Creativity - Nature or Nurture

Tess G Marshal on her blog http://networkedblogs.com/le0Lg  posted a question on the topic.  I posted in reply on her blog and it occurred to me that the reply also explained how I came to be studying music so late on in my life.  Here's my reply to Tess's question


Hi Tess


I think my life experience is like a science experiment on the topic you enquire about!  I'm 55 year of age and ever since I was a child I liked to sing and dance and if I could get anywhere near a piano I had to play it and try to make tunes.  Mrs Kennet, our elderly next door neighbour, had a piano.  I would go and keep her and her two cats company and in return for listening to her telling tales of her deceased husband's experiences of the 1st and 2nd world wars she'd let me play her piano.  I tried to the read the sheet music that was in the stool.  At home there was no money for singing or dancing so it was just part of everyday play.  My mum would sing at home and I'd try to join in.  I never thought of this as creativity or artistic or anything.  It was just like the air, part of life.  As I became adult and went about working, making a home and having a child there was still no time and money for lessons.  The lack of development always caused an underlying sadness and depression which I was barely conscious of.  In 2004 I discovered for the first time who my father was.  Turns out he was a black swing jazz musician from Barbados, (Dave Wilkins, trumpet), who came to the UK in the 1930s to play with the first black British swing bands such as the Ted Heath band and with Leslie Jiver Hutchinson.  Once I found this out I also found I had a brother in Montreal and a sister in Madrid.  Besides that I found the answer as to why the daily atmosphere of music was in me, why I could write songs and had a guitar at 14 (our the youth club loaned them out), why I sang and danced all the time at home.  I met my sister for the first time in 2004.  She has a guitar and plays it just like I do.  She had the ballet lessons and piano lessons, that I longed for, as a child.  Her daughter, like mine, studied music.  It was such a joy to sing with her!


All Dave Wilkins' siblings were musicians.  My cousin, who I met in 2009,  lives in Virginia is a poet, an author and a doctor of philosophy who sings the songs I love too!  His son is a guitarist.  My father's blood line has produced hundreds of musicians and creative people!


In the family I grew up with, no one was a musician - or so I thought.  But in fact, my mum had been a singer before she had me but had kept it all a secret because of the secret story of my father.


Now, at 55 years of age, I'm studying music at University, having started singing lessons at age 48.  It isn't always an easy experience because of course it's a bit lonely being an older woman studying with 99% young people, but it feels essential and I support any older women who take their creativity seriously enough to make time for it.  That's why I'm hosting a series of workshops in theatre improvisation and voice production this autumn in Cornwall for women over 40.  I want to devise/compose an Opera about older women's lives and for us older women to perform.


I hope it's ok to take so much time here writing about this but now I know about music being a hereditary factor for me I also know who and why I am.


With love to all.


Kim