Tag: Band

Musical Awakening

I am embarrassed to say that I am not a famous musician. Why is that embarrassing, you ask, most people aren’t famous musicians. Most musicians aren’t famous. Heck, this city is full of amazingly talented professional musicians who haven’t even heard of each other! So, why would I be embarrassed not to be famous? Because I was told over and over and over — by people who would know — that I should be. I can’t even go back to visit my home town, because someone would recognize me and I would have to explain why I never got famous. Or I could just point them to this blog, which will explain all the complicated reasons why I have always felt like a failure.

I started out life with no self-esteem, frankly. My parents didn’t have two-nickels-worth of self-esteem between them, so how could they impart any to me? Let’s just blame their parents. Over the course of this blog you will come to learn why I consider my grandparents to have been terrible people, although I have no doubt that they did better raising their kids than my great-grandparents did. I guess we are all trying to learn to do better than our own parents, it’s the human condition. But whatever, in this post I want to talk about how I discovered my musical gift, or curse, depending on how I choose to look at it.

In my previous posts I have tried to describe the experience of having a “special” brain: the kaleidoscope at the center of my mind that constantly dishes up psychedelic imagery in multiple dimensions, the painful oversensitivity of my nervous system, and my difficulties balancing the two realities, inner and outer. It can be a good thing. If I am playing the piano or giving a massage, I can just close my eyes and surf the roiling, colorful model of reality that’s automatically generated within. For me, music has color, taste, texture, geometry, and impetus. I first became aware of this when I was five or six and my parents bought a stereo console. My dad put on Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite and I was mesmerized. While everyone else in the room continued to talk or whatever, I plopped down next to one of the speakers, pressed my ear against it and got lost in the sound. Every instrument had it’s own texture and color. My mind followed one melodic line, then another. The various harmonies tasted sweet or sour, hard and soft. Every sensory center within my brain was activated at once, and the rest of the world was shut out. I didn’t understand why everybody wasn’t as affected as I was. I fell in love with music, but didn’t reflect on it that much. I remember sitting in church listening to the organ play, I was maybe five or six. I was moving my feet and fingers as if to play along. Did my mother notice? I remember when it was my turn to load the dishwasher, I was maybe nine, and I found this sharp metal rod with a ring at the end (for holding a roast together?) and I used it as a baton while I imagined conducting a symphony orchestra performing music I was creating in my head. I could hear it! It was for a movie. Again, I never thought it was anything particularly important, just one of the many ways I amused myself with my imagination.

The little town I grew up in had a music program far better than most, for whatever reason. It was customary for kids to start learning their instruments in school in fourth grade. I remember these two music teachers came to our school to give everyone what I thought was a hearing test. They had a device that would generate pitches, controlled with knobs. They made a high pitch and then a low pitch, explaining what they meant by “high” and “low.” Then they would proceed to play two pitches in sequence, and I was supposed to indicate with my hand if the second pitch was higher or lower than the first. This went on for quite a while, and they began to throw glances at one another. Finally they were done, and thanked me. A day or two later my mom got a phone call. She told me it was the music teachers and they had tested my ear. They said they had never seen a kid with such a keen ability to distinguish pitches so close together so reliably, and therefore I should really learn an instrument. They said, given my musical ear and my nice teeth (?) maybe I should learn trombone. For some reason I said no. I think I was intimidated. So I missed out on starting a band instrument when the other kids were beginning to learn.

What I did agree to do was sing in the chorus that was being started at our elementary school. There were kids from fourth through sixth participating, and I thought it was fun. I had always enjoyed singing along with my dad, the Beatles, and to records of Broadway shows. I had a sweet, pure voice. I especially enjoyed singing harmony, which always gave me gooseflesh. Things came to a head when I was in sixth grade. My little sister, now in fourth, had joined the choir with me, and we practiced together a lot, especially when traveling in the car. We sang a lot of rounds. When she didn’t feel like singing, I would close one ear with a finger and harmonize with the drone of the engine. I remember exploring intervals this way, although I didn’t know that intervals have names, or what consonance and dissonance are. But I explored the qualities of all the intervals, even some that don’t have names in the European music system. Anyway, by now the choral program was maturing, and we were preparing for a mass choir performance where the choruses from all the elementary schools in town were to join together in a theater with risers and everything. As the day approached, our director invited the piano accompanist, a professional, to come rehearse with us a few times. That did it. The feeling of euphoria was addicting. The experience of singing on stage with a hundred girls and boys flipped a switch inside of me.

That same year our sixth grade teacher handed out “Tonettes” to the class — a simple musical instrument like an ocarina or pennywhistle, and began to teach us simple tunes using numbers to represent the notes. I learned everything almost instantly. Within minutes I was able to play any tune I could think of. I got looks from people. I didn’t realize it was weird. One day I saw my sister’s clarinet lying on the bed on top of her music book for band. I was curious, so I picked it up and read the instructions. Soon (like, within an hour) I was playing all the songs in the book. She went to my mom, crying, saying “It’s not fair that I’ve been working all year and he can instantly play better than me!” I felt chagrined. My mom had also been working with her for several months from a beginner piano book. One rainy Saturday I was bored, so I sat down at the piano and opened the book to the first page. I read the instructions. Three hours later I came to my mom and said, “Can we get another piano book? I already got through this one.” She looked surprised, but said, “Sure.” So we went from the Primer to the First Grade book of the piano method my mom had learned from as a child. About halfway through that book (a week later) I went to her with a question about some musical notation that I couldn’t understand from the explanation (broken chords). She didn’t remember what that symbol meant, so she said, “Maybe I should find you a piano teacher.”

Turns out there was this wonderful woman who lived on the other side of our block who taught piano. She was a magnificent woman: beautiful, tall, glamorous and graceful. I will never forget that first lesson. She asked me to play for her what I had been learning. She quickly explained the question my mom couldn’t answer, and now I was playing that piece easily. She started to show me different things on the keyboard, and whatever she showed me, I just did it. This was fun! After the lesson I made my way home through the alleyways that divided our city block into four sections. It wasn’t far, but as I came into the house, excited to tell my mom about how much fun I had had and how nice the lady was, I had to wait. She was on the phone, blushing, saying, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh! OK.” etcetera. When she hung up she said, “Well, that was [name of piano teacher], and she said to me, ‘Carolyn, some day that son of yours will be playing in Carnegie Hall!'” I looked at her. “What’s Carnegie Hall?” I asked. She explained that it meant the teacher thought I was really talented. In fact, she said she had never had a student take to everything so quickly. She couldn’t believe I had been playing only a week or two. During a lesson a year later, a couple of former students walked in, friends of the teacher’s daughter, now in high school. She said, “Wait, you guys, come in here, I want him to play something for you.” She asked me to play the piece I was working on, which I did, with gusto. They just kind of stared, then one of them said, “I remember learning that piece. How come it never sounded so good when I played it?” The teacher said, “I know, right? He’s amazing. I just gave him this piece last week.”

Our town had been growing rapidly and had just constructed a new high school. So the rather unique configuration was now as follows: the high school had 10th through 12th, there was a junior high school that was 8th and 9th grades, and every 7th grade kid went to another junior high school. It was a pretty good system, because seventh-graders wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else, given the awkwardness of puberty. My friend Chuck and I continued in choir in seventh grade, but we soon learned that the “jocks” were not down with that, and we got teased. So we decided that when we got to eighth grade we would sign up for beginning band. Little did we realize that we would now be mocked and laughed at by the kids who had been in band since fourth grade. I understand. Anyone walking into the band room during beginning band would be assailed by a cacophony of horrible honking and squeaking — we were not good. I was learning baritone sax because it meant we wouldn’t have to purchase an instrument, I could use a school-issued one. Chuck wanted to play flute at first, because it would be easy to carry. He switched to trumpet when he realized that those “jocks” whose opinions mattered to him so much thought it was “gay” for a guy to play flute. I found sax very easy to learn: it was just a big fat Tonette with extra levers for sharps and flats. Chuck let me borrow his trumpet one weekend, and I learned to play it pretty quickly too. Later that year I found out that tuba uses the same fingerings as trumpet, but you had to translate it from bass clef. No worries, I could read and write music by this time thanks to piano. After one semester of beginning band I was accepted into the “Varsity” band, the second-tier band. The first tier band at our junior high school was called “Symphonic,” and was one of the best junior high school bands in the region. Both bands were combined into the Marching Band when we went to parades. At the end of eighth grade the band director said, “Hey, if you want to learn bassoon over the summer, you can be in Symphonic Band next year.” So I enrolled in summer school and he taught me bassoon. Bassoon sucks because there are thirteen thumb keys and the double-reed requires a lot of work to master the embouchure. Nevertheless, by fall I was playing in the symphonic band! I had also practiced tuba over the summer, so I no longer had to march with a baritone sax.

In my previous thread I talked about winning the High Achievement in Music award at the end of ninth grade, and how much music I was doing in high school. The gist of it was I had started late but learned incredibly fast. I got my first paid piano gig three years after my first piano lesson. The most common compliment I received was from women who would say, “I could sit and listen to you play all day.” I have small hands for a guy and have always struggled with the more advanced classical literature. But there is something in the way I play, a higher dimension to the sound, that people find amazing. I can’t explain it, but I think it comes from trying to infuse into the music all of the kaleidoscopic wonder that is going on inside my brain. I remember asking my mom early on in my piano lessons why do people do music? She said something about “expressing their feelings and emotions.” I thought, “Oh,” and realized that the beginner-level music I was learning at that point didn’t have much emotional content. So I sat down at the piano and began making stuff up, improvising, in an effort to get some of my many intense emotions out. It was pretty crude at first, but within a couple of years I could improvise for hours and could almost fit my emotions into the “orchestral” fabric of sound I was weaving in real time. That first gig I mentioned: I was asked to play background music for a Rotary Club reception. I improvised the whole set!

By this point music was providing me with an outlet for my emotions, giving me a sense of belonging, and garnering lots of attention and praise. It did wonders for my self-esteem and helped me learn to focus. My mind was beginning to wake up.

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From Boom to Bust (Part 9)

My mom was a powerful woman. She was very intelligent, hardworking, and had a strong will. Her biggest failing, in my opinion, was that she was groomed from an early age to serve the patriarchy. She deeply believed that men should take the lead in things and that her role should be supportive. Yet she held the greater power in her relationship with Walt. It was her house. He needed her to help him write his sermons. She made the important decisions behind the scenes, and he must have resented his dependency. Although I never saw him hit her, she was cowed by his temper. He would call her “woman” in a derisive tone. I one time saw him grip her upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. There was a time she brought him toast that wasn’t burnt enough for his taste, and he tossed the whole plate back at her. But in the end she sent him packing. His sudden transformation to meekness and his apology to me, after two years of tyrannical domination, left me shell-shocked and confused. At least he was gone. We all felt a sense of relief and liberation in the aftermath.

Content Warning: discussions of suicide and dark insinuations.

My mom made some big mistakes raising us, but now she did something very right. She hauled the six of us into family counseling. Steve was a PhD psychologist and licensed family therapist, and he was great. I remember all of us sitting in a big circle in his office for several sessions, and as I recall it was a lot of fun. He had a calm and cheerful manner that got us all to loosen up and talk about our feelings. I remember there were these oblong pillow things with handles like swords that we could fence with. It was good times, and it wasn’t long before he said, “I think you all are doing quite well and you don’t need to keep coming back at this point. Except I want to continue to see Kirk.” Wow, I felt so special! I mean that in a positive way — I wanted to keep coming, and never thought about why I might be singled out in a negative sense.

So every week it seemed, for the next three or four years I went to see him. In 1974 most kids didn’t have a therapist, and I thought it made me cool. A year into it I bragged about it to my friends at school and they thought it made me a dark and complicated badass. They already thought I was a musical genius. When they asked me if it meant I was crazy, I said I would ask the therapist. He said, “No, you’re not ‘crazy!’ You’re not a raving basket case. I would would describe you as emotionally disturbed.” That satisfied my friends and me. Steve and I talked about my life history up to that point, trying to identify the turning points. I talked about the pants-down spankings, the way I felt singled-out by my father for extra punishments. I decided I must remind my dad too much of himself and so I got on his nerves. I talked about the Catholic school, the bullying. I talked about how Walt seemed to be a cross between Adolph Hitler and Barney Fife: an insecure loser who overcompensated by being a dictatorial douche. But mostly we talked about the bullying that was ongoing: the jocks at school who were always calling me “faggot,” “queer,” and “fairy,” pushing me in the hallways and punching me in the stomach. “What do they think they know about me?” I asked. “Are you gay?” he replied. And that started a long series of conversations about my sexual orientation. He was a good therapist. I never felt judged or in any way unsafe. I could have told him everything, but I withheld a lot. Maybe it was my age. Maybe it was the desperate need to convince myself that the bullies were wrong about me. I think if I believed that everyone could see who I really was and what had happened to me, if I thought I had failed in my attempts to keep the truth veiled, I would actually have killed myself. So eventually we succeeded in getting me through high school in one piece, but the deepest darkest stuff remained buried.

My sister, Karen, started working as a waitress in a small family-owned Mexican restaurant when she was sixteen. She spent a lot of time at work because she loved it. The other reason was because, due to her good looks and outgoing personality, her two best friends happened to be the richest in town. We were dirt poor, and she needed her own money to fit in, at least in a fashion sense. The owners of the restaurant were wonderful people, very kind, and she was a gifted waitress. One day, a few weeks after Walt left, I came home from school hungry. I looked in the pantry for something to eat and we were out of everything but pancake mix and such. I said, “Mom, there’s nothing to eat!” She was sitting at the kitchen table and, for only the second time in my life, I saw her bury her face in her palms and sob. “I’m so sorry, we don’t have any money. We may have to go on Welfare.” That very moment my sister walked in, home from work, and said, “What’s going on?” My mom seemed so ashamed as she explained the situation. Karen said, “Mom, I’ll loan you $75 so you can get some groceries, and I’ll ask at work to see if we can get you a job.” So for a while my mom bussed tables while my sister waitressed. It must have been a hoot. It wasn’t long before my mom got a part-time job lecturing at the university, and a year later she landed a great position at a community health research clinic as “Director of Intervention” in a multi-year, nationwide study. Like I said, my mom was a powerful woman! Her boss was an internationally-renowned epidemiologist, a Persian MD who got all the credit while she worked herself to the bone cleaning up the messes he created with his imperious arrogance. He was not good with people, but she was. She spent the rest of her career there, working fourteen-hour days to make that place a success. He eventually lost a class action lawsuit for harassment brought by all the other employees. She was probably his chief enabler. But at least we had enough money to get a stereo system, a microwave oven, a new car, and a color TV with cable. We were finally middle class.

Halfway through my ninth-grade year the bullying was getting to be too much. My last period of the day was Physical Education. Whenever PE ended, school was out, and I often found myself face to face with my tormentors. Billy, in particular, was not the scariest, but he was the most persistent. The scion of a very wealthy family, he seemed to take special delight in saying things like, “Kirk, you’re a ‘fairy’ nice guy!” One day he said to me, “You’re such a queer,” and I replied without missing a beat, “You wish!” There did always seem to be a sense of yearning in his pretty blue eyes, so I was calling him out! He responded by physically assaulting me with punches and kicks. I managed to escape and headed toward the band room — a standalone building not far away where my friends and I met up every day after school. That was the very last time I attended PE in junior high! After that I skipped PE and meandered my way over to the band room during seventh period. The band director was a sweet man and never questioned my presence there. I would greet my friends when they arrived after school as if nothing irregular was going on. My sister Karen was off at college now, and I had moved into her old room at the front of the house. My siblings were relieved when I moved the piano into it. They were annoyed at how much I practiced, and this made it less intrusive.

Since my mom was working so much, we younger four were pretty much on our own most of the time. My older brother, Dan, had a motorcycle and a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant on the edge of town. He was gone hanging out with his druggie friends much of the time, and that left me with my sister, Jenifer (two years younger) and my brother, Drew (four years younger). We took turns making dinner, which we would warm up for my mom when she dragged herself in at eight or nine o-clock. She would eat and then promptly fall asleep on the couch while we watched TV. By ten someone would run her bath water, then we would herd her off to the tub. We took turns waking her up, helping her out of the tub, drying her off and getting her moving towards bed. This is how we lived. After a few weeks of skipping PE, I started skipping school entirely. I would get up as normal, make my lunch and load it into my backpack with my books, then head out towards school. I found if I walked halfway to school before turning around to go back home it allowed just the right amount of time for my mom to leave for work. I would sneak back into the house and play the piano all day, talking to the composer Beethoven, whose spirit I imagined sitting at my side, coaching me and discussing his music. He was as weird as me, and we vibed together as I developed a special affinity for his piano sonatas. These were the happiest weeks of my life up to then. It was so nice not to have to deal with school anymore.

One Saturday afternoon my mom was reading the mail and she said, “What is this?” I looked at the letter she handed me. It was from the Department of Juvenile Justice. It said something to the effect of “Your son, Kirk, has been declared a habitual truant and will be made a ward of the court if you don’t respond by” such and such a date. Ooops. She looked at me in pained confusion. “But I see you leave for school every morning before I go to work!” Well, actually. I asked what “ward of the court” meant. She said, “They’ll take you away and put you in foster care, probably a group home somewhere.” What, no more private room with a piano?! This was a crisis indeed. “I’ll call Steve,” she said. I still can’t believe how people rallied on my behalf. I’m so lucky. Steve said he was willing to sign a release to get me out of PE for the rest of the year, and the school counselor told me the principal said they would only accept it because Steve was a doctor of psychology. The only caveat was that I would have to take one more semester of PE before I could graduate from high school in three years. Whew! And the band director said he was perfectly happy to have me as a student aide last period for the rest of the year. I couldn’t believe it, I was getting everything I wanted. But they said I had to sign a written contract, which I was to draft myself. So I wrote up a contract saying I would attend every class until the end of the year on the condition that I didn’t have to set foot in the gym again, and if I had even so much as one unexcused absence I would immediately be made a ward of the court. “Wow, that’s pretty draconian,” Steve commented, “Don’t you want to give yourself three strikes or something?” I straightened my back and said, “I don’t see any reason why I would have any unexcused absences.” So we both signed it. I discovered that merely by showing up to all my classes every day I could easily get straight A’s, and at the end of the year I was even presented the “High Achievement in Music” award in front of the whole school. To this day I still believe that if I had gone into foster care I would have died of a heroin overdose or suicide before the age of twenty. Thank you, Steve, you are still a hero to me!

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