The music of our lives

Not being savvy with technology, it has taken me quite some time to eventually catch up and get reacquainted with some of the things I really love, like music, in what is to me the entirely new world of cyberspace. For instance, it was only fairly recently that my wife succeeded in making me try out Spotify, a giant leap I had no regrets taking. Through Spotify I was able to compile almost all of the music that meant anything to me.

Years ago, I used to brag that I had probably one of the most extensive collections of Sixties music outside of radio stations, plus a smattering of peripheral samples from the Fifties and Seventies. My taste for music was nailed to that era and has not moved ever in whatever direction. But to my great misfortune, that collection was almost entirely on cassette tape, which over time simply gave in to ruin.

I tried to recover and reconstruct the collection with CDs, but even these too were overtaken by technology and even music stores folded up eventually. Then came downloadable music, but even that was too spooky for low-tech me. By spooky I also mean literally, like when the estate of a late rock n' roller emailed me that I had illegally downloaded one of his songs. I was so panicked I deleted my entire music file.

My friends laughed, saying I could just have deleted that one offending file. But how was I to know that? Anyway, I have Spotify now for a monthly fee. Not only was I able to reconstruct my collection, I was also able to find and add so many other songs I never had. My music is now spread over several dozen playlists compiled under the name JSTundag, in case you may want to snoop in out of curiosity.

My aversion to technology has not hampered me in my searches for music I have come to like but which I have heard only once or twice in the long ago past. I have a wife who seems to know her way around this new technology and she does the searching for me. The beauty of the Internet is that you only have to remember a line or two of the lyrics and more often than not the song comes up for me to get from Spotify.

The problem with people like me who grew up in the Sixties was that we got to know music only through radio, whose fare we cannot choose, and for which requesting was considered sissy. That the only money we had was our school allowance meant buying records ( vinyl ) was out of the question. To listen then to the music we loved, we had to sing the songs ourselves. A " song hits " booklet was as part of student life as books.

But I was never good at singing. I was never meant to sing. I think it was in Grade Four at Colegio del Santo Nino that we were asked to apply for the glee club. The music director was a priest. Priests at CSN at the time were still mostly Spaniards. At the piano, he asked each one of us to sing do-re-mi. My turn came and I belted out the notes. The priest screamed: Get out, get out? I was the only one who did not make it, I think.

But whether to sing it or just to listen to it, music has to be one of the greatest gifts God has given man. It helps differentiate us from animals. Birds may sing but do not know it nor understand why. That we do tells us we are special among all creation. Life is one big musical production. We star in it, we direct it. We make the happy songs as well as the sad. But whatever music we make, how it ends is always a story. Ours.

I have forgotten this long poem by Wallace Stevens but I remember these lines from it: " She was the single artificer of the world in which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, as we beheld her striding there alone, knew that there never was a world for her, except the one in which she sang, and singing made. "