My grandparents grew up in Santo Estêvão, an island village in Goa. which was part of Portuguese India. During their adulthood, Goa was annexed by India. When they moved out of Goa to Mumbai, they brought Goan culture, cuisine, language, and parts of their family with them. My gradfather, Cyrilo de Jerusalem Gomes, was an amateur violinist and accordionist. He played the violin like it was singing a song, and danced with it too. His favourite piece was Ave Maria, which he would play for his wife, Maria. My mum and her siblings grew up learning the violin and piano. I could only imagine what it would sound like:
To me, Ave Maria sounds like a summer evening at my grandparent’s house as a child. I’m a sucker for a melody. In my early teens, I started learning the violin so that I could hang out with papa. However, I was so bad that all he did was correct my technique. Of course I was bad – it was impossible to find a violin teacher in Pune, where we lived, and papa was too far to correct me often enough to get better. I went through way too many violin teachers! The most notable being a very expensive guy with long hair, a seminarian who refused to let me learn anything that was not classical, an Indian-style violinist who would make me sit cross-legged and stick the head of the violin into my ankle, and even one guitarist who actually had no idea how to play the violin! Despite the chaos, I learned a few pieces including Ave Maria, and played with a metal band. Papa, however, met with an accident and started fading out. I remember this one time, after he had already lost the ability to speak coherently, I played Ave Maria for him and saw tears in his eyes. Or maybe I just wished for this memory enough to believe that it happened. Who knows? Who cares?
I was an audiophile and a groupie. One of my best friends from high school even continued to become a professional musician with As We Keep Searching. When papa died, I was given his violin. If ever my home is about to be destroyed, I would save the violin (and the living things). Anything else can be left behind.
After we immigrated to Canada, I decided to teach myself using the Suzuki Violin Method. To give myself a constant source of external motivation, I joined the St Francis Xavier Church’s youth choir and began performing at church masses. I progressed so fast because I had time to practice, did what I wanted, and had a perfect distraction from the boredom of attending mass. It lasted about 9 months before I moved to Ottawa to pursue a B.Eng. In Ottawa, I tried to continue playing the violin but my studies kept me busy and I slowly lost touch.
In 2015, I moved to Montreal for an M.Eng. and Ph.D. It was through graduate school that I met my two favourite music teachers, Noemy Gagnon Lafrenais for the violin, and Juan Sebastian Delgado for the cello. It was then that I realized that my favourite instrument is actually the cello because it matches my vocal range so much better. Plus, don’t they look so beautiful together?
Playing the cello helped me learn how to hum, which got me interested in singing again (again = in school, I was actually part of the school choir but lost my vocal control when I hit puberty and my voice cracked). The human voice is the most rich, personal, and yet accessible musical instrument! I just needed to learn how to use it properly again as an adult. During my MEng, to give myself a source of external motivation, I became a founding member of a recreational acapella group for graduate students at McGill. We lasted for a year after which most of the group graduated. So, Klaudia and myself decided to start our own group. Our group kept singing over the next 3 years, as it was succeeded by Chloé and then Catherine, until Covid-19 bowled us over. We created many memories and were even featured in the McGill Tribune! No prizes for guessing whom Leora was referring to (in the feature) when she said that “someone invited [the whole group] to his birthday party” 😉
I would love to sing and play the violin/cello again. If you enjoy the style of the songs in the playlists below, let’s jam!