Let me introduce myself. My name is Isabel Bradley. I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, far too many years ago, during the days when South Africa was still a Union, a colony of England. There have been changes: for bad, and more recently, for good.
Through all the bad and good years in South Africa, I have been privileged in the life that I’ve led.
As a child I was loved and pampered by musical parents. My earliest memories are of one or oth
er of my parents sitting at the piano to learn another song, another duet; or of Dad playing the flute. Dad was a baritone, Mum a soprano. They met as members of the Johannesburg Operatic and Dramatic Society, and spent their lives putting together musical evenings at home, concert parties to entertain at the many ‘old age homes’ around the city and ensuring that my brother and I both learnt to love music, laughter, and the English Language in all its many forms.
My brother, Roger, took piano lessons, and was soon good enough to accompany both Mum and Dad in their singing.
At the age of eight, I asked Dad to teach me to play the flute. The piece he played that I loved best was by an obscure composer, Paul Wetzger; a rippling bit of flute music called ‘Am Waldesbach’ (By a Stream in the Woods). It was years before I could play that piece, but it’s still part of my repertoire.
Sitting side by side with Dad on the old green couch, my first music lessons were on his ebony piccolo, that shrill, small version of the flute. My fingers were far too small to reach the keys on Dad’s silver Boosey and Hawkes hand-made flute!
Within a year my little fingers had grown just enough, and Dad bought me my own flute. I took lessons with the best teachers in Johannesburg: Mrs. Cecilia (Chippy) Yutar, who instilled in m
e a love for making music, then later Monsieur Lucien Grujon. They were my ‘fluting parents’.
Apart from my musical education, I spent twelve years at school learning all the usual things. My favourite subject at school was English. I passed all my school-leaving subjects adequately, but in English I received a distinction. Along with the distinction came a love of poetry, reading and writing. Any kind of writing.
After leaving school, I chose the path of the amateur musician, an ‘amateur’ being one who does something for the love of it. I took a secretarial course at a business college, and worked as a secretary for many years, while remaining a member of various amateur orchestras and chamber-music groups. When I found myself working mornings-only as a school secretary, I took on flute students after hours, teaching adults for at least twenty years.
I currently perform mainly as a soloist and as a member of the Rand Symphony Orchestra, http://www.randsymphony.co.za, and rarely teach. Writing and reading my own poetry as introductions or connections to the music I’m about to perform creates a special atmosphere and enjoyable and unusual programmes.
After the distractions of marriage, child-bearing, divorce, re-marriage and more child-bearing, came a time of relative peace in my life when I studied again, earning a flute teacher’s licentiate from Trinity College in London, and a diploma from The Writing School in South Africa. On a shelf, awaiting the effort of re-writing and finding a publisher, is my novel.
Until now, my written musings have appeared in the FLUFSA Newsletter (Flute Federation of South Africa), The Write Stuff, newsletter of the Johannesburg-based writing circle, Writers 2000, a short-story and poetry magazine called Gentle Reader, and in a now-dormant web magazine, Openwriting.com under my by-line, ‘Here Comes Treble’, http://www.openwriting.com/archives/here_comes_treble/. This post is adapted from my first posting in Openwriting.com.
I look forward to sharing the musings of a musician on many and varied subjects, as the fancy takes me over the next weeks, months, and perhaps even years! I hope you will enjoy my musical and other meanderings.