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As a creative writer as well as a musician, over the last year I'm pleased to announce the completion of a major piece of Creative Life Writing about living and studying music in the German city of Wuppertal from 2002-2005 where I first learned to really play piano late at 23-25 years old. In my native UK it's widely accepted that you need to really be a childhood prodigy at anything to stand a chance of learning it and having been a late flowering pianist, I strongly disagree with that philosophy.
I feel that learning an instrument or voice has everything to do with a Germanic dedication or call it European of some kind Dutch or Eastern European. I'm calling it European or Germanic in the US sense as well because a lot of US academic culture and musical culture is more heavily influenced by a German sense of dedication to one's art rather than being able to leap out of the womb doing it. One of the nicest things about studying and learning in Europe is that it was so academically free. If you had problems with your girlfriend for example you didn't need to stay at college you could do pretty much as you liked in a way you can't in the UK because studying is a privilege and a boot camp and not a right in most places but the elite unis. You are under an obligation to pass not just use the networking at uni to get a job. It's a lot less free in that way you really aren't respected unless you get that coveted 2:1 and I feel for the European system as it was in my day because it made me a better academic than just passing in one subject. It gave me a much broader cultural base and share of the cake or quattro stangioni. I started off in Kassel as a guest student studying in a Hanseatic history and art seminar and singing in the Chor der GhK.
I then studied at HfM Köln Standort Wuppertal for 2.5 years, I didn't like being a countertenor because I lost my woman for it; I hated my voice and smoked it to death drinking and partying every night of the weekend in U-Club, Kitchen Club and Buhtan. I grew a love of politics from my flatmate Axel Böhnisch travelling on the slow trains to Berlin through the night to my first demo on a Schönes Wochenende Ticket with 4 mates for 15 euros return sleeping rough on Minden station for 4 hrs on the way. We just did no work in our flat at all we were hip 1960s and tune in drop out.
I moved to Cologne University later. I always wanted to got to a uni as well as a music college, uni is more anonymous you can be yourself more and it's no goldfish bowl but the standard of performance with the exception of the Wise Guys a capella band can be lower. I wanted to go there to study musicology and composition rather than performance pure and my ex there was a linguist and I got well into my languages studying the Early German masterpieces that became the subject of Wagnerian Opera in some detail sometimes in original language. Tristan, Parsifal, Gregorious and one lecture on the battle between the Franks and the Saxons in Das Nieblunglied. All this German culture became part of me and now it's not allowed to be really. I even became a Bursch having been on the hard left at first and that was the most fascinating thing of all to live like my heroes Schumann and Brahms and feel the pain of having similar relationships and the joy of Kneipe and Komers Zipfeltasusch and Bierjung. It's all pert of me and that's not part of Brexit. I'm not allowed to express my German side any more they don't like it. People don't often see me that way because they are under the misconception that an expelled masonic heritage isn't as german as having a German wife, but I strongly disagree. Brexit is pain to me. the same people bullied me at school and that's why I relished being German and Eastern European even dare I say it anti British to a certain extent as 90% of my friends plus were EU mostly German or at least pro German and German speaking, and US and Canadian citizens.
My ex was born a Russian German citizen studied in Holland and the West. I was English and studied in Kassel Wuppertal and Cologne and I was even a Berliner when I was 18 months old until I was 4 a citizen of Freistadt West Berlin, so I'm very pro Ossi. I'm not your average Cleggite like his name sake parachuted into a city as a student in which it cost 52 euros for a beard trim and a haircut of immense privilege never having lived in Wuppertal Sudstadt or Kassel Nordstadt in the Ghetto with all the other migrants before working my way up into elite status as a Colognish Bursch like me. They never saw the full spectrum of European society from top to toe that's why I don't like the dictating who's culturally European with the Brexiteers and who isn't. I'm never seen as European despite having been a personal friend of the Adenauers it's founding fathers at one stage. That's pure evil to suggest that means nothing to me and that European Classical music means nothing to me it does and it always will do. I'm telling Farage where to stick his gin! So this is me playing a Sonata by someone with a Germanic name just to be rebellious. He might be Austrian. What am I supposed to say I JUST LOVE MUSIC.....I'll leave the rest out.
article posted by:Hugh Waldock, Waldock, Hugh