Alive, Lighter, Floaty, But
The Gothenburg Tales
On an autumnal evening in September, I sat by the window. The window overlooked one of the two main streets in the building. The building is a historical one in Gothenburg for it was built by a privateer, licensed to rob other vessels of other countries in the sea and by the sea during Karl XII’s reign. Now it is a protected structure, a national monument. In the monument, the musicians gathered and their limited number of audience for it was in the midst of coronavirus pandemic.
The autumnal breeze wafted towards the window. The leaves on the trees by the building rustled. The music started to spring from the musicians as one by one took the centre stage by the defunct fireplace in the central room on the top floor of Gathenhielm’s House.
I am not a musician; I know very little of music, but I do listen to some music: classical and religious and anything when someone plays music of his or her choice ranging from musical high jinks to unnamed and from the top of the charts.
An Argentinian made the accordion sing, a Spaniard strummed the guitar, an Iranian made the tambour (and there is tambura, too) warble, a Czech brought clarinet to intone, a Swede played an accordion and sang a summer song, and an Indian made the tabla to dance.
The musicians and the ambience and the art on the walls and the autumnal late-evening weather made me feel lighter. Despite the floaty atmosphere, I wondered how these musicians earned their bread and butter out of their music for they were not renowned, for they were not celebrity types, for they were not seeking renown, for they were not on the top of the charts, for they were not aggressive on social media except sparsely supported by the State and encouraged by an artistic director or some such.
The notes of the accordion — piano with braces — stuck with me.
The ones with the ears for upper-class music say accordion is breathy, clownish, country, discordant, folksy, vulgar, and wheezy. But the ones with the ear for hearty music are always endeared to it for its unending joviality over triviality of note after note.
But the accordion’s music evoked in me a past, possibly the bucolic past, and the past of my forefathers, of that bygone era. I wondered whether my ancestors were accordionists or played some ancient instrument somewhere in between Asia and Europe.
I do not have access to my family tree, for I was adopted, picked up from an Italian nunnery after the Second World War. My adopted parents were dear to me, too dear to me, whose family tree had been traced and that didn’g expand beyond south of Gulf of Bothnia. They did try to locate my biological parents as I grew up in the lap of their love. All they could say to me was you’re the travellers’ progeny who had to handover you to the angels.
Feeling alive, lighter, and floaty, I wondered whether those traveller-parents travelled with a tambura or an ocarina or an accordion.
