A Relation To Music

This is what I once wrote as part of an assignment in the context of a Music Therapy course I took,
It is not deprived of connection to the core spirit of those pages…so I guess I can share it here.

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Hi everyone…

Well, music has always played a major role throughout my life. 

I had a complicated — though common — childhood context, forcing me to move here and there depending on decisions from adults around me. 

My father took me to his keyboard lessons when I was four years old. I remember waiting for him for hours in the room next door, where all sorts of organs, pianos and vibraphones were waiting for me to play..this is my first memory of interaction with music.

Wherever I went in my early years, music was the stabilizing element in my troubled days. It took various forms, depending on the material possibilities of the various places.

Either surrounded with instruments I could freely access all day long, or simply listening to the couple of records available in the house, or playing around with my tape recorder…singing and listening, ..recording sounds and transporting them to be played as background in another room had me playing for hours.

Whatever the possibilities, music always had that same reassuring effect through these various homes.

As I grew up, I was lucky enough to receive piano lessons from a jazz player alway bringing dozens of record he’d then ask me to listen to for the following week…and I later taught myself the guitar, simply transcribing those black and white codes into case and frets language.. For better and for worse, I had the opportunity to become a member of many different bands, professional, semi pro or, simply playing with friends of mine in the attic (Gianni, ten more cents is what we need, right ? )

But nothing has ever given me more satisfaction (physically/ psychologically) than simply singing songs, improvising melodies, or strumming the guitar singing along chords patterns from the songs of others. 

These last decades, along with an involvement in meditation practice, I have discovered the power of another sort of music : freed from of its technical shell, of everything that is often ego-related (jazz improvisation skills, velocity, who we are touring with…). I now understand this as music unveiling its core : the beating heart of it, the one place we need to come back to once every other aspect might have lost us (as they have lost me, at times, for sure).

Today when I teach music to my children, I try to focus on the physical experience we have, as a being through which, sounds resonate… trying to sow the seed of eternal friendship in their field, to introduce them this life-long friend music has been to me.

I wish to deeply thank anyone reading this.



Franck Joseph – ©FJ Fev 2021 – All rights reserved.
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