Do Re AH ME....

I've loved classical music since age twelve, when in 1972 the music teacher at Tyson Junior High School played a scratchy vinyl record of Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto for my class. My classmates were unimpressed, most of my peers calling out, "Play summa that good rock n' roll!" but I, young fop in the making, was enchanted. I had never heard such excellent and uplifting sounds in my life. Something in me, which for a long time had been isolated and angry--smiled.

Tyson Junior High School, a massive, brooding structure squatting at the intersection of Hades and Nightmare Ally, was a hideous institution where--believe it or not--the refuse from the juvenile detention centers were disgorged into the general student populace. Most of these Geoffrey-Dahmer's-in-training were several years older than the rest of us and some (it was rumored) had illegitimate children attending the same classes. The educational philosophy at Tyson was Survival of the Fittest. We learned to either fight, hide, pray, or join the criminal element. The teachers were helpless in the face of this melting pot of savagery; in the early to mid Seventies social recognition of violence in schools hadn't reached the sensitivity it has now. Students carried weapons quite openly. I had a friend who sported a razor, two knives, a small gun that ejected gas grenades, numchucks, a sword cane and various tools the use of which to this day I'm still puzzled. This Hellmouth was eventually closed, exorcised, cleansed by Holy men of various religions, and reborn as office suites--none of which flourished. No surprise, as some negative forces refuse to be banished. As Lovecraft said, some evil lives eternally.

Though born a redneck, in the redneck city of Knoxville Tennessee, when the cultural gamut is pretty much UT Football and Opera is spelled "Opry" and is preceded by "Grand Ol," I somehow inherited from some past life a sensitive soul. The literary bug had already bit me, and for years I had been reading far more than was good for me. I had attracted the attention of illiterate thugs more than once for harboring books and other dangerous intellectual contraband. So when I heard Bach's happy music played on that old record player, scratchy and tinny though it was, my soul responded in recognition. It sounded like home. I raised my hand. I was full of questions. Who was this guy? Did he write any more music? Did he have a band? I soon found out he had been dead for several hundred years, and my friends, amazed that I could give a crap about this crappy music, immediately thought I had lost my mind.

Perhaps I had, but I preferred happy delusion to the bleak reality I faced every day. I willingly plunged into this new-found madness, consequences be damned. There was a bookstore in the downtown area which sold "Budget Classics," classical music albums for $1 each. Every Friday, when I got my allowance of $3, I rode the bus downtown and bought three albums. I didn't know what I was buying, but if it had an interesting cover, or if the composer had a cool name, I bought it. While many of my contemporaries were eagerly and clandestinely making their first forays into drug and alcohol addiction, I was just as intently focused on my own new obsession. My first purchases, I recall were all six Brandenburg Concertos. A milestone for me was when I found a boxed set--on sale--of a La Scala performance of Wagner's Das Rheingold, featuring the magnificent Kirsten Flagstad, to this day one of my favorite performers. If Bach had lured me in, Wagner set the hook.

I remember bringing some friends home, telling them, "Man--you HAVE to hear this!" and their horrified expressions when they did. These twelve year old boys, reared on East Tennessee rock-and-roll and country music stations since conception, suddenly having WAGNER sprung on them--well, I had crossed over from having lost my mind into full-blown insanity.

Hey, did you know they play Classical music on the radio? Of course you do, but this was a revelation to my young unrefined self. My good music teacher, whose name by the way was Mrs. Lovelace (I'm not making this up) informed me of this and when one of my friends decided to lay a logical tour-de-force on me by riposting, "If this Bach guy is so great, why don't they play him on the radio?" I whipped out my transistor radio, turned it on, and lo and behold some symphony was playing! Not Bach, but he didn't know it.

I've learned over the long years you either love Classical music--Opera especially--or you don't. You can't proselytize to your friends, or try to convert them. I'm fifty years old, and I've had a great and enduring love for great music for most of my life. Yet I've never studied music. Not one hour of musical training. This seems to amaze people, considering how much I know about musical pieces, composers and musical works. People just assume I'm an accomplished musician. Yet I know nothing whatsoever about musical theory, or how to play music.

I wanted to take music in school, but my parents thought music class was a scam from the school to extort more money from you. They thought the same thing about field trips. You know, you had to bring in a couple of dollars to pay for expenses. My Mom would snarl, "That's how they get your money," and refuse to pay, so I'd sit in the library reading, which was okay with me. I was usually happier with a book anyway than socializing. She harbored similar suspicions about music classes. But I truly regret not getting a head start on studying music. I could have been a band geek. As it was, I was a geek without a clique. In the words of the old Monkee's song, I can't swim a single note.

However...last week, I began taking piano lessons.