As a child I was extremely sensitive to music. I remember one dreary winter afternoon on a Sunday when I was six the TV began an infomercial for the Longines Symphonette Society. The upper crust British ‘host’ of the infomercial loftily informed us plebeians that we could have the beauty of music in our homes for just nine ninety nine per month, and then frostily allowed us to hear Mascagni’s intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana.
I became bolted to the spot at the first notes of that mournful, exultant, tune. It bruised my heart, leaving me in tears. Mom asked if I had a tummy ache. I could only shake my head, willing the rest of the world to disappear until that wonderful piece of music subsided like the tide going out.
The sad fact is my family was not musical. Mom and dad played no musical instruments, and, outside of tunes from the radio, we had no music in our home when I was growing up. To make up for this awful vacuum (for I believe I was born with an innate hunger to make and to celebrate music) there were the old MGM and Warner Brothers cartoons on the boob tube. Those huge and vigorous studio orchestras introduced me to snatches of Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, along with the wonderfully frisky piano piece Nola, by Felix Arndt. I capered along with these classical pieces like a pint sized Nijinsky. To me, it was pure Imagination Music; propelling me into a throbbing world where anvils fell from the sky and black round dynamite bombs were juggled with careless elan. I’m telling you, brother -- it made my blood sizzle! Contemporary music, whether Bobby Darin or the Beatles, left me unmoved. Give me the Espana Waltz by Waldteufel over “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles any day!
In fourth grade I prevailed upon mom and dad to let me take violin lessons. I had been watching the Jack Benny show and figured the fiddle was just the thing to wring some laughs from my compatriots at school. They rented a violin from Schmitt Music for twenty-five dollars a month, and soon I was rosining up my bow like Jascha Heifetz. Unfortunately, I was allergic to practicing the scales or doing fingering exercises, and so the violin eventually went back to Schmidt’s and I had to content myself with an old plastic ocarina I picked up at the Goodwill Store down on Como Avenue by the bus transfer station.
As a teenager I bought Nonesuch brand LPs at the record store in Dinkytown, driving my family crazy by endlessly playing the 1812 overture late into the night on my cheap record player. Those cannons at the end of the piece still make my spine tingle. Then I discovered the comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan, and would yodel “My Object All Sublime” at the drop of a Twins baseball cap. Had I taken the trouble to moderate my volume I might have had a pleasant though unassuming singing voice; but, inspired by Alfalfa in the old Our Gang comedies, I screeched in a molto forte register that raised blisters on wallpaper. I was the only child in the history of Tuttle Grade School to be invited OUT of the sixth grade choir when my solo antics proved too distracting during a rendition of “The Hills are Alive With the Sound of Music.”
And then I joined the circus as a clown. The Blue Unit of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows. The marches, gallops, polkas, cakewalks, and waltzes as essayed by band director Bill Prynne thrust me up into a higher plane of existence. There were never any clown gags going on during the trapeze act, so I would sit on an elephant tub next to the band just to hear them play John T. Hall’s ‘Wedding of the Winds.’ The best music, to my way of thinking, was reserved for the clown gags. We tossed shaving cream pies to Fillmore’s bumptious ‘Lassus Trombones’ and took tremendous pratfalls to the accompaniment of ‘Mosquito Parade March’. To this day I still suffer from an earworm infestation from those two perky melodies; in Church, when the sermonizing goes a bit flat I find myself humming one or the other of those pieces and swaying slightly in a blissful limbo.
During my first year with Ringling I asked Lou Jacobs to teach me how to play the musical saw, the way he did in center ring. His reply was succinct and to the point: “Hell no, kid; the musical saw is my racket.”
But that didn’t discourage me in the least. In a back issue of Popular Mechanics I found an ad for the Mussehl & Westphal Company, out of Wisconsin, makers of premier musical saws. I ordered one and scraped away at it until I could do a credible rendition of ‘Aloha Oe.’ Next I bought an old squeezebox at a Saint Vincent de Paul store in Toronto and quickly learned to press out a basic ‘ Du Du Liegst Mir Im Herzen,’ with plenty of wheezy oom-pah-pah. Music washed over me night and day -- and I reveled in it.
When I was blacklisted from the circus, I was banished from so much grateful music it seemed I must run mad. But I was fortunate in having an ecclesiastical leader who offered me bountiful and beautiful choral music during my months at Brown Institute of Broadcasting, where I was trying to learn a new trade. Branch President Lewis Church was, by his own admission, nothing much but an Idaho spud -- but he loved choral music and put together a choir at Christmas to sing Gounod’s ‘Oh Divine Redeemer.’ By then I had gotten over my Alfalfa compulsion and sang in a decent baritone. As with my earlier experience with the Intermezzo, I could never sing or even hear this piece without the salt tears furrowing my cheeks. Such beautiful music made my circus exile endurable, if not enjoyable.
I was fortunate to marry a woman with music in her soul. Amy played piano and filled our home with hymns and Scott Joplin and nursery rhyme tunes for the kids on an old Naugahyde-upholstered upright we bought for fifty dollars. When we divorced I lived in a horrible musical silence for many and many a year -- feeling I no longer deserved any kind of charm in my life.
But now, as the years rudely crowd me, I am once again enjoying the allure of music -- mostly from the free stuff on YouTube. I’m trying to broaden my musical tastes. I’ve even -- lord love a duck! -- started listening to Frank Sinatra. That man had the phrasing of an angel, even though he also had the disposition of a devil. And when the lonely nights seem especially long, and my osteoarthritis keeps me awake, I am listening to the symphonies of Jean Sibelius. I don’t yet understand what that anguished Finn is trying to say in his music, but I’m not giving up -- not by a long shot. When he exhausts me with his tonal ambiguities, I play Bing Crosby singing ‘Far Away Places’ for a brief respite. His plaintive croon easily takes me back to my peregrinating years, and present discomforts dissolve for a blessed while.
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