I'm fascinated by musical biographies, and in this case I don't mean carefully researched books about major musical figures. I mean the stories of regular people, whether career musicians or just engaged fans and supporters. I've often described a life in music as a long series of epiphanies - those moments when you say to yourself, 'oh wow' or 'now I get it' or 'I've never heard that before' and dug a little deeper down the hole because the last discovery made you feel good.
So I was taken by this weekend's post at The Score, the New York Times' periodic blog about music making. Daniel Felsenfeld describes his journey of discovery through various styles and artists on his way to becoming a professional composer. In a scene that reminded me very much of my own early life, he talks about trading tunes with his buddy who then lets him in on his private stash for a trial of something "really wild."
It seems implausible now, but the “something really wild” Mike held was not goth, metal, or punk. It was a neatly hand-labeled tape of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He put it on, and I listened. I think it was then I actually heard music for the first time.
The whole article is definitely worth a read. And if you're interested, after the jump is the first excerpt I've posted from my book-in-progress about instrumental music and its often hard-to-access magic. It's a draft, and I'm not even sure how much personal story I want to include in the final work, but I wrote it and I'd rather get it out there than let it fester in my computer. If you have thoughts about it, or if you would like to share your own autobiography of musical discovery, I'd be excited to post it as part of a series.
Am I a credentialed expert in musicology or music theory? No way. I think of myself as merely an active and informed musical citizen, an omnivore who got hooked on music early on through some happy accidents and who has pursued it as a player of numerous instruments, a rabid fan and ultimately as a music journalist who has been lucky enough to have in-depth conversations with a wide range of musicians and music producers about their field. I actually think if I was a trained musicologist or soloist or conductor I’d find it far more difficult to deliver the message of this book. Because with some spectacular exceptions (conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein and jazz pianist Billy Taylor for example) music “experts” have a track record of walling off music’s magic from the masses. They seem to want you to have made the same climb they did, but they keep pulling up the ladder.
I can boil that problem down to an experience that still roils me. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University in the mid 1980s, I took a music theory course as an elective. You know, for fun and interest. Well, we had this pompous bastard of a professor who had us analyze stretches of classical music, identifying chords and inner movements of harmony. And that was fine. It’s what I came for. Except HE WOULDN’T PLAY US THE MUSIC ON A STEREO. Not one note permeated the sterile environment of the classroom. When I asked why, his answer was we could go to the library and listen. Which meant it was on us to visit the listening room on our own precious time and ask to have them put on a record with no ability to find the passage in question and no ability to rewind once we got there (it was pre-digital folks), so it would fly by ONCE in a place where I had no ability to ask a question to help the music on the paper match up to the music as performed and enjoyed. Dude, whatever your name was, I hope you died alone, because you seemed to exist to suck joy and beauty out of the world.
Happily, most of my life in music has been much more rewarding than that class, and I want to describe the broad outlines of that journey, because it’s full of proof that you neither have to be especially gifted or destined for a concert career to fully engage with the power and mystery of music. And as with so many musical biographies, mine begins with my parents. Mom and Dad were and remain ardent supporters of classical music, especially opera. Dad was never a player, but Mom was and is. Her instrument is the harp (the six-foot tall instrument with 46 strings, not the blues harmonica). I’ll confess that the harp is not an instrument I relate to in my gut, but it makes a beautiful sound for sure, and it was cool to see her practicing and performing, as a soloist and in orchestras, as I grew up. In fact, the couple of times she took me to her orchestral rehearsals, allowing me to see a professional group work on pieces under the leadership of a conductor, was one of the most important experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ll have more to say about that later.
I was given violin lessons from age seven, starting with the good old Suzuki method well known to dedicated violin moms and dads worldwide, and moving on to private lessons with a lovely woman who became a family friend. In time, her son Nick would become my best friend for many years. He was an exceptional violinist who went on to a distinguished career in chamber music. We made a fair amount of music together, and he was never the least bit competitive or condescending even though I rather paled next to him, and somehow I never let that undeniable truth make me feel bad. I played in a youth orchestra on Saturday mornings as a kid and enjoyed that most of the time, especially when Nick and I would end our mornings of Mozart or Vivaldi by eating a hamburger at the Eckerd Drug lunch counter and walking to Wade Stadium to catch the miserable Duke football team.
It’s not easy to be a sixth grader who plays the violin, and I alternately liked and resisted it, but I practiced and made strides. For some reason, I didn’t quit. Even when I didn’t like what I was playing, it felt good and important to be able to play and to get better. It was clear to everyone that I was not bound for the stage, but I was getting something out of it, especially reading music and playing with other people. I also found I enjoyed just playing nonsense on my violin, making stuff up, and happily nobody tried to stop me (as I’ve heard so many times happens by music teachers and parents). Of course new kinds of music began filtering into my life over the radio and in live settings. My mom, to my undying gratitude, took me and my little sister to a big band concert featuring jazz drummer Buddy Rich. It was a cosmic experience. His huge toothy grin was clearly visible from our seats, and he was a fury of loud, seething rhythm. From that evening, I began beating on everything in sight, even assembling a goofy drum set out of a half dozen upside-down Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. On Christmas day of my seventh grade year, I got the drum set I’d begged for, and my parents, bless them, let me set up in the basement and later my bedroom where I’d smack away to my first cherished rock records. I was for a time particularly fond of Santana’s live Moonflower album and Hotel California. I even took a few drum lessons, where I learned my crush rolls from my paradidles (no, that won’t be on the test.)
And then lightning really struck.
A high school friend played jazz trumpet. He turned me on to Miles Davis and the legendary Kind of Blue album and he connected me with a brilliant personality and mentor type named Yusef Salim. Brother Yusef, as he was known in the community, actually had a little gang of high school kids he’d get together and coach a little in jazz. I was the drummer. I probably sucked. But between those “sessions” and the magic of LPs, I fell under the spell of jazz outright, and I’ve been exploring it ever since. I would call jazz, broadly speaking, my favorite music. Banished to a desert island, most of my ten albums would be jazz or jazz influenced, along with Bach’s cello suites. It’s our nation’s greatest artistic achievement, a reflection of the entire 20th century. It exquisitely balances the role of composer and performer, of structure and freedom in music.
My parents neither loved nor disliked jazz. They appreciated it from afar and recognized it as serious music, but it never could compete with their passion for classical and opera. My dad was fond of Charlie Byrd, a fabulous crossover jazz/classical guitarist and he had a couple of his albums, but Byrd was no Buddy Rich. So in a sense, I was on my own exploring jazz, though I’m pretty sure I latched on to it more easily and readily because I had some formal music training. It gave me harmonic things to latch on to and made it easy to appreciate the seriousness and artistry of the performers. Plus, I never had to get over a parody picture of jazz place in my head by others, and I cringe whenever I see jazz represented by some cliché guy in a zoot suit playing the saxophone on a fire escape (except for Lisa Simpson’s mentor Bleeding Gums Murphy). I couldn’t tell you about the dozens of mind-warping, beautiful experiences I’ve had at live jazz, and it kills me that while there’s still a lively little subculture around it, serious jazz is a drop in an ocean of weaker, less considered, less artful music. There are a thousand flavors of jazz that extend into every other genre of music on Earth. It is without a doubt, the instrumental music with something for everyone. It has spoken deeply to me, and I'm convinced it would speak to millions more people if they were given a compelling way in, and that's the hope for this book.
(to be continued...)
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