A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

My piano is an old love, a dusty, overlooked and abandoned love. But reading Leon Fleisher’s book (see April 14 post) made me seek out the piano again, the rent-to-purchase spinet that my parents bought for me to learn on and then gave me when I had a house of my own.

I had watched Fleisher play “Sheep May Safely Graze” on YouTube last week. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLYxiLNJj8 It was sublime — and even more moving because you could see his little finger curl up after striking the high notes. You could see the effort it took him to play this piece.

I did something impulsive. I ordered the sheet music. And when it arrived yesterday I took it right to the piano. I’ve always loved this Bach cantata, even had a string quartet play it at our wedding. It is sweet and simple, with a melody that wanders off a bit, like a lost lamb. The piece starts off easily enough, but by the second page there are intricate fingerings. You must bring out an inner melody amidst scores of other notes — not easy for someone who’s been doing a lot more typing than playing the last few decades.

Still, I vow (and I vow it here, in a semi-public place!) to learn “Sheep May Safely Graze.” To prepare each part separately. To take it slowly enough that the notes enter my hands and my head. To increase speed only when I’ve mastered the voicing. To bring that lamb home. To play again.

In My Nine Lives, the pianist Leon Fleisher describes the despair he faced when the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand curled up and stopped working. He was in his prime, playing with the world’s great orchestras, when the mysterious ailment derailed his career. Fleisher had been playing since he was four — for as long as he could remember — and by age 9 was studying with the great Artur Schnabel. Music was Fleisher’s life.

Fleisher admits that he thought about suicide. But he loved life and he loved music, so he turned to teaching and conducting. He mastered repertoire for the left hand and gave recitals. He never stopped looking for a cure for his right hand, either, and more than 30 years later, he found one: botox injections for what was finally diagnosed as focal dystonia, a neurological condition that makes muscles contract.

The life he lived was not the one he planned; it was a richer one. “Time and again, I would look at my life and marvel that so many wonderful things had happened that never would have happened if my hand had not been struck down. I couldn’t imagine my life without conducting. I couldn’t imagine life without teaching so intensely. I couldn’t imagine my life without [my wife] Kathy.”

This is the door-closing-window-opening philosophy writ large. As I write these words I listen to Fleisher play the Schubert Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, Opus 960. It’s a piece that Fleisher (with co-author Anne Midgette) describes as “sublime,” “aching,” “like a memory from far away.” The music Fleisher makes now is transcendent. The desert years carved out a place in him, and the music that gurgles up from that place is both delicate and unflinching. His playing has a depth that comes from struggle.

When I work at home I walk in the suburbs; when I work downtown I walk in the city. Or, if I’m too busy for that (usually the case), I dash from one building on campus to the other. Even a few minutes away from my desk lightens my mood.

Take yesterday, for example. It was about 10 when I went for my mid-morning stroll to the cafe for a cup of tea and heard piano music coming from the small chapel in the middle of the ground floor. It was the “Great Gate of Kiev” from “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky. A noble, stately and expansive piece. A bit grand for a coffee break, but I wasn’t complaining. I slowed my pace, I listened as long as I could. I was all tingly from the swell of sound.

The Great Gate of Kiev Mussorgsky celebrated wasn’t ever a real gate, but the artist Victor Hartmann’s design for it (pictured in the copyrighted image above; pardon the “watermark”). The gate was never built. It is the art and the music that remain.

I often walk to music — radio music, that is. I have an iPod but it’s old and barely holds its charge a half an hour. Besides, I haven’t loaded much music on it. In fact, I never really made the switch from LP to CD. Much of my favorite music is on vinyl. So for years I’ve contented myself with whatever our classical station serves up. This is probably just laziness on my part, or perhaps a willingness to be surprised, to take what fate hands me, aurally speaking.

I was thinking of this in terms of what I wrote about yesterday, the “Big Sort.” Not only are we segregating ourselves into homogeneous clubs, churches and communities but we are also reading custom-tailored news and listening to carefully selected music.

The world is big, complex, confusing. We need the comfort of sameness and exclusion. But trying a new activity, listening to unfamiliar tunes or chancing upon an article in the hard copy of a newspaper gives a necessary eclecticism to our lives. It means we’re looking out windows instead of into mirrors.

Last night we sat on the floor of the Kennedy Center lobby and heard 300 tubas, sousaphones and other lower brass play “Deck the Halls,” “Angels We Have Heard on High” and “Jingle Bells.” But the tune I can’t get out of my head this morning is “76 Trombones.”

That’s because we were introduced to some unusual members of the lower brass family, including a Russian bassoon (a gawky looking mix of wood and metal) and the double bell euphonium (pictured above), as in these lyrics from “The Music Man”‘s signature tune : “Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons/each bassoon having his big fat say.”

TubaChristmas concerts, the international phenomenon which began in New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza in 1974, were created by the late Harvey Phillips as a tribute to his teacher William J. Bell. The appropriately named Bell was born on Christmas Day 1902, and among other highlights of his illustrious career, played with John Philip Sousa. So Christmas and the 4th of July come together in the heritage of this fine musician — just as holiday carols and summer music came together in my head this morning. And why not? It’s the season to seek joy in unexpected places.

Last night I heard on the radio the story of Michael White, a jazz clarinetist who lives in New Orleans. Katrina destroyed his home, forced him to move out of the city for a while, but he — and his music — are back. Threaded throughout this story were tunes from his clarinet, such rich, reedy sounds — we used to hear such sounds when our clarinetist was still in high school. And they made me want to play the piano — our poor spinet has languished this summer — and to teach Celia, who said the other day that she’d like to learn.

It was always my goal to fill our house and our lives with music. Too often that means turning on the radio. But I tell myself what I tell our girls: Once the music is in your fingers, it is yours forever.

It was music, in fact, that brought Michael White and his New Orleans back to life. Here’s what he said: “And then I came to realize the most valuable thing that I have, I never lost. It’s inside. It’s that music tradition. It’s the memory of all of those parades, of all of those older musicians who — who brought the spirit of New Orleans’ music and passed it on to me, so that I could help to pass it on to others. And the spirit of that music is with me every day. Every time I play my instrument, everything I ever knew and felt about New Orleans is still alive.”