Contact: pierce07446@outlook.com
I can’t read a note. I can’t play a
note. I can’t dance worth a damn. If I dared try singing in a crowded room,
that room would empty out in a hurry. I’ve never really studied up on music,
except in recent years from Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music and other books that touch on music
as part of the science of mind.
And yet music has always been an
essential part of my life, something that moves me profoundly, that is part of
my very identity. It’s something universal and yet particular. Music has been
part of humanity since prehistoric times, and there isn’t a single human
culture that doesn’t have music. But with globalization, we are exposed to many
kinds of music, only some of which appeal to each of us; we each come to music
in our own way.
I suppose I must have heard music in
the womb; studies indicate that infants remember music their mothers listened
to during pregnancy. In my case, it was most likely classical from WQXR, a New
York City radio station. But I was a child at a time when you could hear
classical music in places you’d never hear it today. Television was a new
thing, and didn’t get a whole lot of advertising support. So they’d sometimes
fill station breaks with “musical moments” videos. That was where I first heard
Smetana’s “The Moldau.”
Original music for TV shows,
including sf series, was almost unheard of. So the theme of Captain Video was the opening bars of Wagner’s
overture from The Flying Dutchman. Tales of Tomorrow used a piece I learned many years later was from
Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet – the scene where the doge breaks up a street fight between
the Montagues and the Capulets. A couple of other pieces used on TV were from
Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben for The Big Story (true stories about newspaper reporters) and Resphigi's The
Pines of Rome for What
in the World? (an
archaeology quiz show). Music from Holst’s The Planets figured in Tom Corbett, Space
Cadet – but the
Space Cadet march, I learned decades later, was actually a German piece by Karl
Lattan (1840-88):
Of course, I knew Rossini’s William
Tell overture from The Lone Ranger, and Emil von Reznicek’s Donna Diana overture from Sergeant
Preston of the Yukon.
And movie serials of the 1930’s rerun on TV borrowed Liszt’s Preludes, Dvorak’s
New World Symphony (the first record I ever bought), even Brahms’ Academic
Festival Overture. One influence that I don’t remember was my mother taking me
to see Fantasia
when I was two years old. Among other things, that gave me an enduring taste
for Stravinsky, and the kind of music Stravinsky paved the way for. It was over
40 years later that I saw the Joffrey Ballet recreation of the original ballet
and finally got those dinosaurs out of my head! I blogged about the 100th
anniversary of The
Rite of
Spring last May:
Another event that changed my life,
although I had no idea at the time that it would, was Aunt Liz sending me a
record of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos’ music for my birthday. One of
the items was a stunt piece, “O Trenzinho do Caipira,” an impression of a
journey on a narrow gauge railroad in rural Brazil:
Villa Lobos is best known for his
Bachianas Brasileiras and his Choros; he even did a film score for Green
Mansions, hardly
any of which was used in the movie; but he put out an album called Forest of
the Amazon based on
that score that includes one of my favorite love songs:
It was Villa Lobos who got me
interested in other nationalist music from Mexico, Spain, and elsewhere. I had
a taste for the off-beat as opposed to the avant garde; in a music appreciation
class at college (the only formal education I ever had), I asked the professor
to recommend something “wild.” She suggested Poulenc, and I was soon an avid
Poulenc fan. I didn’t know it at the time, but he died shortly afterwards; this
is one of his last performances from 1962:
It was also at college that I first
heard the music of Nino Rota, who composed the scores for La Dolce Vita and other Federico Fellini films.
Today he’s best known here for the Godfather theme, but my first love was for
his blues/waltz theme from La Dolce Vita. I learned decades later that the waltz part (first
heard at .45 and repeated several times) is actually a variation of Kurt Weill’s
“Mack the Knife:”
Rota’s film music was so good that I
was sure he must have also composed concert music. People kept telling me
otherwise, but eventually I found out that he had – symphonies, concertos, even
a ballet version of La Strada. Even in his film music, he could be really innovative, as
in these two pieces from Fellini’s Casanova:
The first samples The Rite of
Spring, it turns
out that Rota was a friend of Stravinsky. He also borrowed from himself; the
final movement of his Concerto Soirée for Piano and Orchestra is a variation of the Turkish Bath
scene score for 8½:
Time to backtrack a bit. Just after
the 1956 Hungarian revolution, my family took in a couple of refugees. They
introduced me to popular and classical music of Hungary – dances like the
chardash and the composers Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok. One work in
particular became iconic for me: Kodaly’s Psalmus Hungaricus, based on a variant of the 55th
Psalm that expressed the country’s resistance to Turkish occupation in the 16th
Century. For some reason, I had never “gotten” choral music before, but now I
did. Here’s the first part. The translation in supertitles isn’t as good as the
one I had in a recording back in 1957; it’s too literal, too wooden. But you’ll
get the idea:
Most popular music passed me by. It
was part of the background noise – I knew about the Beatles and Johnny Cash and
other top names in rock, country and other genres, but there were plenty more
whose names never registered with me. Of course, I loved the classic musicals –
South Pacific, The King and I, My Fair Lady. But I was too much an outsider to
get into folk or heavy metal or punk or rap or the other genre music everyone
else was grooving to then and afterwards. One exception was classic ragtime; I
went on a ragtime kick after seeing The Sting in 1973, and listened not only to
Joplin but others like James Scott, Louis Chauvin and Joseph Lamb. I got
records by the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble, and read Rudi Blesh’s
They All Played Ragtime. I saw Treemonisha, which isn’t exactly a classic, but I love its finale:
Most people who saw the movie
probably never got past the soundtrack album, but I not only pursued the
ragtime genre but also got into one of the successors of ragtime, stride piano,
exemplified by James P. Johnson, a New Jersey (!) native whose works include
“Eccentricity,” “Carolina Shout” and “You’ve Got to be Modernistic:”
Late in life, I’ve gotten into some
forms of rock, jazz and country – thanks to Angelo Badalamenti, whom I’d never
heard of until I picked up on Twin Peaks in 1990. I’d never paid much attention to movie or
TV soundtracks until then, but there was something different about his music.
Moreover, he worked with David Lynch, who wrote strange lyrics to the songs
sung by Julee Cruise, like “The World Spins:”
This led me to watch out for
Badalamenti elsewhere, in movies as varied as The City of Lost Children, The Comfort of
Strangers, The Beach, Holy Smoke,The Edge of Love, Secretary and A Very Long Engagement. They show an incredible range, and
also introduced me to other singers who became favorites of mine – especially
Marianne Faithfull and Siouxsie Sioux (whose previous connections with the
Rolling Stones and the Banshees had been unknown to me).
Sometimes I find a new musical love
through sheer happenstance. I remember that it was when I was driving through
the South, a thousand miles from WQXR, that I heard Holly Dunn’s “Love Someone
Like Me” on the car radio, and it really grabbed me. I’d seen Coal Miner’s
Daughter, but never
bought anything by Loretta Lynn or other country singers. Yet somehow I needed
this:
Well, I’m still learning new things,
including new (to me) music. A couple of years ago I learned first-hand what
jazz improvisation is all about. My wife Marcia and I attended a concert by
Wynton Marsalis and his band. One of the pieces they played was “Baa, Baa Black
Sheep.” What can you do with as simple and banal a tune as that? Well, we sure found out! I
wish I had a video link for that, but I don’t.
Really living means forever
learning, being open to new things, even at my age!
