Klarinet Archive - Posting 001213.txt from 1998/07

From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Nothing new under the sun?
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 22:43:00 -0400

>Are you sure that they are turning away from classical music? I graduated
>from high school in 1955, from a school which had a good music tradition,
>and I was the only person in my school who had an interest in classical
>music. How could they be turning away from it more than that?

Nice that some people are a little older than me around here.... I
graduated from high school in 1961. And it was not until I GOT to high
school that I knew anyone besides me who liked classical music. Last week
I was in the Virgin Megastore on Times Square and the speakers in the
classical department were playing something I knew was by Morton Gould, I
think called "American Salute" or something like that: a weaving of
patriotic tunes into a really fine orchestration. I was having some
serious memory flashbacks, looking for William Bolcom's Clarinet Concerto
while getting Gould piped at me out of my childhood. No, I didn't find the
Bolcom, but I took a trip down Memory Lane...or really Memory Swamp.

My parents owned the Gould on 78s. They were not big music fans in the
sense that they had trained ears, but they owned it anyway: they bought a
lot of stuff, and had a collection of old shellac ranging from Frank
Sinatra and Tony Bennett to an incredibly racist tune by Peggy Lee called
"Ma=F1ana" (hubba-hubba!), and some salacious party songs like "She Has
Freckles on Her Butt, She Is Nice." I didn't know what American Salute
was, I had no idea I was listening to "classics" or "semi-classics," I just
loved it.

Playing followed on listening: to this day, I wonder how I went so many
years without playing an instrument. When they came around in 5th grade to
give instruments to the kids with some demonstrated ear, the big choice was
the violin or the clarinet. Well, the violin was "for girls," so it had to
be the clarinet, and I sucked at it. Not just on it. Through the 5th and
6th grades I was just awful. Then, somewhere in the 7th grade, JHS 127 in
the Bronx, I heard that Gigliotti recording of the Weber Concertino and I
went crazy. See, I'd never heard a real clarinetist before. What I did to
develop a tone was I began to imitate what I heard. It worked, at least
well enough for me to develop a real nice tone for a kid player and at
least a small facility with the instrument.

I also heard the Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. I had the best
of both worlds.

But Junior High was also when rock 'n' roll hit real heavy: this was about
1957. Musical changes, hormonal changes, and me, the schmuck, saying out
loud that I LIKED classical music! I might as well have said I LOVE HITLER
in front of a synagogue, or I AM A HOMOSEXUAL AND I LIKE TO HAVE
UNPROTECTED SEX WITH AIDS CARRIERS WHILE WE SHOOT SMACK WITH THE SAME RUSTY
NEEDLE. See, by the 7th and 8th grades, the factions had formed. There
were the rock 'n' rollers who learned to play the stuff, and there was me
who disdained it and was disdained in my turn. There was also the one
closet jazz piano player who wouldn't admit to it: Harold Horbund wasn't
loved but he wasn't bothered. I was too stupid to keep my mouth shut, and
I wasn't loved and I WAS bothered. It wasn't until I got to high school
that I found other people as nebbishy as I was supposed to be. Hey, some
of them even liked OPERA!

Classical music was considered a disease by kids my age back then. It
marked you as capital-W Weird: a fruit, shall we say. The kids who
purchased strips of tickets for the Bernstein Young Peoples' Concerts
practically had to sneak into the Vice Principal's office to buy them so
they wouldn't be spotted. And only the real freaks and outcasts went. For
me, it was an escape to a room where there were 2,000 other people as out
of it as me!

In some ways, Tony Gigliotti saved my mind and so did Leonard Bernstein.

I just kept playing, haphazardly, randomly. I wasn't good enough to get
into Music & Art so I had to settle for the Columbus High School band.
Like I said, even there we were somewhat misfit-ted, but by high school
kids have learned a bit more tolerance, and the population is larger so you
can find a circle of people as ostensibly Weird as you are.

I don't know where the new audiences come from. I mean, there surely are
people today, my age or a bit younger, who buy classical CDs, go to
concerts, perhaps even perform as amateurs or professionals, but who can
also recite the words to "At The Hop" if you wake them up at 3 AM from a
sound sleep. I didn't get into Fifties rock 'n' roll until I married a
woman who could do exactly that. It's amazing that our marriage lasted as
long as it did, considering her reaction to "La Boheme" was "When's the
broad gonna die, already?"

I'm sorry this really more of a brief auto-psychobio than an answer to the
question of WHY is classical music not getting more kids hooked. Because
they're kids. Because MOST kids just don't care for the stuff. Including
my own. Some people learn if they are exposed to it and it's not made a
big deal of. If all you have around the house is pop music, that's what
the kids are going to learn. If all that's on the radio is WCBS-FM (New
York's oldies station), that's what they will expect: a relatively narrow
palette of tone colors, even though I admit the stuff can be fun.

Funny Footnote: One of the kids who played sax and clarinet in Junior High
became REAL good in a real hurry, he was popular, he didn't even rag on me,
he played rock, and he learned to play jazz too. This was and still is
Fred Lipsius, who played the sax for Blood, Sweat, and Tears in the late
1960s, and is now a professor at Berklee up in Boston. Seeing his
middle-aged face on an MMO instructional book and CD brings back LOTS of
memories....

Ken

Kenneth Wolman Information Technology Morgan Stanley Inc.
750 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 212-762-1685
"I only wish I could write with both hands, so as not to forget
one thing while I am saying another." -- St. Teresa of Avila

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