Today I have a little story for you. A true story.
Once there was a woman named Anselma, who was a very regular person, wife and friend.
She loved music.
And she loved people.
She did not like that in our society there was strife, disagreement and a destructive competition. She experienced that all of these were non-existent when people came together to make beautiful art, to play music together.
All the differences in personal attitudes seemed to be of no interest when humans gave their best to create audible harmony on the highest level.
So she dedicated her life to exactly this wondrous thing: music. On the highest level that was possible for her.
One day she was asked if she wanted to teach the bassoon in a city in Germany where she held a position in a professional orchestra. She was not sure if she would be the right fit for this position, but she gave it a try.
She quickly noticed: her young students did not like the literature for beginners that was available at that time. She struggled finding user friendly bassoon music.
Years passed, she moved to another orchestra, in another country, in another city. And she was asked again to follow a teaching career. And again she was not sure if this would be compatible with following her passion. Which was to experience that personal differences vanish when humans give their best creating beautiful music.
On the second day of her teaching in this new school she made a decision:
– she could do the bare minimum as a teacher.
And see this as a side gig of no special interest. Or
– she could give her all and see this as another chance to actively make this world a better place, with more happy children, less strife, less disagreement and less destructive competition.
She decided to make her teaching about creating culture.
To take this opportunity as a means to express her love for music and for people in a new way.
To accomplish this, she noticed a need for different musical pieces for her students age 4 to 25. She had not studied composition, she did not have any financial reserves or connections to people who would support her as a sponsor or artist.
But she knew she had lots of creativity and a love for music and people.
She noticed when she thought of a student and focused on their next learning step she would have music appear in her head. She started writing these pieces down.
And for she had quite many students with quite many challenges, hundreds of musical pieces popped out of her head over the years, that she all diligently wrote down.
When she showed these musical notes to her colleagues they wanted copies of this work. She gave hundreds of copies to peers for free as a gift. She noticed the work she had done very quietly and privately behind the scenes did have value for others.
To widen the range of people she could reach, she established a music publishing on September 1st, in 2009. With self taught expertise only. This was exactly 15 years ago.
People were laughing at her walking this path. She got ridicule from family and friends and one bassoonist called her to solely tell her how bad an idea this whole thing was.
Still she knew: children, bassoonists and people with an open heart loved this music, so she kept going.
Only three years later she qualified for the prestigious Business Export Grant from the European Union to represent European Culture abroad and the International Double Reed Society (IDRS) introduced her sheet-music books to a worldwide audience by featuring them under the fitting titel “The Return of User Friendly Bassoon Tunes”.
Many of the people who were customers came to be dear friends. These bonds grew so strong that she thought of other ways to contribute to the happiness of these lovely people. So she started writing encouraging columns every month, that turned out to be read a lot – despite the noise of the world growing louder and louder and despite people saying: reading is dead. Well, it’s not.
Today her work is inspiring not only musicians who give their best to create audible harmony. She also reaches teachers, parents, grandparents, music lovers, musical amateurs and pros of all walks of life. Which makes her very proud.
A very exceptional journey for such a regular woman! She did not expect that.
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I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Your presence here, your support of this work makes all of this possible. Thank you for sharing these newsletters so widely with your world and for playing this music with so much love and engagement.
I feel that the dream I set out for did come to life, my heart sings in joy about this unexpected journey – and I am excited to see what the future of Anselma Music Publishing will bring. We keep doing this work with the same dedication as always and I promise we never lose sight of what brought us to this level of success, which is love for music and love for people.
Thank you for being here,
thank you for being so awesome,
Anselma
