Welcome to the Donna Williams' Music Page
Donna's CD's are available to purchase via CDBaby and iTunes.
I certainly always loved music and was exposed from very early on to lots of music, classical, blues, 'rock and roll'.
I didn't 'think', or at least I didn't experience 'thoughts'. I didn't have images in my mind and nothing made any because language didn't connect with meaning and the only things I saw I saw through my eyes, in pieces and uncohesively, or through my hands where I experienced things as a whole.
Instead of thoughts I had a brain like a tape recorder. My 'mind' played music around and around all the time, like even if music wasn't going in the outside world I'd be tuned into to replays in my head and the were so like the real thing I really didn't notice or care where they were coming from. Sure, I also had a head full of jingles and TV advertisements.... bet the multinational corporations would be glad to hear that these days... and people's strings of blah spinning about meaningless... but it was the music that held the beauty and I had no thoughts to distract me from it.
I had impulses, silent tugs at my gut that drew me toward certain things or made me freeze in the face of others and when the music played in my head I danced with air currents all around me, probably looking pretty 'psychotic' and loony but tell that to a belly dancer who does pretty similar except that we can hear what they are listening to and we pay them.
The impulses made me play music on the air with my fingers waggling them about and it wasn't until I was in my teens and first sat at a piano and played automatically that I realised those fingers had been playing the musical intervals of the music in my head. But once I'd moved from the pitch of gravel and beaded curtains to piano keys my brain soon stopped doing only other people's music and it was creating, improvising new musical combinations and all I had to do to hear them outside instead of inside my head was to let them out through my fingers, and that's how I came to compose.
I composed my first piece of music the moment I played it at the age of 14. I was so terrified of this experience of externalised passionate personal individual self expression I didn't play again till I was 19. By the age of 22 I had around 50 compositions and had taught myself through a self made system of dots and dashes, letter names for keys and arrows to say if they went up or down, to write my music out in a way it wouldn't later get morphed into a new composition. Soon I taught myself to read music (badly) and through that learned more or less how to write music on a stave. The compositions continued to create themselves and I was their slave, taking their dictation, leaving my body open to express them through my fingers just as I had simultaneously learned to allow writing out.
If hearing my own music outside myself was a daunting experience hearing myself sing in my own voice was just as hard. I'm certainly good at doing other people's voices; that causes no Exposure Anxiety. I can do a reasonable Elvis impression with a great deep voice, mimic people Streisand's polished style and even do a gravelly Louis Armstrong but singing as me meant the jolt of my own very real existence coming back in my ears and knowing, emotionally, that others could hear or react to that... that took a long time to chill out about that idea. I'd have rather sung as a cat than as a human being but most people are pretty happy I didn't.
Music taught me that who was in there was deeper, more passionate, sometimes quite humorous and often very different to the person I ever got to see in my waking interacting life. Through music I learned of my anger, my intelligence, my compassion and relatedness. It was a great teacher. Sometime we have so much in our Unknown Knowing but the key to allowing it out is different for each person. Music was one of those keys and sometimes it is because we make it and sometimes because we hear it. I am grateful to the existence of music and musicians who gave me a love of music and this an important mutual connection with others and an important voice.
So welcome to my music page, feel free to visit my two albums; Nobody Nowhere and Mutation where you can hear samples of tracks and, if you are moved to do so, even buy the CD's.