Tag: Music

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The Annotated “Stars and Stripes Forever”

Here’s an idea for a posting series that I’ve been kicking around, which will consist of the occasional piece of music with a series of notes about the work in question. We’ll see how this goes.

Anyhow, in my Something for Thursday series, I’ve lately posted several Grand Marches from various operas, and now I’m thinking a bit of the wide variety of music that falls under the general category of the “March”. You have Grand Marches, as I’ve noted above, that involve long musical scoring to big set pieces in operas. You also have the Funeral March, which are generally downbeat and sad-sounding, for obvious reasons. You have Processional Marches, with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches being prime examples. And there are the Military Marches, patriotic marches, circus marches, symphonic marches, and so on. Lots and lots of marches.

One of the most famous of all marches is, of course, John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. It’s a staple of nearly every patriotic-themed classical music concert you might ever attend, and the march is as central a staple in July 4th festivities as hot dogs or fireworks. In college, when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra played a concert on our campus, their first encore work was The Stars and Stripes Forever.

Sousa wrote many marches — hence the moniker “The March King” — a number of which are very familiar to our ears now (Washington Post and Liberty Bell among them), but The Stars and Stripes Forever is by far his most familiar work. It can sound a bit clicheed these days, but like all works that have to a degree become clichee, when you blow off the dust and actually listen to the thing, you can hear anew those qualities that allowed it to become cliche in the first place.

The Stars and Stripes Forever is also a perfect example of the traditional American military march, which in their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to follow specific forms. If you were to join a concert band in rehearsing one of these marches, you would hear some odd-sounding terms: “Let’s begin at the second strain, first time through.” Or, “Just the trombones, please, starting at the dogfight.” You’d be thinking, “What’s a dogfight? Are there going to be planes flying in aerial combat above our heads?” Well, of course not! So what we’ll do here is go through The Stars and Stripes Forever, with my notations below indicating at which point each section starts.

(This is one of the niftiest musical videos I’ve ever seen, by the way.)

0:07 to 0:10: The is the Intro section. Most marches will have some kind of intro section.

0:11 to 0:24: This is the First Strain, which is will be repeated once.

0:24 to 0:39: The First Strain, repeated. Sometimes, but not always, a band or orchestra will perform a repeat of a strain differently than they did the first time: they’ll dial down the dynamics, playing the repeat softer, or maybe they’ll actually vary the instrumentation a bit. This is often at the discretion of the conductor. Marches in this genre tend to be “modular” in construction, making it easier to tailor the piece a bit depending on the demands of the performance. You might need to make it longer or shorter, depending on the situation, so a conductor might decide to repeat each strain twice instead of once; but then deciding to play the first repeat softer and the second repeat softer still, or some other kind of variation. Some conductors, with experienced ensembles, will even have hand signals ready so they can indicate to their ensemble such a change while in the midst of performance.

0:39 to 0:54: Here is the Second Strain, first time through. Note that it is more lyrical than the boisterous First Strain. In a well-written march, the strains will usually contrast in some way.

0:55 to 1:09: Now we repeat the Second Strain. Note in this performance that the brass join in the melody and it’s a bit louder and more boisterous than the first time through. This difference is why, in rehearsal, our conductor will say things like “OK, start at the second strain, second time through.” He has to let the brass know if they’re playing or sitting out.

OK. After we’re done with the first two strains — and there are usually just two — however many times we’ve performed them, with whatever performance variations our conductor has decided upon, we’re onto the Trio. Sometimes we’ll have a key change when we hit the Trio, along with some other way to differentiate the Trio from the Intro and the first two strains. In Stars and Stripes Forever, our relatively brisk sound of the first two strains yields to a longer, more lyrical melody — even more lyrical than what we heard in the second strain. Additionally, there is less syncopation now, although Sousa still puts key parts of emphasis on the occasional off-beat. A Trio section is often the longest part of a march, and it often revolves around a single melody or musical idea, as opposed to the first and second strains, which posit musical ideas briefly and then shuffle them off the stage. The Trio is the main attraction, as it were.

Now, with our Trio section, there’s only one main musical idea going on, but we’re going to hear it three times. Sousa doesn’t want to bore us, so he’ll change it up a bit each time. How? Let’s see:

1:10 to 1:39: The Trio, first time through. Sometimes we might call this the First Strain of the Trio, or we might just call it the Trio, first time. In any event, this specific case is one of the most recognizable melodies in musical history, and in terms of marches, it’s probably the most famous march melody ever. (It might be a close second to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March #1…or the Elgar is a close second to Stars and Stripes. Not sure which.)

By the way, note that Sousa doesn’t just give us this melody by itself; he continues to remind us that this is still a march by putting all those little staccato flourishes softly playing behind the melody. There’s always something going on in a Sousa march, something new or different or contrasting with the main thing at any given moment. Case in point: when the melody reaches its highest note at 1:24, note the descending arpeggio in the lower brass, or at 1:34 when we reach a high note again, a little “tweet” of a fanfare in the trumpets.

Note, also, that one time through the First Strain of the Trio takes as long as two times through each of the First and Second Strains.

1:39 to 2:02: Now, having heard the complete Trio strain one time through, we’re going to repeat it twice. But unlike the First and Second strains, which are repeated in immediate succession, we get a bit of contrast in a passage that stands in marked rhythmic and dynamic contrast to the Trio strain. This contrasting section, found in the Trios of many marches of this type, is called the Dogfight. We’ll hear it twice through; this is the first time. The Dogfight isn’t really a melody, per se; it’s more of a martial fluorish. Note that the Dogfight is, by itself, longer than either the First or Second Strain.

2:02 to 2:30: The Trio strain, repeated (or, alternatively, the Second Strain of the Trio). Sousa lowers the dynamics again, back down to a softer setting, but we get the first variation of the Trio here. The Stars and Stripes melody plays again in its entirety, but this time with a brilliant touch: a counter-flourish played by the solo piccolo. Note also that the little trumpet fanfares from the first time through aren’t there anymore, in favor of our piccolo solo.

2:31 to 2:55: The Dogfight, second time through. Many performances play the Dogfight a bit louder this time through, and have the Dogfight end with a crescendo into the Trio strain’s final repeat.

2:55 to end: Now we get the last repeat of the Trio strain (or, alternatively, the Third Strain of the Trio). After hearing the Trio strain played softly twice, this time Sousa lets it all hang out: everybody’s playing at full-bore, including our intrepid piccolo player. Now, a lesser composer might think that just hearing this great melody with the entire band playing forte might be pleasing enough to send the crowd away, but Sousa isn’t done giving new things to hear. Specifically, this last time, he gives a countermelody to the low brass that plays mostly on the off-bars of the main melody; when the main theme is holding a long note, the low brass are doing their thing.

And at the very end? That final punctuating note that the march ends on? That’s called the Stinger.

Most marches of this type derive their excitement from variations along the way, as described above: variations in dynamics (loud versus soft), variations in instrumention (who plays what and when), variations in backing detail (little fanfares versus that solo piccolo line). What doesn’t vary is tempo: a march of this type will always end at the same tempo it started. The only place I’ve ever heard a change in tempo in The Stars and Stripes Forever is at the very end of the Dogfight, the second time through, where some conductors — not all — will throw in a ritardando on that last descending scale before the Trio strain’s final repeat, and that’s about it. A march is not the place for the type of rubato that you might hear in, say, some Romantic symphony.

Anyhow, there you have it: a road map to The Stars and Stripes Forever. Next time you’re hearing this march while eating a hot dog and watching fireworks, note the march’s tight construction!

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For Mr. Cronkite

I don’t recall Walter Cronkite doing the news a whole lot from when I was a kid, but I do remember him. What I remember more, though, was his wonderful baritone voice showing up in all manner of documentary-type stuff over the years after his retirement from the anchor’s desk. He was once the voice of the ride at EPCOT that goes up inside the big geosphere-golfball thing; his voice was appropriate as that ride takes passengers through the history of communications. I loved his delivery of the vocal portion of that ride when I was in EPCOT in 1990, and I was disappointed to learn in 1998, when we returned, that Mr. Cronkite’s narration had been replaced by a new version voiced by Jeremy Irons. (Nothing against Jeremy Irons, of course — but he’s not Walter Cronkite, is he?)

My main memory of Cronkite, though, is watching him on the yearly New Year’s From Vienna concerts that are the major New Year’s Day tradition in my family. We’d watch the telecast every year on PBS, in which Cronkite would introduce the pieces and give brief vignettes about the history of Vienna around the time the Strauss Family was producing some of the most glittering dance-hall music in history. This past year, however, Cronkite was replaced by Julie Andrews. A fine choice, but I figured at the time that Cronkite must have finally become too old and frail to continue his duties as the host of New Year’s From Vienna.

I couldn’t find any YouTube clips that showed Cronkite actually executing his duties thereof, so this will have to do. For older people of that era, Cronkite’s reportage of the JFK assassination and Vietnam and Watergate are their key memories of him. For me, though, this work will always be associated, in part, with Walter Cronkite.

Here’s the most famous waltz ever written, Johann Strauss’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Cronkite.

(But why, oh why, couldn’t he at least have lived three more days to see the 40th anniversary of the moon landing? That’s just mean, Mr. Reaper.)

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“These Viennese certainly know good music when they hear it!”

I was mulling over today the answer I gave last week in how to help raise a musical child, and I feel the need now to revise and extend my remarks a bit, because I neglected to mention a blindingly obvious means of stoking a child’s interest in music, or at least stoking their realization that music is interesting in itself and is a very real thing that people do in addition to just having on in the background. I’m talking about attending live music.

Now, one should be careful and selective, depending on the age of the child, but live music has to enter into the equation, if one is being serious. This need not necessarily mean whisking the kid to this Friday evening’s performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, or to hear Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; that probably won’t help matters, for the same reason that having a kid’s first movie be Citizen Kane or The Seventh Seal isn’t the best idea. But most symphony orchestras nowadays, I suspect, have some kind of regular programming during the season for children, and these programs can be delightful — we took The Daughter to a performance of Beethoven Lives Upstairs a year ago, and a great time was had by all.

If a children’s program isn’t in the offing, then any “pops” type concert will do, depending on the repertoire one wishes to hear. We’re coming up on the 4th of July; those concerts are always a blast, and if you can’t attend one, watch it on teevee. Go see The Nutcracker at Christmastime. Watch the annual New Years From Vienna concert. And don’t limit it to orchestras, either; if a good ensemble of any kind is performing, take the kid to hear them. Yes, they will be intermittently bored, but the more you do it, the more they will see music as an interesting activity and less as sonic wallpaper.

And finally, don’t overlook the most basic of all musical instruments: the human voice. Encourage singing!

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Serves me right for not being musical.

A reader recently asked how one goes about cultivating an interest in music in children, apropos of this post of mine from last week in which I noted that The Daughter has this year taken up the string bass. Some thoughts on that:

:: I suppose that making an instrument a simple requirement might work — “You’re taking piano lessons, Johnny, so suck it up and practice your Czerny!” — but that also runs the risk of backfiring, in the same way that forcing the reading of Shakespeare on eighth graders can permanently stunt their desire to read the Bard (or see his plays).

But music is such a useful thing to learn. It doesn’t always seem useful, though, which is part of why music is always one of the first items on the chopping block when school budget cuts happen. In addition to simply enriching one’s life if one can appreciate music beyond whatever the “pop crap of the day” happens to be, music can also be a good path to the learning of discipline and work that might not reveal itself in other pursuits. It’s a lot easier for a kid to understand why it’s important to practice scales over and over again than it is for them to understand why they should have to do 40 examples of the same math problem in a single night. (Or, maybe not. I rarely did all of my math homework.) So how to encourage it?

Well, one general rule can be adapted from the usual advice as to how to raise a good reader: it helps if the parents read themselves. A kid who grows up surrounded by books and who regularly observes her parents reading and taking pleasure in reading is exponentially more likely to enjoy reading herself. Likewise, a kid who grows up surrounded by music will, I suppose, by exponentially more likely to take at least some kind of passive interest in music when the time comes.

This doesn’t necessarily imply that the parents have to play an instrument. Just having an environment in the home where lots of music is heard helps, and the more diverse the music, the better. I remember hearing, as a small child, music from classical to Broadway to country, and more. Music was a standard feature in our home, so it was perfectly normal.

Now, I was also predisposed to see music as a respectable activity by virtue of my sister’s constant practice of piano and, eventually, the French horn. (I even remember, very vaguely, the place we bought our piano from. I don’t recall a whole lot, but it was in Portland and we rode upstairs in an immense cargo elevator.) Even so, I didn’t decide that I wanted to play an instrument on my own until my school band teacher, Mr. Beach, summoned me to the band room to inquire as to my interest. I thought, “Hey, why not.”

It was fifth grade when Mr. Beach recruited me for band. After one year of French horn, I switched over to cornet/trumpet, and I played that for a further two years before I finally decided that I actually wanted to be good at the damned thing. So after about two-and-a-half years of bring in band, I finally saw the virtue of practice. It takes time. Practice is drudgery, right up until the moment of epiphany when a music student realizes that practice is nothing more than playing for an audience of oneself. But up until that, getting me to practice was like getting a kid to enjoy bathing. My parents had to order me to practice every night.

As for The Daughter, she simply announced last year, either just before the school year or a few days into it, that she wanted to play an instrument. We’d occasionally made the suggestion to her before, with a “maybe someday” answer, but we never forced it. She knew that The Wife and I both played instruments in our youths, and she’s been around music all her life, especially in church. I figured she’d show an interest sooner or later, and she did.

So that’s my advice: don’t try to force music on your kids, but surround them with it. The rest will take care of itself.

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From the Books

A series wherein I post longer excerpts from books I’ve read.

I’ve been toying with the notion of writing a film script, as a different kind of challenge. I haven’t worked in the screenplay format since many years ago, when I was writing Star Wars fanfic; those stories I wrote as scripts. (OK, to tell the truth, I’ve already been tinkering with screenplay format, producing a script for a movie about an unemployed writer-type, down on his luck in life, who starts over from scratch in his mid-thirties by taking a job as a janitor in a grocery store. You know, fantasy. That project is unlikely to ever see the light of day, though.)

The script that I really want to write, though, is an idea that’s been kicking around my head for several years now. It always surprises me that there really aren’t a whole lot of movies out there about classical music and the people from its history. Sure, there’s Amadeus, but what else is there? Just reading through just about any composer’s life reveals a world ripe for harvesting of stories, and hey, the soundtracks would pretty much select themselves, right?

Anyhow, one might think that I’d be hankering to write a movie about Hector Berlioz, and maybe that’ll come one day, but the story that’s capturing my attention now is what may be the most important love story in classical music history: that of Robert and Clara Schumann. Their story is passionate, romantic, and tragic, and it saw the production of some of the most lyrical music of the Romantic era. What a great costume drama that would make!

The basic facts are these. Robert Schumann was one of the most archetypal of all Romantic-era figures. His life was fairly short (46 years), he fought madness and alcoholism all his life, he attempted suicide twice in his life, and eventually died in a sanitarium two years after his second suicide attempt (in which he was pulled from the Rhine river by fisherman after he had flung himself into it). He was also one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era, and a noted music critic as well, producing some of the most enduring piano music, art songs, and concertos of all time. His symphonies are also staples of the orchestral repertoire.

Through all this was Clara, whom he met when she was just a child, and yet he courted her anyway, to the chagrin of her father, who tried to keep his daughter from a man he respected but still saw as a lunatic (not entirely inaccurately, either), until the two finally wed after a lengthy court battle. Their marriage was loving and devoted, but not without trial; Clara was one of the great piano virtuosos of the nineteenth century, but her career had to be put on hold so Robert could compose. She would endure ten pregnancies and lose three children, and when she eventually lose Robert as well, she would live another forty years after his death. Her deep friendship with Johannes Brahms forms an interesting postscript to her marriage to Robert Schumann; Brahms would never marry, and many have speculated that this was because he was in love with Clara his entire life. (No evidence exists that their relationship ever became physical.)

So, of late, I’ve been doing some preliminary research into the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann, including reading their letters, which have been gathered into a two-volume collection, edited by Eva Weissweiler. These letters are illuminating in many ways. Letters tend to be the most revealing of all writings from decades (or centuries) gone by, and in this age of quick e-mails or notes hastily scrawled on a Post-It, it’s amazing to read these long missives and remember that correspondence was more than just a way for people apart to keep in touch with one another; letter-writing was a major way of passing time in an age when any form of entertainment other than reading entailed dressing up and leaving home. People were literary because they had to be, lest they die of boredom. It’s tempting to read these letters and think “Wow, people back then really knew how to be in love”, but I’m not sure it’s the passion that’s changed, just the expression of it. But it’s impossible to read these letters and not feel the passion radiating from them, in some cases 170 years after they were written and dispatched to secret intermediaries (lest Clara’s father find them and put their relationship to a definitive end).

Here are a few passages from their letters that stood out for me.

Clara to Robert, January 1838

But don’t think that I am angry with you for this; on the contrary, I am happy to know that you don’t love me because of my talent, but, as you once wrote on a little piece of paper, “I don’t love you because you are a great artist; no, I love you, because you are so kind.” That please me immensely, and I have never forgotten it.

…

You cannot lose me; that would be impossible; my spirit would follow you forever.

Robert to Clara, February 1838

“Sometimes it feels as if a great many alleys were running pell mell through my heart and as if my thoughts and feelings were bustling about in there in all directions and running back and forth, just as people do, and they were asking one another, “Where does this one lead?” – to Clara – “and this one?” – to Clara – everything leads to you. The business with the alleys in the heart is a curious thought, isn’t it? And they sometimes lead to the lips and suddenly tehere’s a kiss, and the lovely girl snuggles up to the man, and their names are Clara and Robert–“

Clara to Robert, March 1838

What would you like me to do, my dear Robert? Should I embrace you, should I give your hand a hearty squeeze, should I cry, should I laugh? I am in the mood to do all of these things, because your latest letters were so precious, as cheerful as the loveliest spring.

…

I am very bored with traveling now; I am longing very much for rest; how much I would like to compose, but I can’t do that here at all. I have to practice in the morning, and we have visitors until late in the evening; then I am completely exhausted, as you surely see from my letters because they often indicate that my head is totally empty. –But you should always recognize my heart, because it remains untouched by the events of the day. If I can compose something for the journal, I will. “Macbeth” appears to be very beautiful; –I don’t think that anything of mine would compare favorably to it. I am like you. There are many alleys running through my heart, too, but they are even narrower, and there are more of them.

My mind has hardly investigated one of them when it encounters the next one, and so on, ad infinitum. I cannot stay with one idea; right away there is another one – the fault is yours alone – I don’t know what this will lead to, I always console myself by thinking that I am a woman, and they weren’t born to compose. I often doubt myself. But I remember that you did not want to speak of doubts anymore; I agree with you! Doubt is a disastrous word and also a disastrous state to be in.

Robert to Clara, March, 1838

Where should I begin to tell you what kind of person you are making of me, my love, magnificent one! Your letter provided me with one delight after another. What a life you’re opening before me, what prospects! Sometimes when I read through your letter I feel like the first human might have felt when the angel led him through the new creation, from peak to peak; each beautiful region followed by even more beautiful ones, and the angel then says, “All of this shall be yours.”

I’m not sure how I’d use these; maybe in the typical way of having them read as voiceovers. I haven’t really given much thought at all as to the form such a film might take; this is all just preliminary stuff, and I don’t know if I’ll ever even get around to writing this. But I hope to.

This much I do know: the end credits must roll, at least in part, as “Traumerei” plays. Here is “Traumerei”, played by Vladimir Horowitz in Moscow in 1988. He often played “Traumerei” as an encore.

What a love story Robert and Clara had!

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Hey, WNED

On the off chance anyone from WNED, Buffalo’s classical music station, reads this: this sort of thing does not predispose me to giving money to WNED, something I had actually been considering doing. Now I think I’ll just buy a pizza instead, or maybe get that wireless router I’ve been considering.

John Landis always came on the radio when I was getting off work, and I enjoyed listening to his show. He was knowledgeable and always conveyed a great love of classical music. I can only assume that his termination had something to do with the fact that he’d been there for a long time and thus was probably making more money than some of the less-tenured hosts. If that is the case, I would hope that the WNED brass note that the “Let’s fire the ones who have been around the longest and therefore make the most money” strategy didn’t work out so well for Circuit City.

Anyway, best wishes to Mr. Landis, and hopes that he lands on his feet in these times when so many people are hoping to land on their feet.

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The original one-hit wonder

One of my Facebook friends, a guy I went to college with and who was a fellow trumpet player, posted this video of a comedian who was once a cello player and thus has a special reserve of hatred stored up for Pachelbel’s Canon in D, because the poor cellist has to play that infernal ground bass, eight notes in all, over and over and over again:

As my Facebook friend noted, we used to play a brass quintet arrangement of this piece, which was OK if you’re a trumpet, horn or trombone player, but not so much if you’re the poor tubist. As I’ve noted many times, the most thankless tasks in classical music are playing the ground bass in Pachelbel’s Canon and playing the snare drum part in Ravel’s Bolero.

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Twenty years

I’ve just realized that 2009 represents the twentieth anniversary of my graduation from high school, and my entrance into college. It was in 1989 that I formed dual obsessions with Richard Bach and Sergei Rachmaninov; it was in 1989 that I went on my first date (I must have not been a very good time, since my two or three subsequent attempts for a follow-up were met with the all-purpose excuse, “Uh, I’m busy that night”); it was in 1989 that I got my first paying job (in the library at St. Bonaventure University). But none of that is what interests me at this moment. I was thinking the other day about Christmas presents I got as a kid, up to the end of high school, and I remembered the big gift from my senior year, Christmas 1988: my first CD player.

It was a boom-box affair, made by Sharp Electronics. It had a dual tape deck, too, and that got a lot of mileage over the next few years as my main musical medium at that time was still the cassette. I did have quite a bit of classical and film music on vinyl, but I would almost always use my parents’ big stereo system to tape the records so I wouldn’t have to play them very often. Even though I fell in love with the compact disc, it would take a number of years for the CD to take over the prime place in my music collection, much less become the only thing in my music collection. (A process which has now reached an end in itself, but more on that later.)

I’ve never been much of an audiophile, although there are some things I do admit. I’ve owned the scores to the Star Wars movies on all of the major formats, and never have the cassettes, CDs, or MP3’s sounded as good as the vinyl records I played to death as a kid. And when I say I played those records to death, I mean, I played them to death. By the time I finally stopped playing them, the characteristic pops and scratches anyone who’s ever been around vinyl for long will remember were so engrained in my brain, in certain places, that to this very day if I listen to those scores on flawless MP3, my mind still fills in the worn-vinyl pops. I also admit that Super Audio CDs do sound better than the standard article, but they’re not so great an improvement that I feel it necessary to invest in them. For the life of me, I think in most cases MP3’s sound just fine, if it’s a good bitrate (at least 192 kbps). The greatest moment of audiophilic revelation in my life came the first time I put a CD in the new CD player and heard a work of music I knew very well…but without any tape hiss.

Anyone who remembers cassettes will remember tape hiss. You’d stick a cassette in the deck, hit play, and the room would fill with this white-noise hissing sound that never, ever went away. Over time you learned to filter it out of your perception of the music, although occasionally you’d get a recording that was made on a cheap cassette and the hiss would be significantly worse. I learned, as did lots of the other music-heads in my age-group, that one could tell how bad the tape hiss would be simply by looking at the tape itself. If the tape was dark brown, dark gray, or even black, you knew you had a quality cassette and the hiss would therefore be less bad. If, on the other hand, the tape was light brown, the color of coffee once you’ve added a lot of creamer, or worse, if the tape actually matched your khaki pants, you knew that the hiss was going to be bad. And lo, it was. But that was how it went, back then: if you wanted your music portable, you had to learn to live with a constant Sssssssssss in the background.

Until the CD came along, and hiss went away.

When my parents bought the CD player for me – it was a preordained gift that I knew was coming, although they did surprise me by getting the fancier, higher quality system than the one I thought they were getting – they also bought the first two discs, since obviously it would have been lame to have a new CD player with nothing to play on it. They had let me pick the discs, and I still own them. Here they are:

In fact, as I write this, I am listening to that very recording of Eine Alpensinfonie. If you’re unfamiliar with this work, it starts off very quietly, with a slow, mysterious figure that descends down the minor scale in the lower strings and winds. I remember putting that disc in the player, pressing play, seeing the disc through the little window start whirling around, and I remember thinking, “When does the music start?” My brain was still expecting to hear tape-hiss preceding the actual music! Instead, I heard nothing at all, until the orchestra started in those opening bars. I couldn’t believe how the thing sounded…and then, a few minutes in when the entire orchestra blazes forth with the motif for Sunrise Over The Mountain (the piece is a musical telling of a day’s climb up, and back down, a single Alp), I thought the paint was going to come off our walls. (Or might have, if we’d had paint back then. We had really ugly faux-wood paneling that my parents would have ripped out a few years later.) The disc still sounds fine. I guess I’ve stored it well over the years.

So, that’s where it began for me, my love affair with the compact disc. There were some odd things about CDs in those early days, weren’t there? Take that Alpensinfonie disc, for instance. That work is roughly fifty minutes long and is comprised of twenty-two distinct sections, even though all are played without break. Every CD I’ve ever seen of the Alpensinfonie, and I own three myself, has separate tracks for each section of the work, except this, my first one. Here, the entire work is in a single track. One CD, one fifty-minute long track.

I also recall CD packaging back in those early days, when they came in these long packages. Some were cardboard, others clamshell plastic, but the CD would be in the jewel box at the bottom, and the booklet would be at the top, outside the jewel box. So you’d have to cut open the plastic package, hoping not to damage the booklet in the process. Also, some music stores were routinely dark places with lots of floodlights illuminating the merchandise from track fixtures above the racks. This was OK when you were thumbing through vinyl record sleeves, but when you’d pull a CD in the plastic clamshell thing out to look at it, and the disc itself would be visible because the booklet wasn’t in the jewel box already, if you got the angle wrong, you’d blind yourself with the reflection of the floodlight off the surface of the disc itself. And I remember how multi-disc sets for some reason always stuck a square of yellow foam in the cases, between the discs. That was ridiculous, and I think I recall reading somewhere that it turned out that those squares of yellow foam weren’t good for the surfaces of the discs themselves, so I threw the foam out of all my opera recordings.

The music department at my college had an already-impressive collection of CDs when I got there, but you weren’t allowed to take them back to the dorm room, because they were afraid that students would just take them home and tape the music off the discs. Well, I’d say that’s not much of an issue now, is it?

Twenty years later, I don’t buy nearly as many CDs as I used to. I’ve reached a certain saturation point, in terms of music; I already own more music than I have reasonable time to listen to. Plus, the CD is still, in general, too expensive, a fact that record companies still seem to refuse to acknowledge. Just last week I was in a Barnes&Noble, looking through the classical music section, and there was, for example, the umpteenth-reissue of Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, and it was the full eighteen bucks. That’s ridiculous. The budget Naxos label seems to have gone up a few bucks in the last few years, too; when I first discovered Naxos their typical CD was eight bucks, and now it’s ten. Still not bad, but eight’s less than ten. (It doesn’t help that at some point, Borders and B&N both stopped the once-helpful, but possibly not retail-wise, practice of keeping all of the Naxos discs separate from the other labels.) This isn’t unlike the longtime problem I’ve had with publishers of graphic novels: how much spontaneous exploration of their offerings can those companies expect of people when a single graphic novel is almost always more than twenty bucks?

I’ve also reached the point where CD storage is a big issue. My collection doesn’t take up the most room in the world, but The Wife and I have lately reached the conclusion that our apartment is filled with too much stuff, leaving not enough space. To that end, I intend to gradually replace every CD jewel box in my collection (to a point) with these sleeves. Doing so should allow me to get rid of at least two pieces of cruddy furniture that I use to store the bloody things now.

Do I download music? I do, although not a whole lot yet. I know this will change in the future as downloading becomes more and more prevalent. I’m not wild about my music collection owing its existence to the vagaries of a hard drive’s functionality – there’s no way my current hard drives will still be going strong in twenty years, unlike Maestro Karajan’s old disc of Eine Alpensinfonie – but that’s just the way it’s going to be, so I’ll have to do lots of backing up, I suppose.

But anyway, it’s been a good two decades with the shiny silver discs. They’ve brought me immense pleasure over the years, and I see no reason to let them stop. Viva la CD!

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Food for thought….

Roger Ebert on Lee Greenwood:

Here I was all set to go Elitist on the country singer Lee Greenwood, and I pulled the rug out from under myself. I shared Rachel Maddow’s incredulity that the limping duck George W. Bush had appointed Greenwood to the National Council of the Arts. I even had my first two sentences written in my head: “Remember how the Bush takeover squad at the White House complained the Clintonites had unplugged all the PCs on their way out the door? As he steadfastly marches toward his own sunset, it is Bush himself who seems unplugged.”

Zing! Totally unfair, but snappy, Bush had two vacancies to fill on the NCA, one for three years, one for six. Greenwood got the six-year term. He’ll be the gift that keeps on giving every day during Obama’s first term. The Council’s job is to advise the National Endowment for the Arts on how to spend its money. I assume Greenwood will support the endowment’s Shakespeare in American Communities Initiative, but you can never be sure about those things.

…

Yada yada yada. But then I did a little research on Lee Greenwood and had to abandon my wisecracks. I concluded that Greenwood’s career makes him a not unreasonable choice for the Council. To begin with, he is the perfect age, my age. He is a singer-songwriter. He built his own theater in Seiverville, Tenn., and performed there from 1995 to 2000. Wiki explains the theater was not located in the “heavily entertainment and tourist-oriented area of Pigeon Forge,” which “contributed to its closing.” Greenwood had the semi-obligatory cocaine addiction around the age of 20, which was not all that common in 1962, but “moved to Iceland to go to rehab.” He is best known for writing and singing “God Bless the USA,” which I do not prefer to Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” but that’s just me.

Greenwood has lived the American Dream. Raised on a poultry farm outside Sacramento by his grandparents, he started playing the sax at the age of seven. He’s won all the big awards, including Singer of the Year and Song of the Year. He took time off to perform at McCain and Palin rallies. By all accounts he is a thoroughly decent man. Although his background may not parallel all of the other members of the NCA, why should it? He brings a fresh perspective. And there is absolutely no reason why country and western, that most American of musical forms along with jazz and the blues, should not be heard from on the Council.

Interesting stuff. There’s a lot there I didn’t know about Greenwood, whom I’ve only associated with that one song of his (and I don’t even like that song).

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