Tag: piano

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 10/10)

This thread was only supposed to be a handful of posts but it turns out my life has been pretty complicated. As we get into my high school years the cans of worms that open up are too numerous for this thread, so I will unpack them in future threads. There will be a thread describing the awakening of my mind through reading philosophy, sci/fi and fantasy, which led to readings in mathematics and science, social psychology, and military history. There will be a thread on my involvement with music, how it saved my life and gave me an identity leading to endless opportunities. There will be yet another thread on how my alcoholism developed over a ten year period leading to a very hard bottom at the young age of twenty-three. Another thread will deal with my misbegotten relationship with an eighteen-year-old schoolmate that began when I was still sixteen, and how it contributed to my utterly disastrous early adulthood. And there will be a deep dive into my psychological problems, a many-headed hydra that still horrifies me. But for now, let me just tell a couple more stories and sketch out the logistics of how I emerged from childhood a member of Generation-X.

As the winner of the High Achievement music award I was given a scholarship to go to music camp. This was not a mountain retreat. It was held on the campus of a private university, hosted by the conservatory of music there. Kids came from all over the country. It was amazing. There was a junior music camp comprised of a pair of two-week sessions through the month of July, and a senior music camp that lasted the whole month, for older high school students. There was some kind of mix-up which, by the time the dust settled, resulted in my attending the month-long senior camp as a bassoonist. Many of my friends from junior high school were attending the junior camp, and I turned out to be the youngest student in the senior camp. There were sections for choir, band, orchestra, and a piano master class. As a budding pianist I was particularly in awe of the musicians in the piano master class who all seemed to be leagues ahead of me. One day I managed to find — unlocked — one of the practice rooms with a grand piano. I had recently purchased a copy of the Brahms piano sonata in F minor, so I settled down for a first run-through, sight reading, never having even heard it before. While I was still midway through the first movement there was a loud knock on the door. Oh no! I was not supposed to be using that piano as it was reserved for the master class students, and I was a mere bassoonist who had just turned fifteen. I sheepishly opened the door to see two of the guys from the master class. One had just finished high school and was going to attend UC Berkeley the following year. The other was from Las Cruces, New Mexico, who was about to start his senior year of high school. I had heard them both play: they were the best in the class. They together shouted, “Who are you?” I told them I was sorry to be using the room as I was just a lowly young bassoon player, and they replied, “Oh, no, you go ahead and keep playing. We were just wondering who it could be who had the chops to play the Brahms sonata so well. We know no one in the master class is playing it.” I told them I had just bought it and was trying to sight-read it. They were amazed to hear that, and told me I was going to have to hang out with them. After that they took me under their wings and at lunch they introduced me to the master class instructor, a world-famous concert pianist. I was euphoric. I ended up paling around with them all month, walking on a cloud. They told me, “Next year you have to sign up for the master class.” It turns out I did attend the master class two years later, but those details will have to wait for the music thread.

I was also embraced by some older orchestra musicians, one a brilliant violinist and pianist who later became a professional, another a clarinetist who was pretty obviously gay. One of their friends, an alumnus of the music camp who was now in college and also pretty queer, came to visit one day and the next thing I knew I was whizzing along in a car with them to go to a music store. It was strictly forbidden to leave campus except on supervised activities, so I was risking being sent home in shame if it were discovered, but I was too jazzed up by all the attention they were lavishing on me, telling me how talented I was and treating me like a king. The visitor and I got to talking about Rachmaninoff and being bisexual — it seemed a natural blend of subjects at the time. At the music store he bought me the score of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and said, “You better know this by the next time I see you.” I have never quite mastered it, frankly. Perhaps I wasn’t as good as they thought, but my self-esteem was rocketing upward at the time. And yes, even then I understood that this was grooming behavior, but I didn’t care. They treated me respectfully and I didn’t feel in any danger. I don’t think there was any.

My high school years were dominated by music. I had jazz combo (on piano) before school, symphonic band (bassoon) and marching band (tuba) during school. At lunch time the jazz big band rehearsed (baritone sax). Last period I had music theory. After school I went to the voice teacher’s studio to accompany piano lessons (paid), and on Saturdays I taught piano lessons at the local music store. In the evenings in the fall we had marching band practice for the Friday night football games, and in the spring time we had musical theater orchestra for the big spring musical production. I was busy. But my brain having awakened, I was also taking all the college prep courses, including chemistry, physics, Spanish, psychology, creative writing, rhetoric, etc. I was one of the top students by now. One day my creative writing instructor, a hip/cool veteran of the Vietnam conflict, asked me to stay after class. He inquired about what I planned to do for a living after high school. I said, “I’m kind of thinking composition.” I meant becoming a composer of music. I dreamed of writing movie scores while I improvised on the piano for hours at a time. But he thought I meant English composition and said, “Hmm, I wouldn’t recommend that path for most people, but I think you could actually succeed at it.” He entered my name in a national creative writing competition, but I freaked out and never submitted anything. Awkward! Then my chemistry teacher took me aside and said, “You know, this is a thankless profession and I wouldn’t wish it on an enemy, but you have a special gift. That presentation you did in class reminded me of your father. You could be a great high school chemistry teacher!” The next year my physics instructor took me aside and said basically the same thing, but for physics: “That presentation you did on diodes had everyone hanging on every word!” Finally, my band director asked me to sit down in his office during my senior year (I had never even set foot in his office before!). He asked me about my plans for the future, and by then I was planning on attending the University of California at Santa Barbara for chemical engineering (long story, see girlfriend thread coming soon). He said, “Oh, I thought for sure it would be music. And I would say, don’t even waste time going to college for it. You should head straight down to LA and start doing studio sessions. You’re already better than half of those guys. You know everything you need to know to get started.” Man! I was flummoxed. Too many choices for this neuro-divergent to possibly process. So I went to UCSB because I wanted to learn to surf.

When my older brother, Dan, graduated, he went to live with my Dad. That left just three of us at home. I enjoyed having my little sister in band with me my senior year — she played clarinet. My little brother learned the drum set and played in a punk metal band when he got to high school. As my own graduation approached my mom decided it was time to sell the old Victorian house I had lived in since birth and move ten miles away to the university town where she worked. The escrow closed before the end of the school year and I had to commute the ten miles to finish the last two weeks before graduation. It’s all a blur, but it pretty much ruined the end of my senior year for me. I wasn’t able to celebrate with my friends properly. I never even picked up my diploma. The graduation ceremony was pretty cool, though. There were nearly five hundred students in my senior class. Normally the entire symphonic band would sit on the football field endlessly playing Pomp and Circumstance while the students filed through to get their diplomas. This was a bummer for the dozens of seniors in band who would have preferred to be with family and friends. This year the jazz combo volunteered to play instead. There were only six of us — piano, bass, drums, guitar, saxophone and trumpet — so that freed everyone else up. We played it straight: pomp and circumstance in all it’s regal solemnity. But after a few choruses we mixed it up, doing a blues version, then back to straight. We did a country version, a rock version, and a jazz version too. The crowd loved it!

By the time I was in college my younger brother and sister alternated years living with my dad and I was starting to lose track of where everyone was at any given time. The childhood home was a thing of the past and we were scattering into our adult lives. My older three siblings are all classic Baby-Boomers in their general outlook on life. But I became much closer to my younger siblings who came to define for me the attitudes of Gen-X. We were essentially latch-key kids, on our own for the most part through high school. We each had to carve out a life for ourselves with very little parental guidance or support entering adulthood. All six of us meandered through our twenties, working hard just to survive. We all turned out very different, but we all made it. The older we get, the more we appreciate each other.

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