3 posts tagged “music”
The first thing my father bought upon arriving in Birmingham, Alabama, was a radio. A classical musician, he was a passionate jazz aficionado, and assumed that, since Birmingham was in the heart of Dixie, there would be non-stop fabulous jazz programming on the radio. Instead, all he found was gospel music, and rock'n roll.
“I can't stand these boy singers with their adenoidal voices. And those eternal triplets in the accompaniment--da, da, da...da, da, da--drive me crazy. Take the radio,” he said to me, “but turn it down low and keep your bedroom door closed.”
So the radio came to live in my room, and with it Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Brenda Lee, and Elvis Presley. I didn't understand their songs, but I loved the mysterious world they alluded to.
One of the first songs I remember is Buddy Holly's “Raining In My Heart.” (In the versions below, “blah” designates the parts I didn't understand.)
Blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,
he doesn't know
you've gone away
and it's raining, raining in my heart.
Oh, misery, misery...
This is where things began to deteriorate. When Buddy sang “misery,” I thought he was saying “Missouri.” He was sad because his beloved had gone away to Missouri, which I knew was a state named after an important river of North America. The rest of the song made no sense, as there were no further allusions to the state, plans for the singer to go there, etc.
There
was also “Donna,” by Ritchie Valens. His voice was so nasal, and
he was so often flat, that he could have been any of the boys in my
school, singing on the way to the cafeteria. I had come to the US
after a few years in Latin America, where popular songs were sung by
grown men with mustaches, who sang lines like ”Woman, if you can
speak with God, ask Him if I've ever stopped adoring you...”
But in my bedroom in Birmingham, Alabama, Ritchie stated with adorable simplicity,
I had a girl
Donna was her name
blah, blah, blah
blah, blah, blah
Oh, Donna, Oh, Donna...
What kind of a name was Donna, I wondered? Was there a Saint Donna, and when was her feast day? It must be an exotic, wonderful name, since it inspired such longing in Ritchie Valens.
From the first time I heard him, I found Elvis irresistible. He didn't sound at all like the boys in my class, but he said weird things all the same, as in the song “Stuck On You”:
Blah, blah, blah,
Hide in the kitchen! Hide in the hall!
Ain't gonna do you no good at all [what was this girl doing alone in the house with Elvis? Where was her mother?]
Cause when I catch you and the kissin' starts
Blah, blah, blah [WHAT is going to happen when the kissin' starts?]
blah, blah, blah
I'm gonna stick like glue [what is glue?]
Stick! Because I'm stuck on you!
In this case, I learned, “stick” was not a piece of wood, but a verb, which appeared again in the form “stuck.” From Elvis's tone and panting breaths, I deduced that being “stuck” on someone meant liking him or her very much.
By my sophomore year I had made some progress, and could understand most of the first stanza when Brenda Lee shrieked:
My baby whispers in my ear
Mmmm, sweet nothings...
He knows the things I like to hear
Mmmm, sweet nothings...
Thanks
to Brenda, I realized that in English, unlike Spanish, the noun
“nothing” could be pluralized. I liked Brenda's unsentimental,
assertive take on the things she liked and felt entitled to, a rare
thing in those days.
Finally, there was Johnny Mathis's maddening “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” I couldn't make any sense of it. Were the lovers at a barbecue? Were they caught in a forest fire? It didn't help that every time the song came on the car radio my father would make me turn it off. “Listen to that vibrato. That man,” he would say, “sounds like a goat in heat.”
The bleatings of Johnny Mathis, the pantings of Elvis, the adenoidal laments of Ritchie, the shrieks of Brenda--they were all pure magic to me. It wasn't so much the music that was magical, as the words that I didn't understand, because I didn't understand them. They pointed towards a world that was utterly foreign and desirable to me, a world I was making my way into step by clumsy step. Rock'n roll was poetic in the way that only the unknown can be poetic, and I poured into the “blah blah”places, the spots I didn't understand, all the contents of my fevered teenage imagination.
These days, entire “oldies” stations are devoted to these songs, and my American husband loves to listen to them. But now that I can understand the words, the songs are a disappointment. They are shallow, repetitious (arms/charms, hand/understand) and unimaginative. They were so much better when I didn't understand them, when they were just a vessel for my passion.
I have a CD of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert's “Travels in Winter” in German. The CD comes with a complete translation of the poems on which the songs are based. I have only a smattering of German, but I refuse to look at the translation. It's much better if I don't quite know what Dietrich is saying. It makes the snow, and the sadness, more real.
September 12, 2008 “The Last Time...”
The last time one of my daughters sat on my lap. The last time my father gave me a violin lesson. The last time I ran five miles. I think about these occasions but cannot remember them, because I didn't know when the child jumped off my lap (for my sins, I may have even asked her to get up) that she would never climb on again. I didn't know when I wiped the rosin off my bow that I would never again hear my father interrupt my playing with “that's very nice. However...”--something that never failed to annoy me when he said it. And I didn't know, as I panted and stretched my sore legs, that I was experiencing my final runner's high.
Now, as the years gently coax me to give up one thing here, another there (no more planting trees single-handedly, no more partying until dawn), I wonder about these milestones too, as well as the ones to come. When will I hear my 90-year-old mother tell me on the phone for the last time that she's just brought 25 flower pots indoors (all by herself!) to save them from the coming frost? When will I fix my husband dinner (something that, after 40 years, has lost some of its luster) for the last time? When will my ten-year-old arthritic dog Lexi go for her last walk? Will I look back and regret that I was annoyed during the walk because it was drizzling, distracted during the cooking because I wanted to read a book instead, impatient with my mother because I wanted to get supper going?
Thinking about these things can, I admit, be depressing. But this kind of reflection also lends my days a bitter-sweet flavor, and allows me to approach activities that seem burdensome in a gentler frame of mind. I'm developing a kind of nostalgia for the present, simultaneously tasting its sweetness and its fleetingness. I try to walk the fine line between enjoyment of the moment and despair at its impermanence. I do the best I can.
September 9, 2008 “Music for the Queen”
When Pau Casals was a child prodigy, he played the cello for Queen Victoria. When he was an old man, and considered by many to be the finest musical interpreter of the century, he played for Golda Meir. Now, he plays for me.
He plays the Bach Cello Suites that he rescued from oblivion and practiced for years before performing publicly. He plays the Bach Gamba Sonatas, where the long sustained notes are among the purest sounds ever heard in the universe.
When Bach was a young man he walked 25 miles to hear the great organist Buxtehude play. But with the touch of a finger—in the car, the kitchen, the shower even—I can hear the best music ever written, music that for centuries only a tiny minority of human beings had access to. I'm not Frederick the Great, but I can listen to Mozart any time I want.
Music is all around us, and we don't hesitate to hum along with it, or ignore it. Music has become universally available only recently, just as brightly-colored man-made objects have a relatively short history. For millenia people lived with only the muted colors produced by natural dyes. Now bright, eye-popping color is everywhere, and many of us have grown almost blind to it. The blindness may be a defensive gesture, as today color often assaults our senses—think of the plastic toys defacing people's backyards, or the expanses of gaudy merchandise in many stores.
We are assaulted by music as well, in elevators, from passing cars, from computers. Handel is supposed to have fainted from sheer emotion when he heard the voice of a famous castrato. What would happen to him if he walked into a typical American house and heard his own Hallelujah Chorus issuing from the kitchen radio, advertising jingles coming out of the TV, and hip hop from the kid's bedroom? He would surely faint again, as would Fra Angelico if he walked into Toys R Us.
Sometimes I feel that I might faint too, if I can't get away from all the music. There has to be silence at certain times in order to really hear at other times. It is ironic that humankind has spent so much energy and effort making music universal, and now people like me spend energy and effort trying to get away from it.
Still, on the whole, I'd rather have it this way: Casals playing Bach, Alicia de Larocha playing Mozart, and Winton Marsalis playing anything, all at my fingertips. Where music is concerned, technology has made me an absolute monarch, and I don't even have to worry about hungry peasants threatening revolt.
