In the Living Room With Stravinsky
When my mother graduated high school in the 1950s, her father gave her a blank check to buy a new record player and some new records. She bought a monaural Magnavox player and a whole bunch of classical records. When I was born, this record player still worked, but when the tubes died, they bought a new stereo. I used to ask why the old record player didn't work anymore. It had been demoted to a bed table with a lamp on its lid.
My earliest musical memories are associated with two movie soundtrack albums my mother had: One was Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke and that terrible cockney accent of his. The other is the soundtrack to Hans Christian Anderson with Danny Kaye, including "The Ugly Duckling", "Thumbelina" and "Inchworm", which activate some old but still intact neural pathways that keep those songs in my memory.
I grew up in an era when the family room and the living room were distinct places. In fact, we did most of our living in the family room at the other end of the house where the TV was. The living room was reserved for visiting relatives, Christmas, or just in case the Pope and Nelson Rockefeller should drop by unannounced. Otherwise, the living room doubled as a music studio.
My brothers, two trombonists and a trumpeter, took their music lessons, after which there would be newspapers covered with spit from the spit valves. I remember the smell of valve oil and Ponds cream for the trombones. I heard all of their lessons and the scales and melodies which would rattle around in my head and sometimes sing them to myself. This, and listening to records, was how I learned about music. I took private drumming instruction when I was in my early teens, but other than that, I'm entirely self-taught. I owe it to genetics and environment.
There were oval-shaped dark wood end tables with enormous, towering lamps with giant shades that bring to mind the Dark Knight's helmet in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, an impossibly long, 70s-era floral couch with a giant mirror, later a painting, over it, two small marble topped coffee tables with coasters and ashtrays, including some bearing the insignia of health insurance companies.
There were two vintage fan back chairs from my mother's childhood home (she had them recovered but didn't like the result) and some short, black, stackable tables for beverages, snacks and ashtrays at a party, which was almost never. They had glass tops over a faux marble pattern bordering a big black square.
There was a stereo in the back corner, across from a grand piano which bore the name Howard above the middle of the keyboard. (a funny name for a piano, I grant you. Did other families have pianos with different names like "Steve" or "Bob" or "Dave"?). Just before Christmas, my brother Chris would tell me to get under the piano so I could talk to the Christmas Spirit. He would step on the hold pedal and pluck the strings manually to herald his manifestation and talk into the piano so his voice would reverberate. Every year I would say, "Can I have a bicycle?" and he would slam down on the lowest keys and say "No!" "Can I have a train set?" "NO!" and blam! another handful of keys would ring and we would make ourselves laugh.
I spent a lot of time in this corner of the house trying to figure out how to play songs I heard on records and the radio or ones I made up. It was on that stereo that I first hard the Beatles and contemporary pop from the 70s. I remember my mother playing classical music on the piano and violin, and singing the theme to Sesame Street with me from a book of sheet music. It was the piano where my brother Ray wrote big band arrangements in high school and college. Over the years I would teach myself chords and try ideas on that piano, which now resides in a church in Bloomfield, Connecticut. But the Christmas Spirit and his thunderous tone clusters will be heard no more.
There were two short chairs with big seats and stumpy backs in the bay window on either side of a cube-shaped fancy cabinet which had a Virgin Mary-shaped planter with artificial flowers sticking out from her back, another ash tray, the family Bible (in excellent condition), some art books including Karsh's photographs, Norman Rockwell and the poems of Robert Frost, my dad's favorite poet. The cabinet had two doors on the front where my mother's records were kept. I imagined the doors opened to an enormous vault full of musical secrets.
I found Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Tchikovsky, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, both Strausses...I heard all of that music as a child. I remember Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" narrated by George Raft, who used to play movie gangsters. Also in there was Neil Diamond's Hot August Night, which pictured the singing star in faux-rock and roll long hair and denim, which was a striking contrast to the album covers with Van Cliburn, Vladimir Horowitz, Nathan Milstein, Beverly Sills, and Barbra Streisand.
One of the records she bought for her graduation was an RCA LP from the mid-1950s of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, an album which was mysterious and a little scary, yet I kept coming back to it to listen. I can't say I liked it the first time I heard it. I didn't understand it, but it kept calling me back to listen again. It was performed by the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra and conducted by Pierre Monteaux, who conducted at the ballet's notorious premiere in Paris in 1913 that ended in a riot. Learning about the premiere made the music more intriguing to me. Could music make people freak out like that? Why does Mom have this? She never plays it.
Hearing it now, it's a great performance. I'm struck by its power, the crisp, propulsive tempi and the sudden strikes of the bass drum still startles. It still surprises me, even when I know what's coming next. It was my first experience with acquired taste. Stravinsky was as far out as my mother got harmonically and rhythmically: no Webern, Schoenberg or Varese for her. I sought out challenging music as I got older. I get much pleasure from both consonance and dissonance, especially side by side. Dissonance has its own kind of beauty that not everyone can hear, and I learned that some chords don't need to resolve.
I also heard some out-there electronic music by electronic musician Wendy Carlos thanks to the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange, the cover of which my mother had expurgated, covering up the image of a prone, straddling woman with gaffer's tape (the knife with the eyeball on it was apparently ok). Anyway, I think she bought it because it had lots of classical music on it. This album has the famous "Ode to Joy" with a vocoder "singing" the words, which blew my mind. There was also a track on there called "Timesteps" which was also abstract and a little scary. I saw the movie when I was in high school, mostly because it was taboo. Wendy Carlos' music made a deeper impression on me than the film. You'll have to find a vinyl copy if you want to hear it, because it's not available to stream anywhere.
I was curious enough to overcome my own expectations and prejudices about music that get in the way of experiencing music to its fullest. This attitude aided me when I encountered unfamiliar music later in life. My first instinct is not to criticize for what it isn't, but to understand and respond to new music on its own terms for what it is. Sometimes it takes more than one or several listens, which is more effort than most people want to expend, but in my experience, it's totally worth it and applicable to the appreciation of unfamiliar music, art, literature and, most importantly, people. Imagine that.