Why do I make music?

By Christophe Gervot, December 8, 2019.

At the age of 5, because my sister had started following lessons from this lady, who was playing the organ of the village church, I started to "play", that is to say press any key, on a harmonium’s keyboard, that she had at her home and used to teach with. I was just accompanying my mother who was driving there my sister, and of course I was listening. The whole family went to mass once a week, and my mom sang quite well. Later, and again in 2019, she sang at religious celebrations, and sang in several choirs. Her beautiful voice and his taste for singing made us at home, we were steeped in the music to learn it . In our childhood, on TV, we only had the right to the variety shows of French Television, at the time when it was fully public. The Radio was there too, but in "long waves". Not many records.

Later, my sister changed from that teacher to another one, first time, and really started learning the piano, in a small town nearby. Then a second time when this lady retired.

When I was 8, I asked why I didn't learn the piano. In fact, I had started to work alone at home on the electronic organ that my sister used, from the same methods. As my parents said yes to my request, I started to learn.

I was studying classical piano, with a very talented teacher. Later, our parents bought us a straight piano, a Toyo, which I still use because it was given to me. These studies took 12 years, filled with auditions at my teacher's home, then on a stage, an old cinema of patronage, and national competitions, spent in Nantes, at the auditorium of the Regional Music Conservatory, or in a piano store. We worked on our scores for almost a year. If I'm not wrong, the jury, often composed, over the years, of known people, appreciated, when I had a good mention, my manner of playing (I liked to slur the notes) and my expressive nuances. Claude Debussy was my favorite composer.

When my teacher suggested me to take lessons from another teacher, known on the Côte d’Amour, with whom studied the most demanding pianists of Loire-Atlantique, I refused because I was aware of the financial sacrifice my parents already had and that would have increased again. And then I didn't think I'd career in music. My high school studies were going well. When I studdied in post baccalaureate studies, first in a school of applied arts and then in a faculty of modern languages, in cities of Western France, I had no longer any piano to practice. So I wanted to give up my piano studies.

During one of the last lessons I took, I said, laughing to my teacher (quite surprised of this choice), that I was buying scores by Serge Gainsbourg and that I was working on them alone.

My life made that I worked for a long time thanks to my studies of modern languages, and I started, and finished, a psychoanalysis. In the last years of this one, curious again of various musical genres, I said I would like to make music aagin and maybe computer-assisted one. When I really started composition, based on improvisations, and it was a kind of surprise to myself, I thought that the analysis may have ended with an inhibitory and revived the desire I had, as a child to compose.

Musician on social networks since the end of 2018, and now professionally, I regularly deliver here and on Youtube my compositions, available for streaming and download.

I walked away from classical music, making jazz music, a little, but not from contemporary music, and all the years I didn't practice music were not free from it, since I've never stopped listening to it, a lot, and always with curiosity.

Christophe Gervot, musician, writer, concept artist, psychoanalyst, translator and trainer.