Postcards from the Rogue Valley

For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. — George Frideric Handel, The Messiah

For as long as I can remember, Handel’s Messiah has been an antidote to whatever end-of-year blues ailed me. I think of it as my holiday anthem: an infusion of hope — a Prince of Peace — as the Winter Solstice dims the lights. I am not religious, I should add.

Growing up, music, mostly classical music, was the soundtrack of my life. Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Wagner, Dvořák, and more — they accompanied me morning to night. My mother and oldest brother, Alan, were the turntablists, moving music through the two-by-three foot speakers in the front hall of our house in Princeton, New Jersey. One minute the brilliance of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite would fill the air. An hour later, the pathos of Brahms 3^rd Symphony would cool things down.

We played multiple instruments, my two brothers and I. My mother had played the piano since she was seven. At dinner, we debated what instrument was best or who was the better composer — Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms.

Sometimes, music propelled action. When my big brother thought a faculty cocktail party at our house had run its course (my father was chair of the math department at Princeton), he would let the cannon shots in Tchaikovsky’s 1812  Overture “speed the parting guests,” as he put it. When my mother’s brother, an amateur organist, came to visit, we knew it was time to wake up when Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony shook the house. Indeed, music this grand, my brother Alan insisted, was meant to be played ad alta voce.

This family soundtrack reached its peak during the “holiday” season. Starting in mid-December, Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, and the Nutcracker Suite joined the playlist. As Christmas grew closer, my brothers and I would pick up our instruments (clarinet, cello, and violin, respectively) and accompany my mother as she played Christmas carols from the legendary Fireside Book of Songs. (I always favored the melancholic “What Child Is This?” over “Hark the Angels Sing.”) Sometimes my father built a fire in the fireplace.

You knew Christmas was over when Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite reappeared.

Music is magic

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination,
and life to everything.” — Plato

When I was eleven years old and my family moved to Geneva, Switzerland for a year, I continued my beginning violin lessons with a teacher who spoke no English. At one lesson, he suddenly broke into pantomime, trying to convey what he wanted to say: “Music is magic.” I nodded “Yes.”

Music, we know, is a gateway to our emotions. Have you ever listened to a particular song and been instantly transported back to a specific memory or feeling? 

Brain scans reveal that when we listen to music, regions responsible for processing sound, emotion, and memories – like the auditory cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus – are simultaneously engaged. Our hearts swell, confirming music’s ability to evoke deep emotions ranging from joy to nostalgia to sad.

The sadness can be as powerful as the joy. When I was thirteen years old, my parents divorced and I moved to Los Angeles with my mother to join her new husband (a professor at UCLA), leaving my brothers and friends behind. I remember that first year how I fought back tears whenever my mother, in our new “home,” turned on music from my Princeton soundtrack. I wondered what it invoked for her.

Happily, music can heal, too. It has been used to reduce anxiety, and pain, and improve mood in clinical settings. The discipline of music therapy has emerged as a powerful tool in treating various disorders, from autism to dementia. The neurologist Oliver Sacks explains:

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.” (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain)

In my mathematician-centered family — four generation’s worth — there was an additional narrative: magic was genetically linked to mathematics. 

By this reasoning, the deeper world of musical syntax and structure was akin to the sorts of sophisticated structures, syntax and regularities that are part and parcel of mathematical thinking. Perhaps the best real-life example of a mathematician-musician was Albert Einstein, who was also an accomplished pianist and violinist. “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in music,” Einstein said.

Looking back, I have yet another theory for why music held my family in its palm: It was a way to express and share the emotional timber absent from our daily exchanges. Ours was not a house where love or anger or longing were expressed verbally.

When my piano-playing mother was 93 and dementia was stealing her last breaths, I put headphones on her and played her favorite piece of music, Brahms Piano Concerto No.2. She died when the last movement ended.

Moving on

In college, I would turn to the piano in the basement of my dormitory when I wanted to reminisce. One of my favorite compositions was Schuman’s “Scenes from Childhood” — a collection of small songs with titles like “Catch Me,” “Pleading Child” and “A Big Event.”

When I graduated from college, I bought a used upright piano and moved it with me to Providence, Rhode Island, where I was helping start an alternative high school.  “Really?” one piano mover frowned when he learned that the piano he was unloading would need to make its way up narrow stairs to a third floor.

Meanwhile, my soundtrack switched to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and much more.  If you’ve read an earlier post of mine, you will know that I could not get the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” out of my head and my heart.

A decade later, when my mother bought Tony and me a first-class upright piano for the new home we had purchased after our second child was born, I took out my old piano music. I was rustier than I liked. 

However, our son Carl, who was then seven, decided he wanted to play the piano, too. He went at it with gusto, practicing Bach and Scott Joplin with equal enthusiasm, until sixth grade when a friend who’d sat in on one of Carl’s piano lessons with his admittedly eccentric teacher mimicked him back at school.. Embarrassed, Carl quit lessons.

Dan (five years younger than Carl) fell in love with the cello when he was in preschool. He’d seen a boy a little older than him play the cello at a local music school, and that Christmas he asked Santa for a cello.  Santa delivered. When Dan defied his Suzuki teacher by insisting on learning to read music (instead of learning by ear), he was off and running, playing his small cello two to three hours a day. When he was in fifth grade, I’d steal him from school Friday afternoons and we would head to Boston for an afternoon performance by the Boston Symphony. He attended a summer string camp in Western Massachusetts and joined one orchestra after another, from middle school to graduate school. At 37, Dan still plays the cello for an audience of one.

During the three years we lived in Brooklyn, before moving to Ashland, I picked up the flute — the instrument I had really wanted to play all those years.

Rediscovery

My rediscovery of Handel’s Messiah came late in life — last year, to be exact.

My Italian-born husband eschewed Christmas music, and it was not part of our family’s soundtrack. For our Ethiopian and Israeli “daughters-in-law,”  decorated fir trees  and frosted cookies were leaps in themselves

In short, while Christmas is the only holiday in the U.S. where music takes centerstage  — from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” stalking customers in malls to “O  Holy Night” at tree lighting ceremonies and “The Nutcracker Suite” with aspiring young dancers — holiday music was not a centerpiece in our family celebrations.

A year ago, sparked by nostalgia, I entered Handel’s Messiah in Google search and came upon an extraordinary two-hour plus video of a performance at the Sydney Opera House with a 600-strong choir. The next day and the next, I clicked repeat and rode the Messiah’s musical lows — “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” — and its highs — “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. Hallelujah!” to my soul’s content.

A week later, I discovered a cornucopia of videos with world-class orchestras, soloists and conductors moving to music buried deep in my soul. Where had I been all these years? I bought an electric piano and began stumbling through pieces I once played by heart.

Recently, my Brooklyn-based son Carl told me that he had been playing songs, including Christmas carols, from my mother’s Fireside Book of Songs, which I’d passed on to him along with the upright piano she bought us 35 years ago. He sent me a used copy of the same book to christen my new piano.

Yes, music is the strongest form of magic.

A Postscript: 

Writing this, I am keenly aware that only 10 percent to 15 percent of Americans have what might be termed a close or moderately close relationship with classical music, and again as many have weaker ties (The Knight Foundation). It is estimated that one percent of the U.S. population attends one or more classical concerts a year.

Meanwhile, in classical music circles, the graying of audiences is a recurrent theme. Last season, about 62 percent of the New York Philharmonic’s audience was 55 and older. By contrast, the average age of the Broadway audience has hovered between 40 and 45 for the past two decades. (The New York Times, Aug. 6, 2020)

However, in a recent  report by Britain’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and a leading streaming service, researchers found that a third of those streaming classical music in the previous year had been 18 to 25 years old (Classic FM). Whether more American youth are adding classical music to their iPhone playlists is unknown.

I should add that since the onset of smart phones, I have curated a long playlist of songs from the 70s through the 00s that fuel my daily exercise routines. I’d be lost without them.

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