How I decided to play the cello
To you, dear reader, this story might sound a bit unusual. But to me, it is nothing more than a fond memory of an afternoon in the pub, aged 8, maybe 9.
Years before, when I was a mere 5 years old, my mother, who was a professional violinist, gave me my first violin. If I say that I fell in love with the instrument immediately and dreamt of nothing else but making music, I would be lying. I was mostly interested in playing outside with the other children from the street.
So after 3 weeks of the odd screech and scratch, I held the instrument up to my mom and said: “Moeke, nie mooi.” which roughly translates into: Mommy, not pretty. It was too high, the sound, and too loud. Violin was not for me.
Graciously, my mother did not force me to continue and left me to plunk the piano whenever I felt like it. There was enough music in our lives in any case. I remember that in those days my parents were in a divorce soon after my violin playing (no correlation, I hope) - and that my brother and I joined our mom on a six-week opera tour of Bizet’s Carmen. In fact, classical music was all around, almost all the time. I would usually wake up to my mother practising scales on the violin, we often hung around at rehearsals and concerts, always had the Flemish classical music radio on and we would not need to expect any presents from Santa or Sinterklaas if we did not sing songs for the good old jolly holy man. Plinketiplonk and singalisong until…
One particular Sunday, it must have been a Summer day and after an operette performance, some of the musicians gathered in a local pub for a few drinks. My brother and I were there too and one of them - Herman - ordered us some of that beautifully and chemically orange lemonade which we would never get at home. He explained to us how to play pool and also let us have a go on the pinball machine, which coincidentally also was a gambling machine and even won us a couple of hundred Belgian franks in doing so. We had a good time together.
On the way home in the car I told my mom that I wanted to play what he played.
-Who? she asked.
Herman. I said.
-Cello? she wondered out loud.
I guess. I don’t know.
And I didn’t know. I had never realised what a cello was until we went to the music school where he taught and I was guided into the instrument storage room where I could choose my first cello.
I remember it as a an impressive room with loads of instruments, big and small. I chose the shiniest one, had my first lesson, and here I am now - 34 years later - writing down this memory as I am about to publish my very first and very own website about me, Brendan Jan Walsh, the artist.
Through this channel, I hope to share many more stories with you. I hope you will enjoy this journey with me, sometimes into the past, sometimes into the future or just simply in the here and now with thoughts about the world we live in.
I hope we will spend many hours together and that we may learn from each other. Our time on this earth is limited. Let’s do all we can to enjoy it. May Herman’s kindness in letting two kids of divorcing parents enjoy an afternoon with games and lemonade, be an approach we can all learn from. Ultimately, it led me to a professional career on stage. And beyond. But more about that later on.
Let us be kind, let us listen, let us play.
Yours truly,
Brendan
