going down. Edwina’s sound is amber and refined, a true reflection of her character. Her bow moves over the strings, sinking more and more slowly as she descends. Her face is determined and focused and exquisitely calm; nothing in the music is missing, nothing is overlooked, everything is loved in Edwina’s cello garden.

Edwina is naturally shy and has had to work on dealing with these inherent stresses throughout her life. Through learning meditation, Edwina finds it easier to let go of feeling self-conscious in all aspects, including her cello. Playing the cello when you know someone is listening isn’t easy, with the anxiety that awaits you.

“I have noticed that I don’t think when I play the cello; my head is full so I can’t think of anything else. I feel like I’m pretty focused.”

Mindfulness in life, mindfulness on the cello. Mindfulness on the cello, mindfulness in life.

I ask Edwina what she thinks now about choosing to learn the cello.

“It’s one of the best decisions of my life. I’d say I was supposed to do it; it was supposed to happen. I think if I gave up I would lose so much. More than the instrument. would lose so much fun, so much knowledge; it would be a real tragedy if I gave up. I know it will be a challenge, but there will come a time… a friend who is a musician said to me, “It will come, give “Time for him. Give him time, give him time.”

I point out to Edwina that the songs she played a year ago, she can now play very easily, and the songs she is learning now will be easy for her in a year. “All natural things happen,” as my friend Cami would say.

Edwina nods and says that there have been times when she has performed and she doesn’t remember anything, but the music is just playing through her body. The music sinks into a deeper part of his consciousness.

“And I look at my fingers and now I see that I have calluses on my fingertips and they look like a musician’s, and isn’t that great? Because I feel like a musician.”

Playing the cello not only improved Edwina’s relationship with herself, it helped her in her relationship with her mother.

After Edwina had learned for about a year, she took her mother to a lesson, one she never forgot. Edwina’s mother, June, is almost 80 years old. Alert, serene and nicely dressed in white, June sat down on a chair a little apart. She had never seen Edwina play the cello before and I could feel the astonishment, the awe, the respect as she looked at her daughter. At the end of the lesson, June gave me a hug and thanked me for teaching Edwina. It was like the gratitude of the poet Massoud Khalili in Afghanistan, who had seen me teach in Besheda, a refugee. The size of June’s gratitude was overwhelming.

For Edwina, playing the cello also changed her in the eyes of others. “When I tell people that I play the cello, it’s like saying I just won the Nobel Peace Prize. And I tell them, ‘No, no, lower your expectations!’ So many people say to me, ‘I really wish I had kept this when I was a kid, I really wish I could do that, I should start learning viola, violin, clarinet again, oh wow how are you do that ?’ Well, I’m just going to take some lessons. It’s not rocket science. People think you have to be a particular type of person, with a particular brain or background, or come from a musical background.

There is no talent, there is only love. The love for what you are learning, and therefore the desire to know it more deeply, more completely, so that this knowledge becomes a part of you and of yourself. Love creates passion, and passion creates the energy to work. The spark of love takes time, but it does come. The teacher’s role is to play their students until that spark happens, and when it does, the students take off and mostly teach themselves. From me pushing and pulling them they become a wheel that rolls vertically, the teacher just brushes the wheel forward, not too hard, not too often, not disturbing the natural momentum. It takes wisdom to know when and where to push your students, and such love to stand aside and let them go, knowing that you may never see them again. To teach music, to teach anything, our hearts must be open and ready for anything, never waiting, always hoping. Always hoping that love will grow and the choice will be made.

Playing music is a choice we might not initially make as children, but certainly can make as adults. Listening, listening well to music is a choice that can be made at any age. And it is choosing to play music, and choosing to listen to yourself and others well, that brings us to the highest escarpment of all: love. Edwina shows us how. Edwina perseveres in her game with such strength and joy, she is unstoppable. Music is a gift that can be given at any age. It could be someone who gave this gift to you through your family, or it could be a gift that you can give yourself. And that is to recognize that you are worthy of this gift. Because a lot of people think they are not worthy of it.

“But I am.”

Yes. You are.

Ed Ayres presents Weekend breakfast on ABC Classic (Saturday and Sunday from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.).

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About Shirley A. Tamayo

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