€3,045 raised
·12 donations
A very special present for Thom's 40th birthday
Donation protected
Dear friends and family of Thom!
It's Jeanne here, his wife. On August 31st this year Thom will celebrate his 40th birthday. To mark this, and against his wishes to make something big of it(!) I have decided to start this fundraiser for an extremely special and fitting present.
As many of you may know, Thom's first career was as a professional musician. He left music in 2011 to pursue a different career path, but around three years ago music started to call him once again. I asked him to write a little story about his relationship with music, his teachers, and the special guitar he recently had the opportunity to try. So here is Thom's story:
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As my 40th birthday approaches(!), I rather amazingly find myself in a whole new relationship with music and the process of learning and studying music. In some ways, it feels like coming full circle.
When I was around 15, I had an experience of collective music-making that was so powerful, so moving, and so mysteriously ungraspable that I knew I would embrace this art as a profession and a path.
15 years or so after this moment I found myself at a crossroad in life, and I think it's fair to say that I was in a place where much of the genuine "magic" of music-making was no longer present for me. Making a living in the music world felt increasingly transactional, commodified, and divorced from the intimacy and beauty of that formative experience as a teenager. It was around that point that I knew I had to stop and go in a different direction. I made a clear promise to myself (and in a way, to music itself) that I would not start again until I could experience music being in service of something truly valuable, something more akin to the ceremonial and ritual contexts in which collective music-making evolved as a communal activity to strengthen bonds between community members and as an expression of embeddedness in the more-than-human world.
It turned out that the time was three years ago when I found my first guitar teacher, Rainer Scheurenbrand, who had just released a new album of music for children. I had been listening to his extraordinary recordings for years and I reached out to him to ask if he would teach me guitar. He said yes! From that moment on, music came back to me - and I to it - and slowly I could sense a new relationship opening up. Playing began to weave joy and playfulness first into our family life at home with our children and then professionally in the groups that I worked with and the trainings I offered.
Arriving back into the present moment, there's something about the preciousness and value of music that I feel connected to more than ever before. If I had to put words to this, it is how music can bind us more intricately to each other, as well as offering a gateway to something that is beyond our day-to-day perceptions, something that I think most of us hunger for but so often lack access to in the busyness and clamour of the modern world.
A word about my teachers!
Around three years ago, I started studying with Rainer Scheurenbrand. As well as being a virtuosic musician, Rainer is a wonderful human with a poetic and image-based way of teaching that helped me worry less about details and more about the musical story being told. Last year Rainer moved to Colombia, and I moved to Berlin, now even more inspired and hungry to deepen my musicianship and understanding of technique, sound, and the healing capacity of music.
With an outrageous stroke of good luck, here in Berlin I found a second wonderful teacher, the guitarist and composer Prof. Frank Hill. Frank was the president of the European Classical Guitar Teacher's Association for thirteen years and has written several world-renowned books on guitar technique and musicianship. It turned out he lived just up the road and was willing (after a trial period!) to take on both me and my daughter Solia as students. Frank combines the sensitivity and creativity of a true artist with the precision of a scientist, and I feel extremely lucky to be learning from him.
So this is where I find myself again: practising my scales, putting in hours of patient struggle, but sensing the whole process differently...loving it more than ever. I'm coming home.
--
Jeanne here again :)
For the past three years Thom has been playing a factory-produced student model classical guitar. It's served him well. However, during a recent visit to Copenhagen, he had the opportunity to play a unique hand-built instrument by the English luthier Steve Toon, and it was unlike any guitar he had played before. It gave him a new sense of what is possible with sound, warmth, tone, and resonance. He said it was like the guitar was breathing with the music...
So, instead of getting more "things" for his birthday, I chose to organize this GoFundMe with the goal of being able to bring this beautiful instrument into our home, which I know would be the most meaningful 40th birthday present possible for him.
If you would like to contribute any amount, or share this further, it would mean a lot!
With love,
Jeanne
The amazing guitar!
The luthier Steve Toon
Rainer Scheurenbrand
Prof. Frank Hill
https://www.berlin.de/musikschule-friedrichshain-kreuzberg/studienvorbereitung/klassik/dozent-innen/lebenslauf.1058595.php
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Hill_(Komponist)
Donations
Organizer
Jeanne Wandel
Organizer
Wandlitz, Brandenburg