The Parent Influence

There have been a couple kind of creepy coincidences in my life where my love of music and my parents are concerned. OK, more than a couple, but today I'll only talk about a couple. In my post about my Dad's tastes in music, I was hinting that his influence may count for more than I care to admit. Here I am, a full-grown creature with kids of my own and I find myself looking at my tastes in music and thinking, how did I get this way? Did I choose to like what I like? Or was it chosen for me?

The answer is complex and I think it's complex for everyone. Even when tastes are a reaction against the tastes of parents, that in itself constitutes an influence that seems to compromise what we think of as free will. Would such folks have chosen their current path had our parents been more sympathetic?

In my case, my parents didn't always understand my tastes in music, but they were proud of me for having them. In some cases, like my ceaseless playing of Mussorgsky and Beethoven on the piano, my Dad was highly approving. Other loves, like the Beatles, he teasingly referred to as "monkey music"--it just sounded like noise to him.

More significantly, I don't recall my Mom ever saying a negative word about any music that I liked. I do remember her telling me that I couldn't make a living off only a few songs--which was her way of encouraging me to work harder at the things I loved.

In my 30s, long after my mother had died, there was a moment when I just wanted to write something that had a lot of joy in it. I had begun a new relationship and I wanted to celebrate it. The piece that came out was a crude, but fun little waltz that quoted the song "Buffalo Gals (Won't You Come Out Tonight)". I still like to play it once in a while--it's a bold, shouty sort of piano solo. I didn't give any thought at all to how I had come to know the song. I still don't really know.

On the phone with my Dad a week or so later, I happened to mention the Buffalo Gals Waltz and hummed the song and laughed about how much fun it was to play. He was quiet for a minute and then he said, "That song was on your mother's lips the night we met."

He had never told me that. Mom certainly never told me that.

A couple years later, I was again talking to my Dad about musical interests--these were rare conversations. Mostly we didn't talk, we just enjoyed each other's company. I told him about Charles Ives and his love of clashing sounds and how important that composer had been in my development and my understanding of contemporary music. And he said, grimly, "I know that guy." Umm .... What?

"I was stationed in Boston briefly," he told me, "and the orchestra would put on free concerts in the summer on the riverfront. Your mother used to drag me down to hear the music and one of the composers they played was Charles Ives. I didn't like it, but your mother was excited about it."

I can recall only one conversation that I had with my mother about music. She told me that the orchestra tuning up was her favorite part about going to the symphony. She loved the swirl of the random sounds, the scraps of melodies zooming past each other.

One conversation. So how is it that I am so much her?

--C.

Bloomer Girl

I need to talk about my Dad. It comes up periodically. He loomed larger than life and his spirit still does. But in order to get to there, we have to start somewhere else--up the Great White Way and the stagelights of Broadway.

OK, now, I'm not one for musicals, generally. But it's not because the form itself is bad. In theory, a staged story with songs built in seems like a great idea and, approached with real creativity, it could be a powerful medium. But instead, musicals generally follow a tradition rooted in vaudeville that has little or nothing to do with either a good story or good songs. At the same time, they tend to cowtow to our basest artistic instincts by mimicking the monumentality and mythos of opera like a beggar at ... well, an opera. By aiming at the masses the medium misses the opportunity for meaning. But Broadway isn't about meaning; its about money. And so, musicals, on the whole, are a waste and I avoid them.

As with pop songs, however, smashed within the tight little fist of Broadway producers you can occasionally find a real diamond, formed and harbored there as if by accident.

And that brings me to my Dad. He was a disciplined ex-Navy pilot and an executive of a small steel corporation. He read books. Hundreds and hundreds of books. Usually novels from once-recitable Western canon but also history, poetry and philosophy. His taste for culture emphasized the nobility of the common man--the works of Lincoln, Shakespeare, Hemingway, the poetry of Robert Frost and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Vladimir Horowitz (guileless, pure talent) playing the music of Beethoven (self-made genius-overcomes-debilitating-hardship) was to be found on the stereo console's tall spindle piled atop LPs of the torch songs of Edith Piaf and "West Side Story" of Leonard Bernstein. The thread that bound them was the nobility of mundane experience, the idealization of simple humanity, the elevation of the our day-to-day stories and concerns onto a white marble throne. Dad was the American Dream incarnate and he knew it and celebrated it, toasting it with Manhattans by the fireplace with a good book.

After he died, I slowly began exploring some of the musicals that he subjected us to when we were kids. "Oklahoma", "Camelot" and "Gypsy" were certainly among them, but you can find as many detractors for those as you can admirers. The others were more significant: in addition to "West Side Story" there was Lerner and Lowe's "My Fair Lady", Wasserman/Darion/Leigh's "Man of La Mancha," Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man," Gershwin's "Porgy & Bess" and Stein/Harnick/Bock's "Fiddler on the Roof." Inarguably classics of the genre.

I've gained new respect for my Dad's taste in music as a result of this Broadway inquiry. Just last year, as a gift to my siblings, I went hunting for a couple songs he used to sing: "Free as the Sun is Free" and "I Got a Railrood Song." I had no idea where they came from, but I knew most of the words. We could not take a family car ride anywhere before, within a mile or so, he would come busting out with one or the other. If my father were a sitcom, these were his theme songs.

Turns out, they are both from the same musical, a largely forgotten flower of a work called "Bloomer Girl" with music by Harold Arlen, that was first staged in 1944. A revival was mounted in 2001 and got a tepid, if not sour review from the New York Times, a dissatisfaction that had more to do with the direction than the writing, I think. The original 1944 review, available in the NYTimes online archives, was much more favorable.

Set at the start of the Civil War, the story is a totally contrived blend of romance with commentary on both feminism and race issues. The political positions weren't exactly radical, but they were political positions and that in itself was a little radical for 1944. The authors never lose sight of the charm factor, an almost obsequious pandering to their audience. But still, they manage some great moments, including the women's rousing anthem "It Was Good Enough for Grandma" and a moving little auction block chant, "Man for Sale". And, of course, "Free as the Sun is Free" a song that, for better or worse, will haunt me to my dying day.

You can't find "Bloomer Girl" on iTunes. But, you can get it for $4.99 on CD at Amazon. A bargain. As you listen, just think of my Dad, comfortable in his armchair on the sidelines of the Cold War. My Dad would quote over and over a line from a speech by Faulkner (who, by the way, was referencing himself--and that's not nobility, that's hutzpah): "Man will not only endure; he will prevail."

Will we prevail because of musicals like "Bloomer Girl"? Probably not. But here's what my Dad would say: take enough simple acts by individuals like the composers and actors of that musical--add them all up and the result might just be something heroic.

--C.