Alan Duff: Music - the passport to your inner self

Listening to Mahalia Jackson in full flight is an experience of profound joy. Photo / Getty Images

I'm listening to a selection of Chopin's piano nocturnes. A funny thing, music, where it sends you. For me it's like a celebration of a beautiful, fulfilling life lived. Not mine, someone else's. Spring's first flush of flowers. Yet it's dark too.

Not sad or inward-thinking dark. Just contemplative, with not necessarily any light. The present mixing with all those past memories, but something new being created in the mind, of one's understanding. Now I gush.

You wonder what a classical composer's thoughts are when he thinks of writing for the piano in this uniquely beautiful, lilting, uplifting way like Chopin. Just paying tribute, acknowledge true genius. A salute from the heart, the core of me, the gratitude of us all.

My paternal grandmother played classical piano; I don't know how good she was. Only that she had an obsession for Beethoven. She visited his grave in Vienna, Austria, and came back with a handful of soil. She wouldn't get past Customs these days. Her music was not lost in the fog of dementia, either.

I got released from borstal - that's a juvenile prison for those who don't know - in 1967, aged 16. An angry, lost 16. Yet what was my first record purchase? Some Beethoven's piano sonatas played by Daniel Barenboim.

In standard 4 - Year 6 - I used to protect a classmate from bullies in exchange for listening to him practise classical piano at his house. I don't think many of my peers knew. There was a small forest up the road from our street where the neighbourhood kids played. It was Robin Hood, cowboys and Indians, with bows and arrows and exciting hiding places.

There was also a big old two-storey house sited on the small hill with its little English forest surround, from which we could hear piano notes lilting and floating in the air. I was drawn. Don't ask me why. In our little state house Dad had jam-packed book shelves and a combo of radio and record player on which my oldest brother played Elvis and Dad occasionally put on the Gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt. But never classical. My mother was not capable of hearing classical music.

My first-year intermediate I lived with a Maori uncle and auntie and six first-cousins at Whaka, Rotorua, after my parents separated. Television was a grainy, spotty black and white then. One evening an extraordinary sight and aural experience filled the tiny living room.

In standard 4 - Year 6 - I used to protect a classmate from bullies in exchange for listening to him practise classical piano at his house.

Mahalia Jackson, the legendary black gospel singer, was singing - and seemed solely, singularly to me. I was 11. I could hear her. And so shaken I went outside and found somewhere to have a cry; for inexplicable reasons.

Now I know: Mahalia transported me. Told me what was possible; sweet-noted all the way into what felt like my broken heart and mended it. Now I have Mahalia to take in my arms just whenever I want on YouTube. Which is numerous times a week over 50 years after first hearing - experiencing - her. That's what music also is: A platonic love affair. A mutual exchange of: You sing and I'll be your biggest fan. Just us.

When writing my first novel in 1989/90, I played constant classical music or else a selection of black American artists like Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin. If I saw my rugby teammates arrive to go for a run, I switched off the classical and threw a shawl over my typewriter (my God, do any of those still exist!) the social coward not wanting to seem different.

Music can be a passage, an internal one, of being taken from one state to another. I've just created a character - for television - who sits at a stolen-to-order grand piano and plays the music I'm listening to right now: Chopin. He's the president of a gang.

A bit far-fetched you might think. So was the teenage boy fresh out of the lock-up buying a Beethoven long-play record. That's another thing about music: It makes a mockery of the unbelievable. Stamps APPROVED on the thoughts it triggers.

And, when you get older and wiser, gives one permission to be different without having to hide it under a shawl or the nearest bushel. You want uplifting, pure unadulterated joy and access to your inner mind? Listen to Chopin. Bow down to Mahalia Jackson singing Holy Night and Trouble of the World. And be better for it.