THE EMBRACE: BEYOND CATEGORY (Last--Thank God--In a Series

“There are two kinds of music in the world: good music and the other kind.” --attributed to Duke Ellington.

When Elizabeth replied to my profile on some dating site or other in early 2002, she mentioned that she’d been a classical pianist. According to my memory, that, more than anything else, inspired me to respond positively.

From the end of the Swing Scene to that time, I didn’t listen to much. The only music from that really lit me up was the (now semi-retired) English duo known as Everything But the Girl. I was hanging out at Frankie’s Bohemian Cafe, a Czech-style beer hall on the same-named street in San Francisco, where well-known local musicians like Jonathan Roniger, Max Bran and record producer David Hampp congregated.

But mostly, I’d stare at my beer and ask wither popular music (including rock n’ roll)? Maybe, as a non-musician and not much of an expert, I should shut up . . . but Elvis Costello is wrong. I’m the audience. Allow me to talk back for once.

And what about you? How many post-pop fans among you hands please thank you! When you hear about the new Coldplay album, do you shrug: “Oh, that’s nice. They’re making a living . . . what U-2 is still around? Hooray, The Beatles never reunited, hooray! Stones take note! There's more sacrilege where that came from!")

Maybe it’s just ‘cause I’m an Old Person (ewwwww!) Who Hates New Things Like Old People (ewwwww!) Always Do. But I insist: This is about more than shaking our canes and clacking our dentures while croaking “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.”

When my parents and grandparents (born in the early half of the 1900s) heard the Beatles for the first time O the shrieking, foaming and sputtering! They were appalled, frightened, threatened, offended, disgusted, repulsed and disturbed by that . . . that . . . racket.

Move ahead 40-plus years. Now I’m my parents. But when I hear the music of You Young People Today (watch me wag my bony warlock finger), I do something much much worse:

I yawn . . . mmmmm . . . nap time!

These new songs aren’t bad, either. They’re well-written, superbly performed (though nobody seems to belt it like Elvis and his Spawn much anymore), have catchy melodies . . . what’s not to like? Trouble is, I spend too much time being reminded of the Old Masters who inspired you: “Oh, Elvis/Dylan/The Beatles/The Ramones/Pink Floyd/ did that lick/melody/lyric twenty/thirty/forty years ago in This Tune on That Album.”

Nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from Old Masters, but I hear nothing new spinning on the CD player, either. That jubilant explosion that started in the mid-1960s sounds absent. I may be deeply wrong, but something tells me even Sir Paul McCartney may have reached a somewhat similar conclusion: there’s only so much a bloke can do with three chords, three guitars and a drum set, even after adding keyboard, synthesizer and 100-piece orchestra. Popular music may promote a deceptive freedom, because, musically, it truly is the most rigid form there is. There may be no color left in the old paint box.

Returning to Elizabeth and Self:

Among our first dates was an Oakland East Bay Symphony concert at that incredible Art Deco palace, the Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, for a program of Giuseppi Verdi, Marco Beltrami, J.S. Bach, Franz Liszt and Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Six years later, classical music is what I listen to most: we’ve collected hundreds of hours of music encompassing a thousand years, pouring from thousands of minds from so many corners of so many rooms, so many dimensions, an endless effusion of sounds bright and baffling. If the amount of work, both big and small, wasn’t so great, I could become an obsessive like Phil Schaap. Hardly a week passes where I don’t hear something entirely new to me, or something familiar that sounds so new, it takes a minute to remember. You don't hear me say "Oh, just another Bach cantata."

Like all general interest writers, I’m stumped about how to tell you what it is I’m hearing so you’ll take in a concert, buy a CD or link to some of the countless radio stations that broadcast online. (Classical makes up less than 3% of the buying market, but in live venues and online, it thrives like never before. I usually read Alex Ross of The New Yorker for help.)


Classical music is often called “elitist,” meaning it’s only accessible to wealthy snobs who kick their servants while taking their $300 seats; it’s not “real people’s” music.

(So, what am I? An android? This is the reverse snobbery of those “Ha! I Eat Feces and You Don’t!” social critics--for which the classical industry does bear some responsibility.)

But on a strictly human, emotional level the vast majority of it is remarkably tuneful and even rocking (the opening of Beethoven’s Eroica; the final movement of Schubert’s Quintet D. 956.) Like a great nature trip, it cleans your soul of modern life’s garbage. Its fans will swear to you: it can take you the edge of God and Eternity like nothing else.

Classical music is elitist and non-democratic in one sense: I mean, do you really want to hear me play the violin? All the best music, pop, jazz, and classical is performed by elitists from Ringo Starr to Benny Goodman to Marc-Andre Hamelin, plus the snob in the last photo. They damn well better be better than the rest of us at what they do.

Elite means the best. In art, that’s how it should be. Mediocrity kills beauty like bug spray.

A concluding point: In an early draft of this series, I wrote that I bought the notion that music doesn’t build hospitals, cure disease or inspire people to sign up for Al Gore’s Climate Challenge. This recent “60 Minutes” report below hints I was right to delete that.

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The Embrace: First Sour Notes

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

According to Google, that quote originated with Elvis Costello. It’s funny, but possibly unfair in the way those kinds of quips often are: It douses further conversation, as if it were our duty to dutifully listen, nod in meek approval and go silently home. What do you know about Music, miserable Worms!

True, I know so little about music at its technical level that I approach the subject shrouded in a blanket of mute. As I write this, J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor BMV 232 plays on my computer . . . but how can I ever tell you what it’s like, aside from it’s like sitting in the most beautiful church ever with choruses all around? As clever as we all think I am, the kind of notes I write—words—fail to ever capture the deep experience of music. The best I can hope to do—now—is convey my experience on the outskirts of this universal language that exists in the realm beyond words.

My first—and really last—instrument I picked up was the acoustic guitar. Like so many circa-nine-year-old boys circa the mid-1960s, I was inspired by The Beatles, but that glib parroting passion was all I had and it lasted mere months. The Fab Four made it look fabulously easy, but my hardest lesson was that learning an instrument—even to play three-chord rock n’ roll—was hard, tedious and required a focused obsession I lacked.

(And then there was Mom, who told laughing sad tales about her own “tone deafness” as she tried to learn the violin as a teenager and how we all probably inherited it, which made the situation so 100% hopeless that I should quit anyway and spare the family anymore humiliation and that awful music and you’re getting a haircut I don’t care if every kid in school’s tucking his hair in his socks . . . !)

Until I was eleven, I liked the same music the other kids around Mohegan Lake, New York did—rock n’ roll and British Invasion. We used to stand in circles around the gym during recess belting out Beatles tunes a Capella (I was John, Cool, eh?) Tagging after an older brother, I also dug Johnny Cash.

I also heard classical music on the record player (hand-cranked, of course) and even remember, (probably—I hope—when I was six) air-conducting Beethoven using uncooked spaghetti as a baton while standing on a dining room chair wearing only a pajama top and Fruit o’ the Looms (thank God, no video then.)

But when I was moved to Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1966, I seemed to really go tone deaf. I stopped listening to pop and rock n’ roll (maybe it made me homesick); I failed to fit in with the scene in that dreary place so completely, that my idea of rebelling against the gray crushing forces surrounding me was listening to the music of (I’m cringing as I write this) Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass! (Yeah, you with the complete John Denver collection, wipe that smirk off!)

I stood in this perversely anti-anti-establishment stance for quite awhile; I deepened my alienation by falling for the film scores of Ennio Morricone (and so launched myself way too far ahead of the crowd by twenty years!).

I knew this old dude was cool waayy before you did nyah-nyah!

I drifted back toward the mainstream by becoming a Gordon Lightfoot fan during the terrible awful despairing ghastly infuriating embarrassing depressing paralyzing dumbfounding Late Teens Era—maybe an echo of Johnny Cash past—but this only intensified the acidic scorn and lofty sneers from the vastly-more-sophisticated fans of this Lightfoot-loving legend.

In my early twenties, I moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota and, eventually, into an apartment in south Minneapolis with two fun-loving, dudes, Steve and Greg (who is a reader of these very pages). I immediately fell back in love with the Beatles. One day Steve, admiring my small collection of Morricone scores, said: “You should get all of them” and—

. . . uh anyway, one evening in the summer of 1978, I emerged fragrantly bleary-eyed (a common state at that time) from my bedroom. As I entered the living room, the roar of a chain saw blasted from a pair of giant speakers amplified past 10 followed by a roaring rolling snowball of guitar chords and a solid, thumping dinosaur stomp of drums.

I scurried back to my room and under the futon. When I later emerged, I learned that Greg was not lurking in ambush to make stew out of me, but was listening to a tune called—big surprise--“Chainsaw” by what was, in Minneapolis, a new band: The Ramones.

From there, I started listening to bands like The Clash, The Dead Boys, The Replacements, The Suicide Commandos, Devo, and, maybe my favorite all, a local band called The Suburbs. Great days of sweaty, stoned, beer-soaked nights at Jay’s Longhorn Bar (ground zero in the Minneapolis punk scene) and First Avenue, where I saw the Ramones late in 1981. I went to see The Clash (but had to leave when I got sick; one of the few times I dropped acid, an experience I found mostly boring and vile). I even got to see The Who, though it was years after Keith MoonLake Michigan.
and I sat so far back that saying I “saw” them has as much weight as saying I saw Barack Obama from across

Of course, I was still listening to Dear Gordon (always far from the eardrums of my betters) and my Morricone collection slowly grew (Greg became a fan after I turned him on to Exorcist II and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage both of which put him in mind of Frank Zappa’s music).

But in the spring of 1982, family duty called me to California. Like it or not, I had to go. I went tone deaf again. What happened next will be related . . . next.