Music

February 5, 2000

MUSIC

I am trying to tell you about the byways music has led me into, while making it clear that I am a truly mediocre musician. I play serious music just well enough to understand the marvel of the great players. I would rather sight read new music than practice. I played the guitar just long enough to get calluses. I blew one note on the trumpet to show the 3rd grade owner that the thing would make a noise if you kept at it. I can play a scale on my Jamaica steel drum. I studied piano with a concert pianist until I got restless and changed to a teacher who had played piano for silent movies, played string bass in the first women's symphony, taught any instrument you wanted, rewrote great music to fit the instruments her students were playing. When I announced I was quitting the violin after 3 years, on the grounds that I couldn't stand another high note, she offered me a slide trombone. This is an intriguing instrument on which there is no clue of any kind to mark the seven positions of the slide. Only your ear tells you what to do with your vocal chords, to make the sound you want from a particular position. The same is true in singing, an act which is in fact a miracle.

The trombone took me into the high school orchestra and the county orchestra. Girls were not allowed in the marching band until the year after I graduated. Coincidence, I'm sure. I was so impressed in later years with both daughters marching while blowing horns that I tried it a few times when nobody was home. Not easy.

Then I went from a public high school to a private college, with no idea what that meant. My classmates, at least the eastern ones, had been "going to Symphony" in their velvet dresses for years. I heard my first symphony concert when the Boston Symphony came to open the college concert series. I have wondered ever since why anybody needs drugs to get high.

When I tried out for the college orchestra the conductor kindly said they didn't have time to wait for me, which was a very nice way to put it. His trombone music was all in tenor clef, which I hadn't learned, and the tone from that old horn would have turned heads in a hurry. When I tried out for the college music department as a piano student I failed because I didn't know the vocabulary to identify what they wanted me to play, and they kindly directed me to the college piano tutor, whose mission was to get people into the department in a year or so. It was more fun to stay with her. If I didn't practice in exam week, she didn't complain, just set out Beethoven sonatas for four hands and played with me.

I played hymns in Sunday School, I accompanied music class in school, I played Anchors Aweigh for gym class marching, I played for the community orchestra at sunrise services, I played for fashion shows, and school plays.
One night I played for square dancing, a monotonous disaster since there was no music and I could only remember one suitable tune. But we were young, and with enough beer the dancers didn't care.
At another party Andy Williams, yes, the Andy Williams, was a guest and was willing to sing. That time I had sense enough to refuse to play. There is no point in deliberately humiliating yourself. Someone else eventually took the chance.
I was sitting in the back pew at church one morning when someone tapped me on the shoulder and hissed " You play the piano, don't you? Come with me." And in a few minutes I was up in front of the choir and the congregation faking my way through the service. The organist was on vacation and the sub didn't turn up. Choir members kept whispering what came next. At least they didn't lead me to the organ.

I was again sitting peacefully, after a show at the firstborn's school, in Baltimore. She came down the aisle and said, "There's a good La Crosse game at Hopkins to-morrow, and I have to play in the pep band, because the director played for me here today Why don't you stay and see it? You've never seen a La Crosse game." I said, "OK. Find out what I should do about getting a ticket." She came back to say " The director says you don't need a ticket if you'll play the bass drum. All you have to do is watch him and hit the drum on the beat for marches. You can do that."

And so I made my bass drum debut, at age 60 or so, in front of 1600 people - choose any number - at the Rutgers-Johns Hopkins La Crosse game, in the Hopkins stadium. A student carried the drum into the stands. Hitting a bass drum hard and fast is one more thing that is much harder than it looks. I did fairly well on the marches. The problem lay in the fact that I had never seen a La Crosse game and had no idea which moments called for drum rolls and horn flourishes. The trumpeter next to me solved the problem . Whenever a march ended he slid over and made the game noises, then gave me back my drumstick and picked up his horn in time for the next march.

It is not possible to think of Baltimore without thinking of food. My favorite meal was on Harrison's buy boat, anchored in the Inner Harbor. In days of yore fishermen delivered their catch to buy boats out in the bay. On the night I remember the crabs were gone but we could order shrimp to pass the time until a new truckload of crabs arrived. For once in my life I had all the shrimp I wanted. When the truck arrived and the brown paper was spread over our table and a heap of crabs dumped in front of us, it was like having a great dessert after a great meal. Watching a native Marylander open crabs is more fun than eating them. A true crab eater doesn't even have to look at what he's doing.

There has been one memorable meal after another in Baltimore, and always reliably wonderful cream of she crab soup, but the only meal that gave me something I could copy was in the Johns Hopkins Art Museum restaurant. Chicken and Banana in Orange Sauce was added to the repeated favorites list after the first bite.

I didn't tell you about the piano that the two daughters learned on. I started the firstborn on formal lessons when she was 5, and she was able to have some time with my former teacher. The youngest taught herself by listening when someone was playing, then trying it out when she was home alone. (The middle offspring avoided music strenuously for years, but sings in his church's choir now.)

About the piano - we had been married a few weeks when Doug's fraternity house in Philadelphia was about to be closed up, or down, for lack of funds, and we decided to remove the piano. The boys had burned the stool but the piano seemed to be in fair shape. A mover agreed to take it 8 blocks to our apartment for $6.00. When he looked at the narrow steep stairs that led to our apartment he shook his head and demanded another $3.00. Doug shook his head too and said, "You made a deal for $6.00 and that's it." That's the only time I can remember saying, " Please, dear". I must have done it well, because the piano went upstairs. It was built in 1929. It has been moved 7 more times. It doesn't tune to A 440 any more, but it still has a pleasant tone. I still play now and then, still mediocre, still enjoying it. Next month I am going to Baltimore again to hear the firstborn play for her 44th show. That will be adventure enough and I will just sit there and listen.