The Music's Always There With You

Lately I've rediscovered music in my life. She was an old friend that disappeared for quite awhile till we caught up - it seemed as if we lost no time at all.

It started when my parents (mainly mom) who'd put up with my sulking and put me through piano class at the age of 6. She used to pretend to be able to play a few notes on the piano and fool me into thinking she could (haha she's funny my mom)

I had a great teacher, Miss Diane GK Tan or 'Teacher' as I'd called her who tutored (ahem 'tortured') me all the way till I was 15. We still keep in touch and through her I even met up with an ex-piano classmate in London (whom I re-caught up with after 20 years). In school simultaneously, somehow I got appointed school pianist in the afternoon session and continued on my 'career' in the morning session in upper secondary school. Ask me to play the 'Negaraku', 'Malaysia Berjaya' and the CBN school song and I would mysteriously know how even if I haven't played it for 20 years. The fun times was with my best girl Angie who was leading the school choir at the time and we used to go through the drills of choir competitions. Then there was a short spell with Miss Diane Lee who tutored me through PC but because of the pressure of STPM, I stopped. I went off to uni and it was a long before I even had the desire to touch the piano again.



It was in the autumn in Umea and the cold, dark winter which led me to rediscover music again. The Swedish university I was in had excellent music facilities and it was not long before I found several good pianos to play on. It was a blessing that I was placed in a host programme where my mentor (Lorentz Edberg) was a music teacher at the school. I also had a 'sister' student in Valeria Graffeo, an Italian exchange student who was just as crazy and brilliant in music as Lorentz was.



I also spent an amazing winter/spring semester in the 'Skapande musik'(i.e. Creative Music) course with a group of normal, unassuming Swedish (and a couple of international) students.











Imagine coming to school every day just to play and make music with people who loved exactly that - it was decadent, it was hedonistic and it was too good to be true. Mostly I was impressed with the level of talent they had here - Swedes really do know how to get creative. To allow you to get a taste of how versatile these people are, please see some of their personal pages:

(all genuine music)

Malin Ernestad
Buns and Beans
Kapten Kid
Mates of Mine

And thanks to my fellow course mates, I have discovered the joy of music creation. 100% inspiration and almost all playing by ear - although I knew the chords and the notes, I discovered that one didn't necessarily need theory to create music. It was a new way of learning music which all my years of classical training didn't prepare me for. Now I can truly appreciate music form - which was a result of the complement between inspiring my right brain to create music and my previous left-brained piano training.

The skapande musik programme output from the students can be found here here



London being such a cultural city; I'm happily distracted by all the musical and creative activity going on here. Thanks to G too (whom I work with and who has a blues band of his own), I now own a little keyboard to play on and am slowly picking up the guitar (guitar hero too :P)




So in a way, this post is dedicated to all the musicians in my life, past, present and future - thank you for the music!