Under the heading of “I don’t understand classical music but I know what I like,” I confess an addiction to much of it. We used to call it “long-haired music,” a glimpse of the likenesses of 18th-century composers will validate.
In the hippie movement of the ‘70s, with groups like “Three Dog Night,” the term “long-haired” took on a different meaning.
My addiction took hold at an early age, and it’s afflicted all of my siblings as well.
My mom, ever the pragmatist, didn’t care for Beethoven’s symphonies and passed off her lack of interest by complaining, “me da calentura.” What? The Eroica symphony making Mom feverish?
She’d explain that it seemed as if the thousands of notes that make up a Mozart concerto, for example, had been forced through a tube. “And then it’s like they’re playing it backwards.”
My sister Bingy says she learned all there is to know about classical music by watching cartoons at the SERF Theater. Some may remember the loveable character Goofy, who sang “Sweet potato pie, pancakes piled up ‘til they reach the sky,” to the tune of the Italian song, Funiculi, Funicula. As for me, I had no recollection of the long-haired stuff serving as background music for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons. So I never really suffered from Disney spells.
But yet, cranking up the DVD player for my grandchildren yesterday, I caught some classical music as background: the William Tell Overture and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.
My sister was right.
My most vivid recollections of appreciating classical music came through Dad’s almost-daily purchase of a $1.98 album by one of the three B’s, Brahms, Bach and Beethoven. Back in those days, the ‘40s and ‘50s, people owned record players, not stereos or CD players. The term “LP” had not yet arrived, so the records we played were heavy, quite breakable, easily scratchable, and numerous. Rather than vinyl, I think the 78s were made of adobe.
Because the turntable made 78 revolutions per minute, each side of the record lasted only about three minutes.
We were lucky. In the pre-TV era, Dad had gotten a phonograph capable of playing the records in order. Sides 1 through 4 played first, with each disk dropping in order, and after that, we’d flip all the records, in one swell foop, to play sides 5 through 8.
Often, the weight and number of the disks made the turntable slip and slow down, as if the members of the orchestra were ready for their break.
Dad would buy most of his records at Ilfeld Hardware and Furniture. I believe Dad single-handedly persuaded store owner, Carl Ilfeld, to order classical music. Occasionally he’d shop at The Music Album as well.
As 78s gave way to 33s, “high fidelity” came about, and phonographs became stereos, we kept up with Chopin, Schubert and Schumann, Verdi and Vivaldi, Rubenstein and Rachmaninoff. The effect of this kind of music was its being played constantly, and any visitor got exposed to our music.
On my paper route, when I’d stop at each house to collect for the Optic, I never recall having heard the kind of music we played at my house.
And our visitors often noted the prevalence of this kind of music. Not everybody was impressed, mind you, and some even passed it off as pure noise. But to us, it was fine music.
Two friends once remarked that they enjoyed coming over because of the music. But we also wonder how many people avoided visiting us for the same reason.
Our obvious intention was to share the music. We played it loud, sometimes with enough volume for the neighbors to hum along.
Strange, but too often, when we heard country-western or blues or rock at someone else’s home, it became “noise” to us. And we had no qualms about our insistence that somehow the kind of music we played was “good for them.” The understanding, however, was not always reciprocal.
Just as LPs gave way to audio cassettes and those morphed into CD’s, which then became MP3 players and iPods, the way people take in the music has changed.
For example, almost every patron of the Montoya Recreation Center is wired. I followed suit. So, here’s an almost 69-year-old sweating to the 1812 Overture while on a treadmill.
My iPod, the size of a pack of Juicy Fruit, contains some 140 songs, not to mention 34 French lessons.
But for the, er, record, the main, full-length musical selections in my iPod are the overture to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Haydn’s The Bear. Any of these is prettier and more melodic than what I surmise other exercisers are listening to. Now, if only I could convince them of that….
While growing up, my three sons couldn’t escape classical music wafting through my speakers. So successful was my zeal to inculcate them that they now have their own collections of classical music.
But what about the next, or fourth, generation — my three grandkids?
When they visit, they walk through a silent living room, where grandpa is listening to his own private symphony through headphones and an iPod.
Realizing that much of the music we grew up with would never make it to my grandchildren, I flailed around for a solution.
Got it! There’s a device with large speakers that enables us to attach the iPod and ramp up the volume to the four winds, much in the manner of ghetto blasters of yore. Mine is called a digital docking speaker, capable of de-stuccoing houses blocks away.
So, here we go from scratchy 78s to 33s, to stereos to tapes, to CDs, to micro-mini iPods and MP3 players.
And we go from large, fuzzy, tinny speakers all the way to crystal-clear circuitry. And we go from public to extremely private back to public listening.
It’s amazing how over six decades, so many things have changed but yet have remained the same.