The Shadowless Land of Used-to-Be

From the other, more important side of my brain

I decided to start a series of audio posts featuring some favorites of the songs my friend remastered for me.

I figured I may as well do it while I still can.

Since I was very young (18 months old), music has been the single most exciting thing I’ve ever encountered.

I remember the road trip to my father’s graduation with my mom and my paternal grandparents. Fortunately, it wasn’t until on our way home that I found the (almost completely liquid) chocolate bar left by my grandmother in the back window.

It so completely messed up my little sailor outfit that we had to stop and make our way through a cow pasture to a creek to try to wash things out. If it had happened on the way, I don’t think my mother would have taken me into the auditorium looking like I had completely crapped myself (incidentally, it would only have been because she wouldn’t have wanted anyone next to us to feel uncomfortable). Now, though, piecing it all back together with later memories, such as the one of my grandmother’s big purse that always had a big supply of hard candies (butterscotch disks, mints, or maybe some orange slices) and cough drops) and the other of my by then graduated dad asking her why in the world had she put a chocolate bar in the back window, I’m pretty sure it was because she didn’t want me spotting it after we got inside and left it where she had would have minimized the chance of getting it on the upholstery in the back seat.

She needn’t have worried. There was way too much for me to see to get fidgety. From my mother’s lap in the first row of the balcony, looking down on the crowd finding their seats, I saw a bunch of people sitting near the stage facing each other and holding big shiny things.

After everything had quieted down there was a pause and then the band started playing. I’m guessing it was Pomp and Circumstances. At some point I remember being briefly distracted by my mother saying, “Look, there’s Daddy,” pointing to all the graduates in their robes filing in. But I don’t remember anything else, just that huge bright sound washing over me that was bigger and better than any sound I had ever heard. And it was coming from all those things held by people near the stage.

It made me sit up straight and it made me want to move. I remember people looking at me but I didn’t know why and I didn’t care because that huge sound was everything and it was the only thing.

Yeah, sure, I knew it was music, but from pre-birth up until then I had heard only piano and vocal music, either at church, or my own mother playing the piano at home, singing while she worked, and, after reading to us, singing us to sleep every night.

But this was polyphony. It had many different tonalities. It was huge and was played by many people in a coordinated way. 

I had been seeing coordinated public action several times a week since birth: Stand for the invocation. Sit for announcements. Stand and turn to page whatever and sing. Sit for more talking. Listen attentively for a few minutes while one, two, or three really nervous people “brought us a special number in song to prepare our hearts.” Kneel for prayer. Then sit forever while someone or other did his best to plant a seed in those prepared hearts and make it grow right then and there by the use of serious-sounding talk unlike any other speech patterns I had heard, being held or, after gaining sufficient mobility and ability to utter intelligible words, distracted from doing so with bunnies made from rolled up hankies or pencil sketches or, if grandma was present, candy from that huge purse—anyone old enough will remember the kind, so big that it had almost as much junk as the kitchen drawers next to the sink, but no old batteries, still suitable for an archeological dig, but with a lot more functional items than a kitchen midden, and weird stuff, too, like “napkins” that didn’t look like anything at the dinner table. Finally, the collective action of everyone standing, then singing, then praying while standing, then a musical transition during which everyone started to act normal again and the only collective action was family groups being reassembled and heading for their cars until the next time about six hours later or halfway through the week.

But this was something completely different in almost every possible way, well, at least at the beginning. The rest had a superficial resemblance to the other public coordinated action, someone saying something, and then someone else saying something for a long LONG time while everybody shifted around or coughed or wiped sweat off their foreheads with handkerchiefs or fanned themselves with folded programs or wood-handled fans or, best of all, the fans that could unfold that women inevitably rooted around in those huge purses looking for, the fans that were just far too interesting to let little kids get their hands on. Then more standing by people in robes. And finally, after one more explosion of beauty from the people and their shiny things in the front, everyone could be normal again and head for their cars. Except now, compared to what I had heard, normal sucked.

I found out years later that the reason everyone had been looking was my performance as Little Gregorio the Human Metronome sitting up straight in his sailor uniform (my father was Coast Guard) conducting the band. Apparently, I was dead-on accurate.

Fast forward to third grade and an electric guitar for Christmas (probably because of my fascination with the guitars of older cousins). But it hurt my fingers in a way the piano didn’t. So goodbye electric guitar and hello chemistry set (the huge kind that folded out and out and actually had dangerous chemicals and an alcohol lamp), microscope (one that was not a toy), The Visible Man, and lots and lots of books, real books, science and natural history, Gulliver’s Travels (the real one), The Sinking of the Titanic, Tom Sawyer, One, Two, Three…Infinity by George Gamow, continuing to play the piano, figuring out stuff from my mother’s collection of piano music, telling her how much I loved Beeth-oven, then taking piano lessons, and finally, in fifth grade, the saxophone.

That last fully solidified my distaste of performance. Apparently, because of all the time I spent figuring out how to make music I already knew come out of the saxophone and could do it really well, the band teacher, who subbed by coming to our grammar school, one practice when the eighth grade girl who played first chair was out sick, told me, “Here, you play her part.” I told him that I couldn’t play it. He said of course you can, here it is, just play it. I told him the literal truth that I could not play it. If he had played it for me first then I could have played it without a problem. But I guess by then he thought I was refusing rather than just stating a fact so he didn’t bother to ask why I couldn’t play it. He started to get red-faced and louder and louder until he was yelling. I know now that he had assumed, because of the way I played, that I could read the music just as easily.

So, attempting to defuse things, I told him matter of factly that we should all just calm down and not blow things out of proportion. It was sort of the wrong thing to say to someone who already thought my refusal was a challenge to his authority, the wrong way of saying it all calmly and not like a kid getting yelled at, and the wrong vocabulary (something I had heard my dad say—though never to mother), probably for the same reason my 5th grade teacher told my parents I read too much. So he kicked me out of the band.

Too bad I couldn’t have as easily gotten kicked out 5th grade for telling my teacher, no, Egyptian mummies don’t turn to stone from “sitting around so long,” followed by distinguishing petrification from mummification, and then describing the processes involved in Egyptian funerary practices.

Hey, teachers claimed they were dedicated to learning, so why should she get upset over learning something new? But later I realized they were dedicated to teaching, not learning, and certainly not from a student. With few exceptions from kindergarten through at least high school, I found this to be true of all of them, especially principals.

Anyway, that misery wasn’t over with getting kicked out of band. No, in order to keep being able to take saxophone lessons, I had to play for the Christmas program at church.

I got my friend who played trumpet and made an arrangement of We Three Kings of Orient Are. I guess I should have roped in a third to spread the misery. We practiced a LOT. The choice was cool because it was mostly in a minor key and, so, suitably mysterious sounding, and because I was able to throw in little figures I’d heard in cartoons and movies and The Three Stooges to make it sound more Middle Eastern.

The night came. We decided to position ourselves to the side of the stage by the swinging doors that opened onto the rest of the church. The house lights were out, the place was packed (because later the Christmas candy would be passed out), and but for candles and some dim Christmas lights in the front the place was dark.

Aside from the shadowy figures of the crowd nothing could be seen but those candles and lights reflecting from all the eyeglasses worn by the adults. Oh, yeah, and no added pressure knowing my father’s reel to reel Wollensak was running.

We were introduced. All those lighted up glasses turned toward us.

I counted in and we started, except my friend hit one of those notes, not the wrong note, but the one that became very wrong in a non-Miles Davis acceptable kind of wrong. We stopped. He said, “Let’s get outta here!”

I had already heard the expression about someone’s past flashing before his eyes in the second before his death. What I had flash before my eyes while looking at all those lights reflected from all those eyeglasses, many of which belonged to all my relatives sitting in the dark looking at us illuminated by the EXIT sign above our heads, was my future, starting with all of the relatives later at our house and then years and years of that Wollensak tape being played every Christmas.

So I said, “No. Do it over.” and counted us in again. We played through a verse and chorus and then left.

And so began a hatred of performance of music as great as my love of music. Some folks have said, yeah, but you didn’t run. You went ahead and played. Yeah, because the short-term actual pain of staying was far less than the anticipated and long-term future pain of running off. But it was still pain.

Over the years I played many times, for big groups and small groups, at school, at church, in synagogue, for weddings, in competition (but not live) and every single time was just as agonizing. I had friends in bands in high school and later who have always LOVED performing and I have never been able to understand why.

It wasn’t until many years later that I finally understood why that band teacher got so bent out of shape. I was visiting old friends with my parents in my dad’s farewell trip before he died. We were back in that area and visiting with my piano teacher and her husband. She told me she had never had a student like me. Since that could be referring either end of different Bell curves, I asked what she meant. She said that when she assigned me something for next time and I asked her to play through it, then I could play the whole thing back to her immediately.

And that recalled to me what a piano teacher told our piano class in college. He said he was tired of having anything he gave me nailed down by the next class and that he was going to give me something I’d never learn. But that only took a couple of weeks to memorize.

So, over the years I kept playing and composing and when the Yamaha DX7 came on the market, I was finally able to create some of the sounds I wanted to ever since seeing Robert Moog demonstrate his first synthesizer on the Today Show.

Up until 2015, my usual way of composing was to sit at the keyboard and listen attentively. Then I would hear the beginning of something and play that, then listen for the next bit and play that, and continue to the end. And then, of course, play it until I was certain I wouldn’t forget it. After getting a sequencer, I made sure I would record it so I wouldn’t lose it because I had had a couple of instances of falling asleep knowing I’d never forget it and waking up with totally gone.

What happened in 2015 was getting my brain scrambled by some guy rear-ending us at about 90 mph, racing to get to his girlfriends house at 2:15AM with his lights off on Lakeshore Drive.

It severely messed up my ability to write as well as to compose as I always had. I just could not find my way to enter that state of quiet attentiveness. My ability to write began to recover slowly as most of the weirder neurological signs and symptoms began to recede. I’m guessing that was the outward sign of my brain rewiring itself.

But with the exception of one piece I heard halfway asleep and sequenced it (One for the Road), I’ve never been able to sit down and capture anything in almost finished form in a single take. I can remember nearly everything from before, but that’s because it’s in my muscle memory.

So starting in about 2017, I began to transfer all my MIDI files from my 30 year old DataDisk floppies into LogicPro on my desktop computer. Since, with the advent of LogicPro, I had all the voice, effects, editing, and almost limitless tracks that were limited by my vintage equipment, I decided to see if I could turn my earlier sequences into forms that were more like I had originally envisioned.

I’m guessing that the rewiring to my musical imagination was somehow different from what it used to be. I couldn’t hear to compose like before, but I could hear to arrange what I already had a lot better.

These songs my friend remastered for me represent about half of what I have redone from my original tracks. Some of the others I was planning, during my Covid Inc-forced retirement, to recreate using my original equipment and build on from there. I had my 16 channel Mackie Onyx FireWire mixer unused and ready to go; my Tascam 244 four track refurbished and working well (I used it to transfer my friend’s guitar part for our cover of Love Broke Through about 35 years ago into a track in LogicPro and then re-recorded all the other parts around it). And then the guy in the adjoining storage unit and some friends broke in and stole all my instruments and equipment. At least they didn’t get my media (not that they’d know or care) so now all I have to do it buy another DataDisk and a QX5 sequencer and I can finisher transferring things into the LogicPro realm.

In posts to follow will be either piano or multitimbral pieces. The names are weird because they reflect my filing system.

The style is varied. Nearly all of them began as experiments, like this: Do something like a Kuhlau or Clementi sonatina (Last One Before Grad School). Do a 150bpm piece. Do something that sounds like ragtime (Southern Ragtime). Do something that reminds me of what I heard on NPR’s Piano Jazz (PTK). Do something with arpeggiation (ArpExer). Do something that would work as music for a scrolling video game (Transluminal Subduction). Do something sad sounding (Wedding Music). Do something using jungle or dance loops (That Bart, Right There; Close Encounters of an Afghani Kind in the Apple Bush of Loops). Do something that sounds like choro (Brazilian Sunrise) or merengue or Middle Eastern (Moroccan Tango) or Japanoid. Do something that sounds dreamy and flowing (Joe Jackson). Do something long that episodic and Byzantine (“Your Metropolis is not God, Fritz (God Is a Western)).

A number of people have said my music reminds them of movie music, which is okay.

Now I need to convert them to ACC because the uncompressed wav files of some is just too big to upload to substack.

Though I’ve always loved science (and much later, math), enough to go back to get a PhD for work in molecular neurobiology and a post-doc fellowship in neurobio/pharm/phys on a USDA cardiovascular training grant, and then almost 16 years doing DNA sequencing and genotyping, it’s music, whether composing, playing, or listening, reading and writing, photography and other mediums that have meant the most and have harmed me the least. It wasn’t a piano teacher who fired me for refusing the viral mRNA products that I knew, from my own long familiarity with their common, primary mechanism of action, were inherently dangerous. I’m glad, because of that work, that I’m able to describe for others what is going on, but it still doesn’t have the thrill that music does.

I would like to get a graduate degree in composition, but to stay alive, I’ll probably have to go back to a lab if I can find one that’s not still under the sway of Covid Inc.