Leon Mika

I’m on a roll with these, but I must warn you, this streak may end at any time. Anyway, todays question is from Hiro who asked it to Gabz, and discovered via Robb:

Hiro @hiro@social.lol

@gabz What’s the best music-related experience of your life so far?

2:40 PM • November 1, 2024 (UTC)

Despite attending only a hand-full of concerts in my life — live music is not really my jam — I’ve had some pretty wonderful music-related experiences in my life, both through listing to it or by performing it. Probably my most memorial experience was playing in the pit orchestra for our Year 10 production of Pippin. This was during the last few weeks before the show opened and we attended a music camp for a weekend to do full day rehearsals with the music director. The director had a reputation of being a bit of a hard man, prone to getting a bit angry, and not afraid to raise his voice. It was intimidating to me at the time, but in hindsight I can appreciate that he was trying to get the best from us. And with us being a group of teenage boys who were prone to loosing focus, I think we were deserving of his wrath.

One evening, we were rehearsing late, and the director was spending a lot of time going through some aspect of the music. I can’t remember what was being discussed but it was one of those times where everyone was tired, yet each knew what they were meant to be doing and was still happy to be working. You feel something special during those moments, when the group was doing their best, not out of coercion but because we were trying to “get the work done”.

Probably a very close second was discovering Mike Oldfield for the first time. This was probably when I was 11 or 12, and I wasn’t a bit music listener back then (I mean, we did have a home stereo but I wasn’t listening to a walkman or anything like that). Dad was working one night and I came up to him. He then started playing track 1 of Tubular Bells II, thinking that I would appreciate it. I was more intrigued at first, as it wasn’t the type of music I was use to at the time: long, instrumental pieces. Yet I found it to be decent, and something I could see myself liking the future¹. He then played track 7, and I was absolutely hooked after that.