The Titanic’s Orchestra
My mom told me that she used to put classical music near her pregnant belly when I had not even stepped into the Earth. Much later, after eight years of singing and dancing to childish songs that for us kids seemed amazing, I made the random decision of learning to play some instrument. Piano looked pretty cool. However, I got a sad five in the entry exam and I had to choose the oboe. What the hell was that? Well, the only thing I knew about it was that it was represented by a duck in Peter and the Wolf and that it literally sounded like a duck when I played it for the first time. It took years to make that instrument sound decent, but that was what the Conservatory was for.
The first one where I studied was literally placed in a Primary school building with no means to minimize noise. The second one was a modern infrastructure that was considered to have “the best artistic facilities in Andalusia,” but whose lack of public funding created a debt of 54,000 euros in water and electricity. Not to mention the endless problems to reconcile high school timetables with those music studies that occupied at least twelve hours a week.
But it’s okay. I continued going on because I was passionate about what I was doing. People around me never understood what kind of charm I found in wasting my time and money in learning such a weird instrument. However, I met wonderful people and I had a lot of fun. I enjoyed so much I did not even notice the impact. When I was eleven, we played a bit out-of-tune version of The Godfather soundtrack in my small band. It was years later when I watched the film, remembered my childhood and wondered something as simple as: “Could we seriously imagine The Godfather without the soundtrack?”
Plato said that “music gives a soul to the universe” and maybe that is exactly what the soundtrack gives to the movie. My oboe was not a duck anymore; it was a life partner. Maybe we should all realize that music is all of us’ life partner even when we do not see it, and that we need it without noticing. January 1 needs its New Year’s Concert, countries need their national anthems and Liverpool needs The Beatles as well as the Titanic passengers needed those eight musicians playing until the end. But to have all that, first we need a musician. And to have a musician, we need a society that literally invests in music. A society that believes in the importance of music.
Presidents, deputies, mayors, councillors, do not forget about music in 2018. Fill the streets with culture. Give the people something to live for. Let’s create a society that teaches music at the same level as Maths or Geography. Let’s not regret it in the future.
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