Music: short-shorts on a theme

Jim. Sitting on my front porch thinking about you, how you might have died. And where. How do I even know you died? I bet Bruce told me. Or Charlie. We four were part of a group in junior high and played tackle football in the mud, Tilden Regional Park, 1963 or 1964. I wasn’t really in the group, but I did enjoy slipping in the mud, and sliding, trying to block you, Jim. Much later Bruce did try for a PhD, ended up happily enough managing frontline customer service in an academic library. Charlie taught public school math for decades. I taught English for awhile in Community Colleges, then worked in printing and, finally, in public libraries. Maybe my favorite role was disability services. Though I saw you on the streets, Jim, where you lived for years, I saw you in the library too, sometimes on your meds, sometimes not. You always recognized me, greeted me, and I returned your greetings. I thought about how the library could have helped you out more, never figured it out. Makes me sad. After you died, I saw an obit, but all I remember was that a local choral group sang at your funeral, a group you’d been a firm part of. Such a sweet voice you had, the obit author reported.
    - Alan Bern



At the edge of the yard where Gresford colliery once stood, a wheel from the winding gear marks the site where two hundred and sixty six miners died. It was history already when I was a boy, but at “Big Meet,” when brass bands struck up The Miners’ Hymn, old men who worked the blind pit ponies could be seen tearing up. Written as a requiem for all that sorry disaster’s dead I gave it my all on an old Besson cornet. I come from a long line of Durham pitmen. At the end of their shifts, when the vicar falls silent, Gresford is played to send them off.
    - Alan Peat

NOTE: You can hear this hymn played by different bands by Googling the words “Gresford Miners’ Hymn” — highly recommended: the versions played by the Black Dyke Mills Brass Band and by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. The hymn was composed by Robert Saint.



As an adult, I fell in love with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. I, too, wanted to sing, dress in gorgeous costumes, openly express love, sorrow, loss. Then I remembered my musical history. In the early grades, singing lessons were informal, everyone singing together in a shouting mode. Then came the real music teacher, the real music room. We practiced scales, echoed back a note she sang to us, sang lines of songs alone. But when I sang, the teacher frowned. She stopped asking me to sing alone. At the end of term was a concert, each class on stage, taking it in turns to sing. At supper, a week before the concert, my mother said, “the music teacher spoke to me. Because you sing out of tune, you will sit on stage with your class, but mouth the words.” I said, “No, I won’t.” My mother looked across the table at my stepfather, “What can I do?” “Keep her singing around the house,” he said, “all the pop singers sing out of tune. She could be famous.” I said, “I’ll sit in the audience. I won’t pretend to sing. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them why.”
    - Antonia Matthew



Music is a constant companion of mine. Sometimes I’m very particular. But other times I just go with the flow and listen to whatever is floating around in the air. My intolerance of noise is downright wicked, however, so I remove myself from those situations as quickly as possible. Like leaf blowers, or beeping construction machines, or blaring sirens, or kids throwing tantrums, or those automatic hand dryers in public bathrooms. Pleasant environmental sounds are soothing — like cats purring, or bees buzzing, or porch chimes gently tolling in a soft breeze. When I’m feeling particular I become absorbed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Mozart’s Requiem, or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Life is full and compelling when I am surrounded by aural beauty. No matter how crazily these present times contort us, music is a gift and a blessing beyond compare.
    - Blue Waters



A beat pulses through wooden risers beneath my feet and the shared breath of exuberant teenagers surrounds me as we sing. We are on stage in the midst of our high school Christmas Choral Concert. The audience is filled with nostalgic alumni who are invited to join us for the grand finale, Handel’s Halleluja Chorus from the Messiah. They pack the stage and the magic begins. No one ever forgets their part. We, members of the the acapella choir, have tingled with anticipation for weeks, practicing four part harmony, every morning in choir class. With a bit of prompting, I can still sing the alto parts of the Halleluja Chorus (totally off key). Singing together bonds us. We breathe the same air, microbes and viruses are shared. Even DNA is shared. When we control breath in unison with others, our heartbeats synchronize with every person in the choir. Endorphins are released in our bodies, as voices swell and ebb and swell again to crescendo after crescendo. We are engulfed in the music. We are the music. This experience is as close to joy as any other in life.
    - Carole Johnston



As a youngster, I’d often “play” piano on the old Ford’s dashboard, synchronizing with the radio. Dad said my long fingers would do me well, but we couldn’t afford lessons or an upright. I couldn’t wait until fourth grade when I would follow my siblings by taking recorder lessons, but a month before finishing third grade, we moved. Instead, I began expressing my creativity in poetry and art. Years later at a party, my husband overheard me share this secret yearning with someone. Soon after, he surprised me with a Casio keyboard. His sweet gesture was heart-warming. We researched local teachers, selected one, and I introduced myself on the call. “Hi Lelia. I’m 64 years old and can’t read music, but I’ve always wanted to play piano. Would you be open to teaching me?” A resounding “yes” came through. I became Lelia’s oldest student, but she loved my passion and enthusiasm. She was wonderfully patient and encouraging, the perfect formula for me. After the first year of instruction, on her birthday, I pulled out three elementary songs for my first recital, including The Old Brown Jug, for a simple duet with her. My fingers trembled, hovering over the keys, but I was ready to make my dream come true.
    - Deborah Burke Henderson



Help me, I think I’m falling . . .  Court and Spark spins on my sister’s phonograph. Above it, a poster of sand-colored walls, gleaming domes. Jerusalem. I don’t spend much time in Felicia’s room. She’s a senior and I’ve just started sixth grade. But today she doesn’t seem to mind, pasting movie tickets and love notes in her scrapbook. Rob Goldman has curly black hair and wants to live in Israel, where he and Felicia met. Aliyah. I look at Felicia’s books: Shakespeare, Keats, Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Rod McKuen’s Listen to the Warm. I make up my own titles: Smell the Darkness. Taste the Noise. Joni Mitchell has stopped singing. Felicia lifts the needle, replaces Joni with Carole. Rhymes and Reason — that’s a good name, almost as good as Listen to the Warm. A napkin from Le Crepe, a playbill from Fiddler. An almost flattened rose. Oh, I’ve been to Canaan and I won’t rest . . . “Carole King went to Canaan?” I ask. “Is she Jewish?” Felicia laughs. I try again. “You’ve been to Canaan.” “Many times.” “I thought only once. In July.” Felicia pastes another photo: she and Rob by the Red Sea. Carole spins round and round.
    - Ellen Orleans



During my growing-up years in the 1940s, it was Beethoven, Mozart, and Puccini that poured from our Zenith stereo console. Later, my older sister introduced me to jitterbug songs like Rock Around the Clock, and in college I got moony over love ballads by Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, and The Four Aces. But country music? Paah! Those whiny songs and twangy banjos? Not for me! When my husband insisted on listening to country music on the car radio, I was horrified. I hated it. He bought albums by Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Tammy Wynette. How could he like that trashy stuff? Then he hauled me to a Johnny Cash concert in Lansing, Michigan, and I heard Johnny sing Folsom Prison Blues and tell the story of how he came to write it. After that I began to actually listen to the words in songs by Patsy Cline, Hank Snow, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn. I learned how to dance to those songs, and in North Dakota my husband and I often frequented bars that featured country music so we could burn up the dance floor. I was hooked. But that was then. Now it’s back to Rodgers & Hammerstein, 2Cellos, Debussy, and — yes — Beethoven.
    - Emily Rhoads Johnson



In the seventies, when I was a child, there weren't many movies on TV, and the ones that were allowed to air were, unfortunately, in black and white. At the time, a British series, The Onedin Line, was in vogue. For several years in a row, every Sunday afternoon, I gave up other activities just to be able to see this lovely program, which helped me escape to another world. I prayed that the electricity would not be interrupted so as not to miss the meeting with the sailors. That's the only way I could hear the pleasant symphony of the ocean waves. I don't remember much about the action, but the song on the soundtrack stuck so well in my mind that it followed me from an early age. I've always been able to hum some of it. I can still do it. One day I wondered to whom this fascinating work belongs, which enchanted me and which in difficult times helps me to move on, and I found out. The author is Aram Khachaturian, and the piece is called Adagio from Spartacus. If you haven't heard of it yet, take your time, it's worth it. You will immediately fall in love with it.
    - Florin C. Ciobica



After returning home from a long work shift on a busy Saturday, I decided to go for a stroll in the large un-mowed field next to the little cabin that I lived in. I wandered slowly through the brilliantly glowing tall grasses and wildflowers under a blazing July sun being serenaded by crickets and birds. And then I noticed another sound wafting in from beyond the nearby woods. It was the unmistakable sound of bagpipes being played. And they were playing Amazing Grace! I stood still and listened intently to the music from an unseen musician that blended magically with the rustling plants and natural orchestra. I was treated to this lovely afternoon concert on several more occasions during that summer. I asked neighbors and fellow bus passengers if they knew who the anonymous musician might be, and did internet searches as well, but it remained a mystery.
    - Frank Muller



When I was a sophomore at UCLA, I took a class in Music History to satisfy the arts requirement for science majors. The class was in a large lecture hall and, on the first day, Professor Sayers strode to center stage where he announced that the course would survey the history of Western Music from medieval times to the modern period, including atonal composers but not jazz, which he called “a barbaric yawp.” Then he seated himself on a small revolving stool at the piano and, stressing each syllable, intoned: “Jo-hann Se-bas-tian Bach!”  From then on, he began each class in similar fashion, reverently reciting Bach’s name like a priest offering the “body of Christ” at a Mass. One morning, a fire alarm went off just as Professor Sayers was lowering his ample rear end. He missed the stool and landed on the floor with a resounding “yawp!”
    - Jack Goldman



The drive from Auburn, Maine to Elmira, New York is a long one even with today’s extensive network of highways. It must have been excruciating ninety-one years ago, in 1931, driving a Ford Model-A with a young family in tow. For my grandparents, it was a journey of necessity — echoed by millions of Americans during the Great Depression — born of unemployment, babies to feed and, often, diminishing hope. My grandfather, a piano tuner who ran his own business, watched his small practice dry up overnight. Piano tuning was a luxury in Maine’s mill towns, which most could forego. With only one prospect in sight, a job posting clipped from a trade paper, my grandfather decided it was best to apply in person for a piano-tuning position at a music store, in a town he had never seen, where work was sparse but available. Driving six-hundred miles, from the banks of the Androscoggin River to the shores of the Chemung, my grandparents carried two infants, a few keepsakes, and a lone letter of recommendation. The store manager, impressed by my grandfather’s pluck yet sensing his desperation, hired him immediately — an act of humanity forever changing the course of our family’s history.
    - Jim Mazza



The Japanese art of “kintsugi,” using gold to repair a piece of cracked pottery, has become one of the tools I use to soothe the pain of my migraine headaches. When a headache hits me, it’s as if someone has hammered my skull, cracking it. Pain races along the fault lines I feel in my skull and down into my neck. My headache ends only after I fall into a deep sleep and my body resets itself. Years ago, I discovered that drugs did little to bring relief and my system suffered from their side effects. With research and advice from other sufferers — using rolled towels, cooling pads for the forehead, and of course, resting in a dark place —  natural remedies were what I relied on to lessen pain until deep sleep arrived. Then I read someplace that soft music could help. I remembered that the ancients (think of David playing the lyre to soothe King Saul) used music in this way. I found that it worked for me. I tried an inexpensive “Best of Mozart” CD and it acted like that “kintsugi” — repairing the cracks I imagined in my brain — easing the pain. Falling into a deep sleep came more quickly. Mozart’s golden tones are, indeed, my personal kintsugi.
    - Joan Leotta



it was in our shared shower sing-along that it all started when i moved into his condo gilbert and sullivan did too it was a wild time at the top of our voices to hear ourselves through the steamy spray it wasn't long before we were planning the full length concert and wedding with an intermission and my three costume changes poor wandering one he played the flute little miss buttercup I sang all three little maids from school and klezmer too . . . oi mama I'm so in love our harpsichordist married us in the five minute encore thank goodness they clapped
    - Kath Abela Wilson



“Stop listening to the notes and listen to the music.” So said George Ives, father of the famous composer Charles Ives. The story goes that the elder Ives was music director of a small church in Danbury, Connecticut, and when a parishioner complained about the lack of expertise among the singers, George replied with his timeless wisdom and continued to lead his joyful, amateur choir. I consoled myself with this story when, as a young woman in Washington DC, fresh from rural Pennsylvania, a voice teacher found fault with my country voice. “Just sing the notes as they’re written,” he said, stabbing his finger on the sheet music for You’ll Never Walk Alone. “Don’t slide into them like someone from the backwoods.” Well, I was someone from the backwoods. My singing was formed by my mother at the old upright piano, chording to songs like Red River Valley and Silver Haired Daddy. My singing was shaped by my brothers, strumming guitars around a summer bonfire, harmonizing to Seven Bridges Road and He’ll Have To Go. These songs, these people, this way of singing, live deep in my heart. They are my very breath. So I ended my voice lessons and gave a silent thanks to George Ives. When I go home for a visit this summer, we will gather again. And we will sing.
    - Kathleen Kramer



wrapped in a blanket of frogs’ voices i half awaken in darkness and  follow the chorus outside faint stars overhead no moon morning light above the rolling mountains almost  sleepwalking feeling my  way deeper into the chorus the sound wrapped like a cape around me yet calling me calling me rising and falling swelling up from the rice paddies rolling all rising into trees where sensing dawn tree frogs voices join the chorus so swelling up from the rippling paddies punctuated by a deep bass soloist who feels the vibration of footsteps and stops until i am back on my doorstep with the frog symphony embedded in my bones
    - kris moon



Sister Mary Joseph. That was her name. I can picture her so clearly: long black skirt and veil, stiff white collar, wooden cross around her neck. She taught piano lessons at my school on Saturday for one dollar a session. When I was ten, my mother decided I should learn to play the piano. I despised the idea. I was such a shy kid that I hated getting any personal attention, and from a nun! I could hide in a large classroom but this was different. It was a painful half hour each week for both of us. I never really practiced enough. I was supposed to keep track of my practice hours in a little red book. My mother was supposed to sign each entry. Fortunately, Sister didn’t look too closely at the signature, but I’m pretty sure she knew. I would  stumble through the pieces she had assigned, with tears in my eyes because I was so nervous. She never said a critical word, but just encouraged me to keep trying. I finally got permission from my mother to quit. When I told the Sister, I saw a funny look come over her face. Would she miss that dollar a week or was she relieved?
    - Margaret Dennis



Dreamin’ - I’m always dreamin’ — I woke one morning recently with this song running through my mind. Why? I barely remember it. But almost every day I wake with an “earworm.” Today it was Brahm’s Lullaby. Occasionally favorite movie songs  — The Time of My Life. Many are dance tunes from adolescence and young adulthood. Stay. Stand by Me. Rock Me Gently. Some are special. I remember who I was with, where, what I was wearing — and I feel the dance. Some hold few, if any, memories. One was Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song. I’m not a big fan of country music but there it was, playing in my head all day. I can’t carry a tune anymore but if I hear a few bars I can remember most, if not all, of the lyrics. La Marseillaise. Where does this come from in the night — this walk through my past? It doesn’t matter. Even if I have to consciously force it out of my head by mid-day, I have opened a treasure trove of often forgotten memories and I am grateful. But it does make me wonder what I was dreaming.
    - Margaret Walker



When I went on an unwanted blind date my last summer in grad school in 1967 I never expected to meet the man I would end up marrying. We were inseparable after that night. With a low draft number, he had already signed up for OCS in Newport, Rhode Island and I had a job waiting for me in St Louis. A Whiter Shade of Pale was on the radio all summer, becoming “our song” by default.  He went to Vietnam as a junior officer on a Navy Supply ship and I was accepted for a job in Hawaii after St Louis, to be there for his break between tours, and so we could get married. After he left, whenever “our” song came on, I felt tears flow, remembering his arms tight around me, wondering if I would feel them again. Even now, long after our divorce, and his death nine years ago, when I hear the song I’m transported back to that summer — our dreams still ghost-dancing ahead of us.
    - Pris Campbell



I am on the freeway driving east through the brown hills of Martinez, California, near the home of naturalist John Muir, dotted with ambling cows as well as a few horses, while listening to Within You, Without You, a song on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, sung by the late George Harrison. The sun is shining, the sky is a soft blue fringed by wispy, passing clouds and the sense of being a separate self dissolves, just floats away. Tears are streaming down my face as George sings the last lines of this unforgettable Beatles song. . .
      When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
      Peace of mind is waiting there
      And the time will come when you see we're all one
      And life flows on within you and without you
For a fleeting moment, who I am is not an “I” but rather an “us.” And this is quite enough.
    - Robert Epstein



Sometimes I try to recall the music playing in the pink jewelry boxes of my childhood. I had a place to store carnival rings and broken beads. Trinkets from gumball machines. Souvenir charms from summer travels. Each box, no matter how simple, featured a plastic ballerina who spun in front of a tiny mirror until I got dizzy. I discovered everything would stop once I closed the lid. When the repetitive tune got to be too much, I longed for silence. Maybe I was an introvert and needed alone time. Shut the lid: That’s a first step to taking control in a young life.
    - Roberta Beach Jacobson



My husband Mike had a rich voice and an ear for picking up local accents, but he couldn’t quite keep a tune. We sang in the Seattle Labor Chorus that accepted all singers eager for justice. It worked because of the skill of Janet, the director. Preparing for a folk festival, we sang Appalachian songs, where Mike and I had interviewed over 100 coal miners. Janet’s ears pricked up when she heard Mike singing “Dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew, where the dangers are double and the pleasures are few . . .” with that stressed West Virginia mountain twang. “Let’s have Mike sing the verses, and we’ll sing the chorus,” announced Janet. “But how will we know what note to come in on?” worried a musically savvy chorus member. “Just pick up the note Mike ends on,” announced Janet. It was powerful. We added freedom songs. Mike had joined the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, registering Black voters in the Delta and hearing Fannie Lou Hamer sing “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round.” Mike’s voice slowed down the whole chorus to a deep determined cadence. It brought tears to my eyes then – and now as I write.
    - Ruth Yarrow



When I was very young, my parents played stacks of long-playing records to keep me occupied and lull me to sleep. The wooden console sat just outside my bedroom door. I was weaned on Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and Swan Lake, Chopin piano etudes and Saint-Saëns' The Swan. But the record I remember most vividly is A Child's Introduction to the Great Composers. My favorite selections were Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld which included music for the can-can, and Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances. I think that's why I was later drawn to various folk dances and studied everything from Hungarian czardas and flamenco to hula, the Balinese welcome dance, and everything in between. Someday, maybe I'll take down my castanets and practice again.
    - Theresa A. Cancro



When Peggy and I hitched south from Milwaukee in the spring of 1971, it seemed like every car or truck that picked us up had the radio on. We were heading for a wilderness area, the Land Between the Lakes in southern Kentucky. Me and Bobby McGee, sung by Janis Joplin, was hot at the time, and I could hear “Na na na na na na” in my head as we lay down in a pasture where curious Hereford cows came close to stare at us and Peggy fell fast asleep. The way personal playlists flow music into people’s ears these days, it’s hard to explain to a youngster just how Top Forty pop radio dominated back then. The same songs over and over, at that time Me and You and a Dog Named Blue (road songs big in the early seventies) and Put Your Hand in the Hand, a gospel pop song . . . . On the way home, a true hillbilly with an old pickup filled with cages of chickens stopped for us and it reeked, but I jumped in so Peggy had to follow, the only vehicle without a radio playing maybe for the whole trip.
    - Tina Wright



My father loved classical music and had a ritual Sunday afternoon time where he would lie on his back on the living room couch with his eyes closed while one of his favorite symphonies was playing at the loudest level our less-than-state-of-the-art phonograph could play it. There was an accepted family understanding that we all should steer clear of the living room and let him enjoy his music without interference. Years later when I became a teenager collecting 45s, and 33 LPs, I would play them on that same old record player and he often repeated instructions to “turn it down.” In some bizarre linkage his enjoying his music imprinted in me a love of “my music,” which was a whole different world apart, but what made it unite us was that it was music. Forty two years ago when I was 28 I sat in Sage Chapel with my family and others who had come to my father's Memorial Service. As part of this gathering my mother had chosen some of my father’s favorite music. As Finlandia was playing I felt my eyes well up and then my tears flowed freely.
    - Tom Clausen



When I was a girl I liked to sit at the low dressing table in my grandmother’s bedroom and rummage through all the bits and bobs that she kept there. Her brush and comb; a single tube of red lipstick; a powder puff tucked tightly into a pink plastic container of face powder. There were always two or three freshly-laundered handkerchiefs folded into small neat squares; a magnifying glass; a hand mirror; and at least one emery board. Scattered across the top of the table were a handful of grey bobby pins and slightly larger hair clips. I would choose one of the clips and hold it up to my mouth, pretending it was a microphone. Then I’d look straight ahead, smile at my reflection in the large mirror that hung on the wall just above the table, and start  singing. Most often I’d sing my favorite song from my favorite movie, The Parent Trap. Hayley Mills played twins. Not everyone could do that. She was very talented. Even my grandmother thought so. “Let’s get together, yeah yeah yeah, why don’t you and I combine?” But I would pronounce it togetha the way she did, and I’d sing ya ya ya. Hayley was English. That’s how English people spoke. I knew that when I became a grown up, and could be anything I wanted to be, I would be English, too.
    - Zee Zahava