My very first musical memory remains as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. I was around three or four years old, before kindergarten, and I know this with certainty because I remember that phase of my life clearly. This was not merely my first memory of music. It was my musical enlightenment.
One night I could not sleep. Restlessness pulled me out of bed, that peculiar, nameless unease only a child knows. I went to my parents’ bedroom, expecting safety, but the room was empty. We lived in an old former farmhouse, a place full of creaking wood, shadows, and echoes. Uneasy now, I made my way down the narrow, steep wooden staircase toward the kitchen. Those stairs haunted my childhood dreams. I often had nightmares of falling down them. The kitchen, too, was empty.
Fear began to rise. My parents were not home.
I walked further, toward the living room. It was completely dark, no lights on at all. The fear sharpened. Then I heard something. A sound. Faint at first, but unmistakable. Music.
Slowly, cautiously, I moved closer. With every step, the sound grew fuller, warmer. I noticed a soft glow ahead, not electric light, but something gentle, flickering, like candlelight. When I finally reached the entrance of the living room, the scene unfolded before me.
A record was spinning on my father’s Technics stereo system, which I regarded as almost sacred. The large speakers filled the room with unfamiliar melodies, sounds I had never heard before. Candles were lit on the side table near the sofas, their light dancing across the walls. And there, between the sofas, lay my father on the carpeted floor, stretched out, utterly relaxed, either asleep or suspended in a state of deep calm.
I had clearly intruded on his well earned solitude. His private ritual. Music, stillness, no disturbance. A pure state of inner peace.
He sat up as soon as he noticed me. I immediately began speaking, fast and anxious. I could not sleep. Where was mum. Why was no one there. My words tumbled over one another. He gently interrupted me and told me to calm down, to relax, and to sit down on the carpet with him.
I sat down, though relaxation was impossible for me. I was a typical child of that age, tense, alert, unable to let go.
His response was simple and decisive. He said, just listen to me. I will show you how to relax.
He reached for a vinyl album cover and showed it to me. On the cover was the Earth as a globe, but its surface looked like skin torn away in places, revealing a human skull beneath. It was unsettling, even frightening, especially to a child. He explained what we were about to do together. That we were going to learn how to relax. How to let go.
Then he told me about the album behind the strange and slightly terrifying artwork. Oxygène by Jean Michel Jarre.
He explained the difference between music and magic. That some music is not meant only to be heard. That there is music you can feel. Music that can carry you into a state of complete inner peace.
All I had to do, he said, was find a comfortable position. Breathe very deeply and very slowly. Close my eyes. Try not to think of anything. Focus entirely on the sound. Let the music wrap itself around me. Breathe the music in. Open my ears and listen. Just listen.
And I did.
The first moment I became aware of the outside world again was almost twenty minutes later, when the record ended and had to be turned over to play side B. I had been somewhere else entirely. And what mattered most was that I was able, almost immediately, to return to that place again.
A place of complete and absolute inner peace.
