A Walker in the Suburbs

I’m not a musician anymore. I play the piano every few weeks. But I’m an avid listener, and sometimes when I hear a piece I knew from long ago, I can imagine the string bass part or I can see the piano music, the key signature, the caesuras, the repeats.

I always liked the latter. The vertical bars, one thick and one thin. The two dots. The permission it gave. Try it again, this time softer or louder or more legato.

Playing the same section twice had its challenges at times, especially if it was a difficult passage. But it also gave me, never the most confident of musicians, two chances to get it right.

Not a bad idea, in music or in life.

Word came yesterday that the great pianist Van Cliburn died on Wednesday. Though his career did not fulfill its early promise, there was a time when his name was on everyone’s lips. He was the man who so wowed  the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow in 1958 that judges were forced to ask Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev if they could give him the medal. “Is he the best? Then give him the prize,” Khruschev is supposed to have said.

Van Cliburn took not just the classical music world by storm. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine, given a New York City ticker tape parade. When I told my kids this last night, they said, “What’s a ticker tape parade?”

I heard Van Cliburn play when I was a child, a young piano student. Not yet in love with classical music, I stared up at the ceiling of the concert hall, counting the beams or the light fixtures or something. Bored by the Chopin or the Rachmaninoff or whatever dazzling piece he was playing. Bored by my own lack of understanding.

Could I have that concert back now, please?

Watching a colleague’s fine film about a musician’s comeback from MS makes me think about music, how important it was to me growing up, how it has slipped out of my life, how I might bring it back.

Consider the offstage trumpet. Many composers have used it — Mahler, Respighi, Verdi — but the piece I remember it in most is Beethoven’s Leonore Overture Number 3. I was buried in the string bass section, still learning to play the instrument, while Jim Reed, first-chair trumpet of the Central Kentucky Youth Symphony Orchestra, stood in the wings of Memorial Hall blaring the call.

But it could be any orchestra anywhere, the trumpet in the distance, like the call to hunt or the approach of a royal entourage. It’s the acoustic equivalent of painterly perspective, a tonal shading, extending the orchestra beyond the stage.

Hearing it played (from minutes 9:17 to 10:12 of this recording) makes me think something important is about to happen. Not here, of course, but somewhere else. It is, therefore, a reminder to pay attention to the faraway and forgotten, to what’s offstage as well as on.

I bought the tickets months ago in a fit of concert-going induced by pleasant outdoor evenings at Wolf Trap last summer. But by the time Saturday night rolled around I was wondering why we were going to hear the group Chicago. A concert for me usually means a symphony orchestra. What was I thinking of?

The opening band, Kansas, didn’t do much to dispel the fears. Yes, they played “Dust in the Wind,” but their other songs were more cacophonous than I remember. By the time I was ready to slip in the ear plugs, though, the opening set was over and Chicago was on stage. The volume went down and the energy level went up. Here was the soaring trumpet in “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” and the driving keyboards in “Saturday in the Park.”

And even though I’m a classical music nerd, I still knew every song. More to the point, every song took me back to a me I hadn’t been in years; to sweaty high school slow dances and college parties in the top floor “rack rooms” of gritty fraternity houses.

It was enough to make me believe that the past isn’t really over after all, that it lives within us and can be sparked to life by a brass chord, a guitar riff, a voice. That music is a place, after all, and a visit there can make us feel young again.

Photo: Wikipedia

My musical life has languished for years, taken a back seat to raising kids and earning a living and making a home in the suburbs. It’s not just the playing of music that’s dropped away but even the listening. Being at least two generations behind in recording technology (pre-MP3, pre-CD — most of my treasures are in vinyl), I’ve contented myself with the radio.

The radio, of course, is potluck, taking what you’re given and, in the case of D.C.’s current classical music offerings, listening to the same “greatest hits” over and over again.

But a couple weeks ago an iPod nano entered my life and I’m finding tunes I haven’t heard in years, downloading show music and folk tunes and arias, mixing them all together and coming up with playlists that start with Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” and end with Gilbert and Sullivan’s “He is an Englishman.”

To paraphrase someone (Churchill?) who said, “It’s not the end, nor even the beginning of the end … but perhaps it is the end of the beginning,” I say, It’s not the revival of my musical life, or even a reinstatement. But it is, at least, the end of its dormancy.

Today is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose grave we visited in Vienna (though due to the burial practices at the time, we can’t be sure his bones rest beneath that soil) and whose melodies have been in my head since I was a kid (of that I am sure).

When I was in high school, I played his sonatas on the piano and his 40th Symphony on the string bass (along with the Central Kentucky Youth Symphony Orchestra, of which I was surely the proudest and least musical member). The 40th opens with the tune that children still learn to sing with the phrase “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Mozart.” (For an interesting rendition, click here.)

I listen to Mozart now and I feel as Salieri did in the film “Amadeus,” amazed at the sounds one mortal can produce, in awe of the genius so evident in his music. “Displace one note and there would be diminishment,” Salieri says, “displace one phrase and the structure would fall. … Here again was the very voice of God. I was staring through the cage of those ridiculous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”

Sometimes when I’m feeling worn out, idea-less (is that a word?), in need of a long vacation on a broad beach, a song pops into my head. Often the song will be perfectly apt to the situation at hand. With the canny precision of a dream, the lyrics or melody will match the mood I’m feeling — even before I’m feeling it.

This morning I’ve been thinking how life requires us to keep going. Our steps don’t have to be elegant or persuasive. We just have to put one foot in front of the other. Over and over again.

And the song that popped into my head was this one, “The Rhythm of Life.” When I was a teacher and accompanied the school chorus, we performed this piece. It was in my head for years and the magic of the Internet and YouTube brought it alive again.

Originally from “Sweet Charity” (I think), it’s beloved of grade school choruses and is best sung by amateurs. We are the ones who capture the reaching, reaching, reaching for the high notes in the middle and rushing through the flustered accelerando near the end. It is a song about living, about keeping going. I’m going to be listening to it today.