I guess one could say I’m a wee bit set in my ways. (Cue the eye-rolling and sniggers from my friends). Okay, I’m VERY set in my ways. That comes from years of practice and a tightfisted grasp on order and tidiness in my life. I like it that way. Sure, spontaneity doesn’t figure too heavily in my existence, but I do go off the deep end from time to time (more laughs). Nothing extreme, but occasionally I do go outside my comfort zone. My day is structured and routine, mostly dictated by Morgan, my dog. He’s almost 15, pretty well deaf,
on prednisone, has trouble walking and is my accomplice in the ordering of the day due to his need to pee every couple of hours. I don’t mind this. In fact, I look forward to it because it gets me out of the recliner and into the outside world if only for a moment. These forays, combined with strict smoking-on-the-balcony times, are what get me from a 7:10 rising to an 11:30 bedtime. But it’s those balcony sojourns that provide me with blank time during which my mind wanders down all kinds of paths, some of which have resulted in other posts in this Blog. One of those little byways took me to the thought of being marooned on a deserted island with an unlimited supply of batteries for a Discman (yeah, old school but the only practical alternative for a deserted island) and the entire oeuvre of a single composer. I decided to contemplate which composer’s music I would choose. My results in a moment.

Parallel to my considerations, I began to wonder why I like the music I do, mostly what is termed as “Classical” or “Symphonic” music. I knew that our musical taste influences are obvious – social environment, peers, family (the “exposure effect”), childhood memories – but also that one can be hardwired to respond to sounds on a purely emotional level. How a progression of notes can deeply affect one person emotionally but not another baffled me. My comparison was my brother who, of course, I grew up with. He was “into” Rock and Roll and some Jazz. I was always into Classical, although I did feign an interest in Jazz to gain access to a small circle of the cooler kids in high school (Peter Leitch (now a highly regarded jazz guitarist in New York), Robert (Bobby) Walker (now a renowned photographer working out of Montreal and New York and Warsaw … yeah, a little bit of name dropping there) – they were into John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk, but I found a way in through Milt Jackson and the Modern Jazz Quartet who were musically based in Classical style and structure). My parents didn’t listen to Rock and Roll. My Uncle Jimmy had an incredible record collection of great music (mostly Classical and Jazz) and my Mom would borrow albums to bring home to play on the big console record player in the living room. I remember Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto (Piano Concerto No. 5) and I also remember The Jackie Gleason Orchestra with Harry James playing the trumpet on standards of the day. I know now that the music was for my folks to listen to, but it clearly influenced my brother and me. But why the divergent paths? All the music was going in both our ears.

“Music is the art of thinking with sound”, says French scholar, Jacques Combarieux. Both Jazz and Classical music are considered “high art music” and an affinity for them identifies someone who has a reactive brain, someone who has a “conversation” with the music. At least, that’s the connection our brains create. Sort of makes sense to me. Being engaged in the listening (rather than “using” music as merely background noise) can be passive or active, but is rarely inconsequential. There is a subliminal empathy to emotions deeply buried in us via music. Certain note sequences or harmonic progressions affect us in an indefinable way. They “pluck at our heartstrings” or prompt memories or feelings that are somehow comforting or familiar, visceral recollections. So, essentially, the paths of me and my brother weren’t really all that divergent. We were experiencing what the music prompted in us and if we didn’t experience “something” with one kind of music, we found another with which we could experience that “something” that comforted us.

What perplexes and astounds me even more is the ability of those human beings who put those notes and harmonies in a particular order to affect me. We all have access to the same notes (or words, or colours), but to be someone who hears “something” in the mind that has not been there, that hasn’t existed before and that resonates in the soul of that creator and then, somehow in us, is, to me, a miraculous thing. I’ve written music and words and put colour on a piece of paper, but to produce something that becomes Universal in its profundity and effect has and will always challenge my understanding of what it is to be human. How someone’s internal hearing and seeing is externalized in such a way as to bring together “heaven” and earth in our hearing and seeing can only be termed as divine. From all the choices I have, there are two composers who, for me, completely encapsulate that genius.

When I was 15 or 16, I joined The Record Center of Montreal, a record lending library. It was located on Metcalfe Street and run by a tall, bespectacled man who played the oboe or the French Horn (I can’t remember which) for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. This shop was incredible to me. The walls were lined with shelves of SO many records to choose from! I had a small collection of my own, mostly made up of Steinberg’s Supermarket’s “Great Music of the World” LP’s, a new one on sale weekly and eagerly anticipated because I never knew what was going to be on the record. I think that’s how I developed my tastes – accidentally and spontaneously. But this Library was heaven on earth. Saturday mornings I would trek downtown and browse for hours. There wasn’t any place to listen to the records. You just had to read the liner notes and take a chance on something new. And that was how I discovered the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

By now, symphonic music was pretty much a part of me. I was my High School’s rep on the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s Young People’s Concerts Student Council (wow, that’s a mouthful!) and eventually became President of that “august body”, involving myself in every aspect of selling tickets in schools across the city (6 Concerts for $12.00!!!), developing promotional approaches to get kids interested in Classical Music. The highlight of the Council’s year was when Sir Wilfred Pelletier, the great MSO Conductor and Conductor of our Student Concerts would come into our meeting and talk to us about the up-coming season and what we would like to hear. Those memories are indelible and, in my mind, accompanied by the Overture to “Russlan and Ludmilla” by Glinka, which I can still “see” the Orchestra playing in the wood paneled Montreal High School Auditorium. Rushing home from the Library, I’d put the newly acquired (for a week) music on the player in my room, close the door and disappear into it.

The first Vaughan Williams piece I listened to was called “The Wasps”, an Overture written for a play by Aristophanes. SOLD! The rhythms and the luxurious evocative melodies dove into my heart and I couldn’t wait to hear more. The “Greensleeves” Fantasia, the Thomas Tallis Fantasia, and “The Lark Ascending”. Oh, my God!! That last one! Totally beyond anything I had aurally experienced before! I didn’t care why it affected me; I just know that it did, to my very core. In the summer of 1983, I walked from London to Canterbury along The Pilgrims Way. It took me eight days (that’s another story) and my accompaniment on my Walkman was, among others, “Lark”.  Combined with the landscape I was in, the vistas I was seeing, well, it brought me to tears any number of times. I expanded my Vaughn Williams collection to include just about everything he wrote, from the complex and intense Symphonies to the Concertos, the Church Music, two small operas, the songs, Ballet Music and the Chamber Music. I’ve never been disappointed. In fact “Serenade To Music” is playing as I write this.

Those grocery store collections introduced me to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Mozart. I listened with my ears, but sometimes with my mind, asking myself how it was possible for a human being to choose from just the twelve notes of the scale and put them into such an order that I would be touched, provoked, cajoled into feeling this way or that, one note following another or on top of another or through, above and below its neighbour. I had heard Handel’s “Messiah” on records for a time. Over the years, I have sung it many times. I’ve even created theatre pieces out of it a couple of times. But I will never forget the first time I experienced it live. I was 16 in Montreal and the MSO was giving a performance of it at Notre Dame Cathedral. The Cathedral is immense! It seats over 2,500 people. It is a riot of colour, the overall impression, at least to me, is of a hummingbird – iridescent gold and orange and green and blue and red. The orchestra is seated in the vast alter space, with the towering gold façade of the saints as the backdrop. The basilica is darkened at the start of the performance. The slow, almost languid opening notes of the Overture bring a sober focus to the purpose of the music. Handel is directing us into a worshipful mindset, gradually pulling us into the mystery. Then, suddenly, in an incredibly theatrical surprise, the spritely Fugue begins. As those first notes stab the momentary silence, the lights of the vivid blue alter background flicker to full power setting off the gold and red of the façade, like eyelids fluttering after a night of sleep, moving from the dark into the light. The effect overpowers you for a moment as in “Did that really just happen?” and takes your breath away.

The organization of Handel’s music, the order of the Baroque harmonies touch my sense of structure and I am calm, open, accepting of the path down which I’m being led. It is sensory bliss. More Handel found its way into my life over the years through my involvement with the Montreal Elgar Choir and Gifford Mitchell, its conductor. Heady days, those; all the Oratorios, Maureen Forrester singing in most of them (what a voice!). Then seeking out any performance of the Orchestral works and then the Operas. I discovered the magic of the Countertenor voice with Handel. I came to understand the predictable progressions of his harmonies in the Baroque style and could hum along the first time I heard the music, not the actual melody but a harmony to it because I knew what the next chord would be. That was incredibly satisfying, to understand Handel’s music in that way.

Musical signposts that have accompanied times and events in my life: listening to Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” and the effervescence of the Jean Podromides film score for “Le Voyage En Ballon” on dear friend Michael Sinelnikoff’s magnificent sound system in the early sixties in Montreal; hearing “Days of Future Past” by the Moody Blues (very Vaughan Williams in fact) right inside my head via my new-fangled Walkman as I walked down Tottenham Court Road in London; my Pilgrim Way walk, in the Kentish countryside, again with the magic of the Walkman, tears streaming down my face as I listened to Peter Allen singing “I Could Have Been A Sailor” and “Tenterfield Saddler” over and over again. Oh Lands!! Just thinking about those moments now fills me with joy and melancholy all at the same time! Maybe I provoke myself at times like these, wanting to feel big feelings in big ways, expanding the emotion to be all encompassing in the moment … and how gratifying that can be!

So, back to the deserted island and lots of batteries. What’s it to be? It comes down to all that the above entails, really. Allowing oneself to bask in memory for a time (and perhaps this really is just a thing about getting old) and the need to recapture feelings from the past and force away the jangle of the present. So, I would have to chose (and I really am taking a moment here to decide … well, actually, I’ve taken a few days but I have to set the name down now) … Handel! No! Wait! Vaughan Williams!! No, uh, Handel. Oh, Geez! BOTH!! I have unlimited batteries for the player, so why not? The personal satisfaction that results from the music of these two composers can’t be diminished on either side. I have to have them both. It’s my game and I can make the rules however I want.

Okay, your turn. What’s YOUR choice to get you through extended time on a deserted island and, more importantly, why the choice? Never thought about that, have you? Well, maybe you did as you were reading this. Go for it! Let the notes take you to some place, some time, some event, some feeling, and relive it all over again. Or just simply marvel at the genius of Creation.

I’ll be back!