Music That Made Me

For someone who never succeeded in mastering an instrument (though I tried once with trumpet, once with flute, a couple of times with banjo, and several times with piano), music has always been important to me.

That doesn’t make me special; music is important to almost everyone. I’m not a musicologist, like my sister-in-law, so I’m not going to try to explain why music matters, or what it does to us in general terms. I’m not qualified.

Instead, I’ll do what I did with books a couple of weeks ago—talk about some pieces of music that mattered to me: things that resonated with me at some point in my life and affected or changed something in me.

You know what a sympathetic vibration or resonance is? It’s when you play a note on an instrument or hit a note on a tuning fork, and the vibration of the sound waves makes another instrument or string vibrate at the same frequency, even when there’s no physical contact. That’s how I think about these pieces of music—when I hear them, they vibrate something inside of me. When I first heard them, they changed something in me. They’re landmarks of some kind, saying something about who I am.

And, fair warning, what they say is probably pretty pedestrian. Looking down the list, I see that nothing is very edgy or experimental or alt. But then, neither am I. I’m a late Boomer/Generation Jones kid from the suburbs who listened to The Beatles, The Who, and Springsteen in high school, not The Sex Pistols or even The Ramones. It is what it is. I yam what I yam.

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In quasi-but-not-strictly chronological order…

Dear Pen Pal (T.E.A.M)

My first grade class (when we were still living in Manhattan) put on a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which is pretty amazing, now that I think of it, because the musical had only just premiered off-Broadway about three years earlier. Somewhere in there, before or during first grade, I went and saw it. It was one of the first plays I was ever taken to see.

In school, I played Charlie Brown, complete with black construction paper zig-zags taped to my shirt, because no one could find or make a real “Charlie Brown” shirt for me.

This number, where Charlie Brown describes a disastrous baseball game to his pen pal, was my big solo, and all can I remember about it is falling off the stage during dress rehearsal. But it was my first time on stage, and it certainly lit a long-burning fire in me for doing theater—and loving musicals.

Why does this song stay with me? As happy and well-adjusted a first grader as I was, I think there’s something in the song’s bittersweetness that resonated with me. I’ve always liked a sad song or a melody tinged with a little mournfulness. The big rah-rah of the team’s singing, juxtaposed with Charlie Brown’s lonely solo…I’ve felt that thing, many times in my life.

Did I internalize the character of Charlie Brown a bit too much, maybe? Yeah, maybe. Maybe playing him onstage in first grade led me to play the role in real life: the put-upon straight-man surrounded by a cast of crazies. In the group but not always of the group. Or maybe it’s who I was fated to be, regardless, and it was just an inspired bit of casting by my first grade teacher.

Yellow Submarine

My mother took me to see this movie when it first came out, and it blew our minds. Well, mine. It gave my mother a massive headache. I loved the movie then and I love it still. It gave me my first tastes of surrealism (or whatever you’d call the animation style), British humor, and, of course, The Beatles, who became my favorite artists for years and years.

The first album anyone ever bought me was that day, when my mother took me to a record store to buy this soundtrack. I have a clear memory of trying to buy a different Beatles album, because there was a prominent display showing all of these portrait photographs and a big poster. It must have been the White Album. I think the timing works out. I wanted that record because it Came With Stuff, but my mother steered me away from it, and we got the soundtrack instead. Years later, the first record I ever bought for myself (in a record store/head shop in our suburban town) was a Beatles record, as were the second, the third, and many thereafter. Including the White Album, of course. I did finally get my posters.

Night on Bald Mountain

I was introduced to classical music in three ways: through cartoons, during cocktail hours, and at actual concerts.

Cartoons: Bugs Bunny, of course, but also Disney’s Fantasia, which was filled with classical music. The dancing hippos were great. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was fun. But it was the climax that really stayed with me: Mussorgsky’s sweeping, epic, dramatic music, animated with deep, rich colors and a lurid, semi-scary story. The music was….big. I decided I liked big.

Cocktail hour: my parents had a good record collection, and they liked to listen to music in the late afternoons when my father came home from work. This was after he had left his Wall Street law firm, from which he rarely came home in the hours while I was still awake. We moved to the suburbs, and he started teaching at Hofstra Law School, keeping much more civilized hours. And, like other civilized, suburban parents of the 1970s, they had Cocktail Hour before dinner, drinking and chatting with music in the background. It was usually classical music, although they had an excellent selection of musical soundtracks from shows they had seen on Broadway as a young, married couple.

My favorite classical music, listening at home or when we would go to concerts at Tanglewood and lie on the grass, looking up at the stars, was big, booming, crashing music: march music, the 1812 Overture, the very beginning of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Radetzky March, the Light Cavalry Overture, the Overture from Ruslan and Ludmilla—stuff like that.

French Horn Solo From Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony

And yet…

Even though my childhood favorites were big, loud, crashing pieces, I came to love some of the quieter, more serene passages, too. This horn solo was probably the first I really paid attention to, from one of my favorite symphonies, from one of my favorite composers. It feels like the whole, giant engine of the orchestra just stops for a moment to let this quiet expression of emotion work on us, all by itself. As lush and Romantic as the rest of the symphony is, there’s something about this solo, and what it grows into, that touches a nerve, for some reason.

Another, similar oasis in the middle of a big, multicolored symphony is this oboe solo from Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” I heard it often as a child, but it never really jumped out at me until I had kids of my own. It was featured in an episode of the show, “Little Einsteins,” which my two boys loved when they were very small. When I took my older son to a Young People’s Concert in New York City, as I had been taken by my parents, the orchestra featured this piece, and my son turned to me in excitement, wide eyed and open mouthed, because he knew it.

One more piece in a similar vein for me is Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie #1,” which I first heard over the closing credits of the movie, My Dinner with Andre. I remember walking out of the movie, the first time I saw it, a little dazed and confused and enchanted, the tune lingering in my head, married to the feeling the movie had left me with—gentle and sweet, but also mysterious and strange and a little sad. Watching normal Wally try to hear and make sense of his extraordinary friend, Andre. Andre, racing all over the world, making wild art, taking part in crazy rituals, trying to find some kind of larger meaning that transcends what normal Wally lives in…all ending with this:

People hold on to these images of father, mother, husband, wife...because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there's no wife there. What does that mean? A wife. A husband. A son. A baby holds your hands...and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the ground...and then he's gone. Where's that son?

If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus

My father’s tastes ran to classical music and Sinatra, but my mother, harboring deep beatnik sympathies within her proper-doctor’s-daughter exterior, was a Pete Seeger fan, and from her, I learned all the songs from his famous Carnegie Hall concert. The songs on this album were my introduction to folk music, the Civil Rights movement, and the broader idea of political art, art meant to motivate action. Would I have been drawn to the plays of Brecht and then Tony Kushner as an adult if I had not grown up listening to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie (And Arlo, of course, singing his Alice’s Restaurant Masacree)? Maybe not.

As I listened more deeply and widely to folk music, I latched on to some of the really old tunes. Shenandoah was one that I’ve loved in many different versions—vocal and instrumental. There’s something bright and sweet, but also a little aching and lost in those old folk songs (and the modern improvisations on their themes, like in “Appalachian Spring”) that feels quintessentially and idealistically American to me—old, colonial, New England/Yankee American (wherever the songs actually came from)—even though, as this article makes clear, the origins of “Shenandoah” are as murky and confusing and problematic as our country is. But American music can be as cacophonous as Walt Whitman in its multiplicity of voices and attitudes. There’s everything in there, as well as its opposite. It contains multitudes.

Rhapsody in Blue

I’m pretty sure the first time I heard this piece of music was in the opening section of the Woody Allen movie, Manhattan (and then, climactically, perfectly, at the end of the movie). For years, I had a cassette tape in my car with this soundtrack on one side and the soundtrack to Hannah and Her Sisters on the other, a gift from my friend, Stephanie. I don’t think there were very many of is on the road—any road, anywhere—listening to old, instrumental versions of Gershwin tunes in the late 1980s.

I started listening to jazz because of Woody Allen movies, and, because of that, my early tastes ran towards Swing and Dixieland, as Woody’s did. The part of me that loved big, crashing classical music also loved the big sounds of a jazz band, whether more orderly and controlled, like this Glenn Miller piece, or looser, janglier, and more raucous, like in “Smokey Joe’s La La,” or this great, live, Dinah Washington performance, or this Wynton Marsalis piece, or most anything by Louis Armstrong. That music is still the purest expression of joy I know.

The Wood Song

I met Amy Ray and Emily Saliers outside of the student center at Emory University. They were sitting at a table, selling the record they had just cut (a 45, we called it back then, children, because it played at 45 RPM and contained just one song on each side). Emily was in my year and in one of my English classes; Amy was a year younger. I started going to see them play on Sunday nights at a place near campus, and then almost every night, wherever they were playing. I could watch them play forever. Indigo Girls music was the soundtrack of my 20s, pretty exclusively.

I could list so many of their songs as important to me at different points in my life, but I’m choosing this one as a stand-in for all the others. It was an important song for me at the end of my mother’s long illness, giving me permission to sit alone in my car, feeling brokenhearted. But it also reminded me to be resolute, telling me to dry my eyes and get on with the job of living.

But the wood is tired and the wood is old
And we'll make it fine if the weather holds
But if the weather holds we'll have missed the point
That's where I need to go

Wherever it is I need to go next, whether the tired, old wood holds or falls apart, at least there will be some good music in my head and my heart to help get me there.

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