(Cath Coombs) Music and me- a quest for freedom. Part 1

Music has held for me the promise of freedom. Freedom to be myself, to transcend the tethers on my soul and fly. The pursuit of beauty and something great in musical form is something enthralling to live for, to believe in, and to strive for. It has been a spiritual quest for me, a hero’s journey, both inspiring and painful, sustaining and devastating. I have experienced music as both a blessing and a curse.

But over many years, have gradually come to realise that the pain has derived more from my relationship with music than from music itself or perhaps more accurately, it is my relationship with myself that has made it painful for me. My journey “through the woods” has been one of purifying that relationship and freeing myself from its darkness. It is a flame that has never gone out, and though I have sometimes wanted to give up, I haven’t and I never will.

When I was a little girl, my mother taught me the piano, which I loved. My father, however, jealous of the creative power I wielded, and needing to have complete control over me, violated my relationship with it, making music a dangerous activity and emotionally terrifying and shaming from then on. When I arrived at grammar school, I wanted to play the saxophone, but because there is no saxophone in an orchestra, and because there were three cellos in the music cupboard, cello it was. I was excited by the playing of Jacqueline Du Pre and Paul Tortelier nevertheless, and grew to love its sound. That I passed all my grades on the cello amazes me. I even got a few merits and distinctions. Background fear meant I was extremely tense in my body and the ‘flowing bow arm’ and secure tuning evaded me again and again. Practising was an excruciating battle with myself in which the disparity between the perfect, ideal sound in my mind’s ear and the noise I was making fed my self-hatred, anger and frustration all the more. This of course made for more rigidity and greater physical impossibility.

I failed all my music college auditions. My bow literally bounced across the strings – and not in a good way! The audition setting, unforgiving as it was, wasn’t conducive to playing at my best. I can still recall the exasperated, eye-rolling sigh of the auditioner at Cardiff Music College with “Lets start again shall we?”.

I have however always felt what a blessing it was not to get into music college. I was intimidated by the classical ethos which I perceived as “if you’re not the best, you’re rubbish” and by its emphasis on perfection. Had I been super cocky or even just confident, it may have brought out the best in me, but in my heightened self-critical state, it was just stifling. Instead, I went on to thoroughly enjoy a degree in philosophy and art which led me to Cambridge, Buddhism, and the wild, Bohemian world of Irish music…..