Christmas Trees and Music Practice
Winter came late to Paris this year. When I caught up with some Australian friends who were recently in Paris, they were hoping that there just might be some snow in Strasbourg, where they were to spend Christmas. I think they knew it was wishful thinking on their part, as the weather leading up to Christmas was decidedly mild. They’ve now left France; however this week, the second week of January, a cold front from the Arctic is providing the type of weather they were wishing for. With temperatures hovering around zero, everyone is out and about in gloves and scarf for the first time in a long time. Today, going for my run, there was even a dusting of snow about—I haven't seen snow in Paris since 2018, when it really snowed.
While the first fall of snow puts a spring into the step of even the most nonchalant Parisian, the novelty of such weather is generally better appreciated from inside. It can take a bit of motivating to leave the warm cocoon of one’s apartment, knowing that the winter chill outside that awaits. There is a heater in our building’s stairwell, just before the main entrance; it's a “crossover point”: the radiator’s halo of warmth comes into contact with the icy air entering through the cracks in the door to the outside courtyard. At the bottom of the stairs this morning, I lingered there, inventing stretches, checking my agenda for the coming day—whatever it took to avoid starting what I was there to do. But, as my father always says, the hardest part of any job is getting started; delaying the inevitable, no matter how well-founded our reasoning may seem in doing so, is counterproductive. Once I’d left the apartment, I didn’t regret doing so. (The only regret I had was that it took me so long to get going.)
Learning and practising a musical instrument is a little like this. There's a certain resistance to getting started. A lot of other things offer less resistance, and we can easily cite convincing reasons why we should follow other courses of action first, before attending to our music practice. More on this in next week’s edition.
Effort in will always provide something in return
With Christmas now behind us, the council have set up Christmas tree deposit sites in the local parks. My local drop-off spot is in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont— a beautiful place where I like to jog.
Every couple of days, when the drop-off points are overflowing with trees, the park gardeners process them into beautiful smelling Christmas tree mulch (honestly, I wish it could be bottled into a room fragrance).
The mulch will be used around the park. The gardeners work tirelessly throughout the year, planting different gardens with the seasons for people to enjoy. It's important that the parks here have such great gardens, since many Parisians are otherwise limited to flower pots on the windowsill.
Our Christmas tree had seen better days, having been in our apartment for the best part of a month. It was turning brown, and there were pine needles all over the floor. So a couple of day’s ago, my brother and I took it to the Buttes Chamount. It’s always sad when it comes time to strip the tree of its decorations and drag it unceremoniously to the drop-off point. And, considering what was required for it to grow to its height, it’s easy to become despondent that all that effort was made for such a brief moment to shine. But something given in one area will often bear fruit in another.
The same is true learning a musical instrument. We’ll put in a lot of effort into learning a particular piece, only to perform it once or twice (if we’re lucky), before moving on to something else. When I was in high school, I really wanted to learn John Dowland’s Fantasia No.7, a beautiful piece for lute that guitarists have appropriated. I’d first heard it when I was a young child—on a John Williams album that my father had on cassette tape. I used to listen to that album all the time. Years later, in high school, I started taking classical guitar lessons. I bought the piece to my teacher, about three years into my lessons with him. He rightly judged it too difficult for me, but I wouldn’t have any of it. I had to learn it. After a few weeks of me berating him, he agreed to take me through it. Several months late, after much practice, I was in a position where I could muddle my way through it.
While I certainly never got to the stage where it was at performance level, I learnt a great deal from that initial encounter with Fantasia no. 7. Other pieces came more easily to me afterward; the experience of learning it seemed to take my playing to the next level (even if that level was still insufficient to really play Fantasia no.7). Even my teacher remarked how it had been a catalyst for progress.
The gardens of the Buttes Chaumont are now in fallow. However, with the coming of spring a few months from now, it will once again be awash with colour and life. And it will be nice to think that my Christmas tree is a part of it.
