Old Music and Donations

Currently, I'm working through listing my late-Grandmother's piano music; and believe me, there's a lot of it!  So, this week, I split the whole lot into three piles.  There's the 5-page sheet music, the Songbooks (these are larger ones that have more than three songs in them and are written by a variety of songwriters) and then the single-sheet music; which is very fragile and hard to handle.

Once that was done, I used two of Grandpa's briefcases to store them all in and called the Queensland Archives.  They advised me that they only collated and collected Government papers; and not what I've got.  But they suggested the Queensland State Library would be most interested in my collection of old music.

So, I called up the QSL and they jumped at me donating the lot to them.  However, they needed a list of it all.  And I'm in the process of doing just that.  I'm writing out the titles, authors and song-writers.  It's not a hard thing; but it's an exhausting exercise.  

But I do find it a great pity that elderly people who have passed away leave their music, records and belongings to their relatives only to have them either sold off, given away or thrown out.  Seeing I've seen the worth in this music, I'm only too happy to give it to the right people who will care for it not only after my Grandmother had passed on, but also when I'm not here as well.  It's only right.

You see, I inherited Grandma's piano and all the show tunes that went with it.  However, I don't wish to learn those; that was Grandma's thing.  They were lovely and a great memory of my Grandma.  What I want to do is play jazz and blues on the piano.  I wish to learn improv and be able to sit at any piano and just play anything that comes into my head wherever I am; or jam with anyone who's playing a guitar or a saxophone if I feel like it.  

To me, the joy of music is not only written down in the old songbooks and sheet music, but it's also running through our veins when we're brought up around it.  Even though I never played it when I was young, I always envied people who could improvise and play jazz as I'm a classically trained flautist; I was never trained - or taught - improvisation.  My teacher taught me to read what was in front of me; and that was it.  Nor was I taught that much theory either.  So, learning the piano and it's theory is something I've had to look up myself and find on the net; and it's been a lot of fun and very challenging.

And if it weren't for people like myself and others donating music to the State Libraries around our countries, we wouldn't have such a great historical archive of them to look at and play and remember what the good old days were like.