I knew who Ronnie Milsap was before I knew who The Beatles were. I mean the real Beatles, not the Beetles muppet band on Sesame Street – I knew the Beetles before The Beatles or Ronnie Milsap. But sometime between age 15 and 25, I stopped listening to Ronnie Milsap and began listening to The Beatles. A lot. As a result, when I hear Ronnie Milsap’s Back On My Mind Again, I automatically think of Ringo Starr singing Octopus’s Garden.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QboA41mP7qg
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne_lq4wwOu8
How unfortunate – even if huge amount of the music was . . . borrowed . . . Ronnie did it better. And his song actually makes sense.
There is a bend in Highway 20 between where I grew up and the freeway. At this bend there stood the Cottonwood Ballroom. Grandpa said that Harry James played there, back in the day, but I remember it as being dilapidated and unused. At that same bend is an intersection, and the road that goes off to the East is the way to Russ and Helen’s.
Every Friday night, the Grohn’s would go there, often stopping at the Cottonwoods convenience store where Dad would pick up a two-liter bottle of soda. In the fall and winter, we got there in the dark, and as we reached the end of the gravel driveway, Dad would swing the car wide so the high-beams would scan across the empty field and we might see the glow of deer eyes looking back at us.
It was an old two-story farmhouse, painted white, built on a high foundation because in the years before the dams were built, it would flood every year. Just inside the back door, the wood stove was burning full tilt.
This was Quartet practice. The Quartet was Mom and Dad, and Doug and Sandie, another couple from church. They sang four-part harmony on many Sundays in church. Helen was the organist at Bethlehem Lutheran, and she played organ for the Quartet too. From her Hammond and the four voices practicing in her living room, I learned the sounds of harmony. This is one of the three things in my childhood to which I attribute my musical affinity for harmony.
I grew up out in the country, outside of town a few miles, but this was farther out. It was quieter at night, farther from the highway. The big white barn no longer sheltered livestock, but there was still some mouldering hay in the loft. Bats and owls were the occupants of the space, evidenced by the piles of guano and some owl pellets. While the guano was bat droppings, the owl pellets were something else altogether. The undigestable remains of the rodents the owls had dined on became smooth round balls of hair and bone which the owls then horked up and left for us to find. Gross? No – awesome! By disassembling these dried out pellets the skeletons of owl food could be recovered. This was much easier than getting skeletons in other ways that involved a live or recently deceased animal, but relied on the great fortune of finding owl pellets in the first place. (Have I mentioned that Dad was a science teacher?)
At Quartet practice, us kids would play while the grown-ups sang. There were a couple tins of classic Tinkertoys, the pieces skinnier than the ones made today. There were matchbox cars and children’s books. I read about the Pilgrims, and how Squanto taught them to plant corn.
Russ was Helen’s husband and a man of few words. There was a joke about one of his phrases being “dad-gommit!” He had his special chair in the living room. One Friday night, Dad said that Russ wanted to show me something, so I went to Russ who was sitting in his chair. It was a BB gun, the plastic stock slightly melted, probably from being too close to the blistering heat of the stove. He showed me how the BBs were loaded into it, how to pump it, and how to use the safety switch. He gave me that BB gun to share with my sister and brother, and seemed very pleased about it.
In the bathroom at Russ and Helen’s were funny clear soaps in lots of colors. There was a bathroom scale with a big lens under which the numbers spun and finally came to rest under a red line. And the toilet had a funny carpet-like cover on the lid. This cover and the u-shaped rug around the base of the toilet changed periodically. At Christmas, the toilet lid cover had Santa’s face on it. When the toilet lid was lifted, the cover on the underside had Santa covering his eyes with his mitted hands.
When the practicing was done, it was time for snacks, sometimes followed by dessert. Snacks and dessert – no actual meal, just good stuff. Snacks might be Russ’s pickled herring, which I am reported to have eaten enough to turn my lips white, or it might be Sandie’s cheese fondue, or something else good. The bottle of pop Dad got on the way was for us kids to have with the snacks. The grown-ups got various grown-up beverages, but we pretended that our soda-pop was beer. Snacks were the best part of Quartet practice.
When snacks were done, the cards came out, and it was time for us kids to go to bed. The stairs were very skinny, and very steep, the narrow steps covered with black rubber treads. Jugs of Russ’s homemade wine were perched on the lower steps, off to the side as out-of-the-way as they could get. Rhubarb, raspberry, currant – wine made from fruit grown behind the house. While my house only had an attic at the top of a folding ladder, this house had bedrooms at the top of this skinny staircase, one on each side at the top of the landing. The ceilings were at funny angles with the roof of the house. The three of us were tucked into one bed, and expected to go to sleep while everyone else played Pinochile downstairs.
The bed had an electric blanket. The only other electric blanket I had ever seen was at Grandma and Grandpa’s. But this electric blanket was better – it had a controller with a dial at the head of the bed. When you turned the dial, a different number would light orange. We turned this glowing orange dial in the dark, counting the various numbers as they clicked by. What a marvelous toy!
At some point we must have fallen asleep. Magically, we woke Saturday morning back in our own beds at home. In later years, when I was a little older, I was woken up and walked out of the house under my own power down the long sidewalk to the car. I looked up and saw Dad carrying one of my slumbering siblings. I watched out the front window of the car from the back seat as we went home, the voices of those awake muted. As we approached the intersection at Cottonwoods and then made that hard left turn back toward home, it was like crossing the threshold between the world of Russ and Helen’s, and the world of my own home.
Just before Russ and Helen’s 50th anniversary, Russ wasn’t doing too well. One night, the mustard colored rotary phone on our kitchen wall rang. I was at the kitchen table. Mom picked up the phone, said “Thank you,” to the caller, and hung up. She called across the bar to Dad who was in the other room, “Honey? – Russ died.” A few days later, there was Russ, asleep in his casket, at his funeral at Bethlehem. We went to the graveside service. I saw the vault lowered into the earth at the Oddfellows Cemetery. I saw the earth filled in, and the little metal frame holding a typed marker pressed into the ground. Dad explained that it took some time for a proper stone marker to be made.
Helen said it meant a lot to her that my sister, brother, and I were at the funeral. I don’t know if we had the choice to go or not, but at the time it seemed right to be there. We had spent most of our Friday nights in his home, and did a good bit of our growing up there. We still went to Helen’s on Friday nights for practice. It was hard to stop calling the place Russ’s too. Russ’s chair was empty. I didn’t want to sit in it because it was Russ’s. It was still his chair.
Tonight I drove down Highway 20 in the dark, away from Mom and Dad’s and toward the freeway. In the daytime it wouldn’t cross my mind as I rounded that corner where the Cottonwoods Ballroom once stood. But in the dark on a cool spring night, I can’t help remembering the right turn off the highway and over the threshold into the world of Russ and Helen’s. Passing by the intersection I remember a blazing wood stove, pickled herring, a Hammond organ, four-part harmony, homemade wine, Tinkertoys, a glowing numbered dial, cards, merriment, and sweet dreams . . .
It has been about 672 weeks since I last played music publicly, excepting my participation in the handbell choir at church. It has been more like 957 weeks since I last played my trumpet, which I hung up after the 1994 marching band season in high school. That was when I switched to baritone horn for concert band.
So I got the crazy notion about a month ago that maybe I could play something for Easter. Easter is coming up very shortly, and I have a perfectly good trumpet that has been stowed away for years. What better feast day is there to bring out the old axe?
I heard a saying back in college, something to the effect that if you skip practice for a day, you will know it in rehearsal. And if you skip practice for two days, the people who sit next to you in rehearsal will know it. But if you skip three days of practice, everyone will know it. So at this point, I am wondering, what if you have skipped practice for 6699 days?
The challenge isn’t unfamiliar. It is similar to every summer after baling season, when I would go back to the university, and Doc would put the very best construction on the situation, saying, “You aren’t playing very well. Haven’t you practiced this summer?”
I would reply, “Well no, I was busy earning tuition.” Summer work farming with my family had usually run right up to a couple weeks before school began again, and by the time the machinery was cleaned and everything was put away, it was time to spend my summer paycheck. Doc even told me I should have taken the instrument over the summer and played it a little when I could out in the field. I wonder how it would have gone if the “big boss”, the man we did contract work for, had come out to the field and found me tootin’ my horn.
Thus began the uphill climb to being a somewhat halfway respectable euphonium player again. There were distinct stages in this annual comeback. First was the stage of being completely bad – bad sounding, bad intonation, bad tonguing, slow fingering, embarassingly poor range, and endurance of about ten seconds. . . eventually stage two kicked in. At stage two, things began to work good, the range improved, the fingers were pushing the correct valves at the right time, and it was possible to play longer.
But then stage three happened. Stage three is where there is a plateau, or more likely a step backward. It is like the lips toughen up and don’t want to vibrate, the range decreases, maybe even to less than what was possible in stage one, and nothing is predictable. Eventually it got better from there, but I won’t bother enumerating further stages, because right now, I am in stage three.
The hymn is “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”, and all I want to do is make a single pass on the fourth verse playing the melody. That’s 40 seconds of playing, mostly between the G’s in the transposed B-flat treble clef. In order to account for what may be a massive tax of nerves, I have to be able to do double that in practice. 40 seconds is really pushing it. Any individual phrase is no problem, but all strung together, it is quite a challenge.
I’m pulling out all the tricks. I’m using my very best in technique and proper breathing. I am even using my Cheater mouthpiece. The way mouthpieces generally work is that smaller means you can play higher. My standard mouthpiece is a 1 1/2C (the numbers are backwards so that smaller numbers mean a bigger mouthpiece), but that is the large mouthpiece I used back in high school. The Cheater is a 10 1/2C, a small mouthpiece that came with my first trumpet in grade school, a King 600. I plan to use the Cheater on Easter. But just in case, I also have the Super Cheater, an unmarked small mouthpiece with a tiny cup that came with an antique cornet I bought back in my college days. It would be embarrassing to resort to the Super Cheater, but it might be necessary. My trumpet is a semi-custom model with a specific combination of bell and leadpipe. While the pairing makes a wonderfully rich tone that is often commented on, the combo is commonly known as a “chop killer” and isn’t helping me out at the moment.
I stop by the church on my way home to practice for a few minutes most evenings. A few minutes is all it takes. By the time I leave, the muscles in my face are smarting, having been pushed to the limit and a little beyond. The ones at the corner of the mouth are first to go, letting me know I won’t be able to get up to that G. A few more passes, and I’m no longer able to get to the top of the staff without going flat. A couple more minutes, and I pack it up and head for home.
Maybe Lent was too late to start. Maybe I should have started working on my chops back in Advent. Well . . . eleven practice days left.
About once a year I get to fly somewhere on an airplane. Sometimes it’s for work, sometimes for a wedding, sometimes for a funeral, never just for vacationing, but perhaps I will do that someday. I like flying in airplanes. I especially like that final turn on the tarmac, sometimes followed by a pause at the runway, when I know the engines will throttle up next, and inertia will push me back in my seat. I recently found out that most people like aisle seats, and airlines may be charging more for them soon. But I like the window seat, especially during the day. I like when there is a break in the clouds and I can see the ground passing below. Once in a while I can see the shadow of the plane on the ground, miles below. From that height the shadow is tiny, just like an airplane in the sky is tiny when viewed from the ground, and not at all as the aircraft seems when I am in the airport watching them come and go. I like watching the shadow pass over the patchwork of fields of different colors, of green circles made by irrigation systems inside of arid brown squares. Passing hundreds of these fields in a minute, I begin to add up the length of the flight . . . all these parcels, owned by someone, tended by someone.
Next week I fly again, and this year’s trip is for work. As much fun as it is to fly on an airplane, I am really excited because I am going to Atlanta, Georgia, and there is a small possibility that I will get to see the World’s Biggest Pipe Organ. I read about it a couple years ago. It is up in the air exactly how the biggest pipe organ would be measured, so there are actually a few contenders, depending on if you count manuals, ranks of pipes, total number of pipes, or number of stops. But this particular one is a stand-out among gigantic pipe organs. It has seven manuals (keyboards), over 1200 stop tabs, and it has one of only two true 64′ open stops in the world.
The boxes on this wall are the actuators for the lowest diaphone pipes. There is one box per pipe, and the bottom of the pipe begins at about chest level.
The 64′ Diaphone is a pipe that makes an 8 Hertz tone, more than an octave below the normal range of human hearing. It works the same way a foghorn does. I have personally heard a 32′ Diaphone in person and remember it well, but this goes a full octave lower! It is true that this organ is not in very operable condition, and much of it doesn’t work. But even so, I hear that they are open a couple days a month for tours, and maybe I will be able to catch one of these. That would be so cool! This organ is the loudest musical instrument in the world – the Grand Ophicleide stop alone produces 130 decibels at a one meter distance. It operates on 100″ inches of air. That is to say that the air supply for the pipes has enough pressure to raise a column of mercury over 100 inches. Mercury is heavy! A church organ operates on something like 30″, and most theater organs on 60″ or more. But 100″?
I’m not really a pipe organ nut. I don’t play them, repair them, or collect them. But I do appreciate the complexity of moving parts, the mechanical apparatus of a tracker, and the valves, solenoids and switching network of an electrically operated organ. I appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into an instrument like this, and the amount of time and skill it takes to build one. I love the sounds they produce and the works written for them, especially those by the greatest Lutheran cantor ever, J. S. Bach. And I love a performance by a skilled organist. The pipe organ is, after all, the mother of all brass instruments, and while I am confined by ability to playing the smaller, less complicated, and less expensive variety of brass, that doesn’t mean I can’t sit back and enjoy the performance of someone else who can play it well.
So although this is a business trip, I am hoping that there will be an opportunity for me to break away and go see this behemoth of pipes.
What’s that . . . ? I have my cities mixed up . . . ? The biggest pipe organ is at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey? It’s not in Atlanta, Georgia? I guess my chances of seeing it on this trip are significantly diminished.
So what else is there to do in Atlanta? At least I still get to fly on an airplane. And I have a window seat.
Words are hard. They don’t stick in my brain very well. The idea they convey remains, but the actual words slip away. And a thought or idea seems simple until it must be put into words – the length of this post is evidence enough. When it comes to music, the text, the very meaning of the song, takes a back seat to other things. I might hear a song on the radio a hundred times and still fumble the words, substituting one word for another that sounds similar, or mixing lines from different verses.
No, with most songs it’s in the musical elements where my brain works best. And of the basic building blocks of music, harmony is where I am most at home. Rhythm and melody are nice, but harmony is what makes me like a song. I’m a harmony junkie. For me, it’s all about the changes. I suspect that whether other people know it or not, they might be the same way.
There is a musical comedy group in Australia, Axis of Awesome. Most of their comedy is offensive in some way or another, and this video is no exception. So . . .
****WARNING****WARNING****WARNING****WARNING****
At 5:20 these guys drop the big one. If you play this video and don’t want to hear the bomb, keep an eye on the clock and a finger on the pause button. When you hear the word “birdplane” you have about six seconds to stop the film. By that point, you really have seen most everything in this very clever and humorous bit showing the common harmonic structure of many pop songs and poking fun at the original (or unoriginal) artists. I understand they can do this once in movies and keep a PG-13 rating, but wish they wouldn’t. I really would like if there was a clean version as I could give it an almost-blanket recommend. Alas. . . //End Rant//
Here’s the problem. I like some of these songs, probably at least half of them. It’s a little like chocolate. Just because it’s a common Hershey bar, does that mean I won’t eat it because I had one last month, or last week, or yesterday, . . . or even thirty minutes ago? No, I’m gonna eat the Hershey bar every time. Go ahead, call me unsophisticated, I don’t care. It doesn’t have to be fancy chocolate with funny sea salt sprinkled on it. It doesn’t have to be made from the very best exotic pods. It doesn’t have to be delivered by a team of fancy purple unicorns. Normal unicorns are just fine. A regular Hershey bar is just fine. And I’m ok with the common I-V-vi-IV progression. Is it the best? Is it unique? No, but it gives my brain a hit. The chords are the foundation on which a great melody is built and tight inner harmonies are constructed. It lends music a sense of motion all on its own, of rising and falling, tension and release. A good progression can certainly be squandered, but having one is a great start.
Suppose you did want a better chocolate bar though. . . How about a longer progression that starts out the same way as I-V-vi-IV, but is deeper and richer. . . although still copied?
But first, what’s with all the Roman numerals? It’s called Functional Harmony, and it helps to show the relationships between chords in a given key. I is a triad built on the first note in a major scale, V is built on the fifth, vi is built on the sixth, and so forth. Upper case numerals are major chords, and lower case are minor. So you can have the same functional harmony in any of the 12 major keys, and it would be expressed with the same sequence of numerals, regardless of the actual chords being played. So this progression is:
I – V – vi – iii – IV – I – IV – V – I
In the key of G it would go:
G – D – e – b – C – G – C – D – G
In C it goes like this:
C – G – a – e – F – C – F – G – C
As you can see, when changing keys, all the other chords change, but when using the numerals to express functional harmony, the numerals stay the same no matter what key the song is in. For simplicity, all the printed examples are in the key of C, regardless of what key these recordings are actually done in. So here are a few tunes I can think of off the top of my head. . .
First, there’s the ever-classic Percy Sledge singing When A Man Loves A Woman.
The Bee Gee’s put it in Holiday.
The Dixie Chicks used it in There’s Your Trouble.
A few years later the Chicks feuded with Toby Keith after he did The Angry American.
Aerosmith built most of Cryin’ on it.
In Blues Traveler’s Hook, John Popper sings that it doesn’t matter what words he sings because you will come back for the hook. And I do . . .
There is Fastball with the chorus of Out of My Head . . .
And finally, there is the Rance Allen Group singing Let The Music Get Down In Your Soul.
Just for kicks I’ll throw in the Marc Broussard cover of the same song.
What’s going on here? Something makes me want to keep listing to the same progression over and over. What makes it so good? It’s the inner tension of the chords pulling against one another. Here is the basic progression. It doesn’t look like much.
But if I take the chords and invert them, or move the bottom note up an octave on some of the chords, you can see continuous stepwise movement down the scale from one chord to the next. These are highlighted in blue.
With a different inversion, the same chords show a continuous upward movement in the notes. These are marked in red.
Not all of these songs are exactly the same progression. Many take out the second IV chord because that allows for a continous stepwise scale all the way from upper C to lower C.
So with the same set of chords, there can be stepwise upward movement and downward movement at the same time – contrary motion. Human ears usually like this. Mine do. Everything works its way back to I. Some chords have a stronger tension toward I than others, like V – I is stronger than IV – I. Even stronger is if you add a 7th on top of V for a V7-I. It all wants to roll downhill back to I.
What’s that? I left one out? So I did. It turns out that this progression has been used for a long time. In fact, this progression is probably best known for Johann Pachelbel’s use of it in his Canon in D, probably composed sometime in the late 17th century. Here is an ensemble playing it on period instruments.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNQLJ1_HQ0
What amazes me is that I will listen to songs where I disagree with the words essentially because of the chord progression. I get Toby Keith, I really do. I remember being angry like that. But is it just to seek revenge and revel in the destruction of one’s enemies? The awesomeness of the song makes me second guess myself. And there’s Rev. Rance Allen, telling people they will find the answer deep inside themselves. Please don’t look inside yourself. You’re full of guts and other gross stuff. Something about that music? Do you feel it? Yes, it’s the chord changes. That’s all it is. So-called gospel music without a shred of the real Gospels. It does get in me somewhere, mainly my brain. It makes me feel happy, but it doesn’t do a single thing for my soul.
Alright, I’ve been holding out. There’s one more, a sort of chord progression cousin to Pachelbel. The overall structure is similar, but there are a few substitutions. These substitutions function as the V of something other than I. For example, I7 is the V of IV. Remember V-I is a strong pull? This is a strong pull toward something other than the real I. These constitute a sort of momentary key change where before everything wants to roll downhill to I, first it wants to roll on over to something else first. What is so cool about this progression is that instead of a regular stepwise motion along an unaltered major scale, a half-stepwise motion is enabled in an upward direction. The movement between notes marked in red is a mere half-step at each change. Talk about tension from one note to the next! The regular downward stepwise motion is in blue. And an extra bonus is marked in green where the same note can be held for several chords, something previously not possible. All at the same time, there are notes moving up, moving down, staying the same, moving only by small degrees, and pulling against each other.
The song is A Man Like Me by Randy Houser, and this progression is used for the chorus following a very plain verse made simply of I, IV, and V. It’s like a bite of sweetest chocolate after a sip of plain coffee.
I love it, love it, love it. Hard swinging rhythm section, honky-tonkin’ piano, sweet pitch-bending and sliding action, built on a great set of changes . . . and the words . . . what more could I ask for?
I would have liked if I had earned a BA Mus. Ed., just so I could tell a joke.
No, instead I have a BM. Try telling people you have a BM and see what reaction you get.
When I was in the first grade, the music teacher, Mr. Mason, taught our class out of a little book titled Wee Sing Silly Songs. He played them for us on a piano in the music room. Our entire school only had 80 students, and what I remember is that his job also included mowing the grass.
Years later, as a student pursuing an . . . erm. . . BM . . . with an emphasis in music education, I was required to complete a course called Functional Piano. This was so that I could confidently play the ubiquitous music room piano in order to teach Wee Sing Silly Songs to gradeschoolers in my future career. The idea is that in one semester, your average music major can play all major and minor two octave scales, something Mozart wrote for little children to play, and sight-read a hymn in four parts from the Methodist Hymnal with five or fewer errors. There were other things on the checklist, but none of them were as horrible as these. This course took me six terms to complete.
I must have been just about the worst piano student ever. At one point the standard two-part Mozart children’s piece was abandoned altogether for a substitute because there were so many mistakes learned into my playing that it would be too hard to undo them. It was better to cut it loose and start from scratch on a new piece. Worse was the hymn. Since it was sight-reading, a different hymn was chosen at each lesson. By the end of the sixth term, all the other requirements of the class had been completed, and so the entire lesson was spent trying to successfully sight-read a hymn. There are only 552 hymns in that hymnal, and we were running out. I only had to do it once. It could be at any tempo. It could be the largoest of any largo you ever heard. It could be slow beyond recognition, just as long as one chord followed another at whatever tempo I chose, and five or fewer mistakes were made. Many times Dr. Hauff pointed out that if a hymn was difficult in real life, at least play the soprano and bass, but that for the purposes of completing the hymn requirement, we would keep hammering away at all four parts. (A few months ago, I was showing Mom and Dad my new-to-me Hammond organ by crashing through For All The Saints, sans pedals. Mom kindly pointed out that I might do better if I only played the top and bottom parts.) Eventually I got one hymn right, or right enough. I don’t know which hymn it was.
But the worst was yet to come. If I remember right, the final performance didn’t affect whether you passed or not, but it still had to be done. At the end of the term, all the Functional Piano students who had completed the requirements played at a sort of recital where all the Functional Piano professors heard you play your hymn and two-part little children’s piece. And the other Functional Piano students heard you too. They had probably all heard me for three years on the dilapidated Chickering upright in practice room B trying to figure this out, but it didn’t help. The final was an utter failure on my part. I wasn’t embarrassed for myself at being bad on an instrument that isn’t my main instrument. What made this the worst is that in front of the other piano professors and students, I embarrassed Dr. Hauff with the poorest showing after six terms of study.
The class was essentially private piano lessons, so I had plenty of attention. I was just a bad student. I didn’t practice enough. I was over-extended on other classes. The plight of the typical music major is that they have many more classes to fit into four years than any other discipline, and many of them are only one or two credit-hours because you can’t have students with a 32-hour load. I was never in less than three ensembles playing my native instrument. I’m sure I could have done better. I would love to play as well as my cousin, Steve. Steve can hammer out The Entertainer with speed and force that would make any piano bleed. Steve drives a motorcycle. Steve is cool. But I’m not Steve. I don’t drive a motorcycle. And I can’t play piano.
Ultimately, it comes down to how many fingers are involved. My first real instrument was B-flat trumpet – three fingers, all on one hand. The same three fingers also worked for baritone horn, valve trombone, F-horn (other hand), euphonium, and tuba. If you add a thumb or opposite index finger, you can also play the 4th valve of the last four instruments in the list. With brass instruments, that is pretty much all you need – four fingers, and they all stay on their own keys. With piano, it takes all 10, and they all have to play different notes. Beside that there are pedals to push with your feet – these do various and sundry things, only one of which I understand. With a better brass instrument, there are tuning levers and slides to move on the fly, but this is really beyond the functional level. So are the brass instruments with more than four rotors or pistons. With woodwinds, lots of fingers are involved, but at least they don’t each have to push multiple keys. Things pretty much stay where you start out. 88 keys to push is way too many. 61 on an organ manual is way too many. There are simply too many fingers and limbs involved, and my brain just can’t get everything in the right place at the right time. And so, loving piano and organ music, I seriously respect and wonder at musicians who can play keyboards very well.
My instrument was euphonium. What’s a euphonium?
This is my euphonium, Hirsbrunner model 479, serial number 323. It is most like a tuba, but since the tubing is only half as long, it sounds an octave higher. Like the tuba, it is also similar to the horn (call it a French horn if you must), in that the tubing is mostly a conical shape. This gives it a diffuse mellow sound compared to instruments like the trombone, trumpet and baritone horn where the tubing is mostly cylindrical and produce a sharper more focused sound.
I was considered a good player at the time, always first chair, but the pond is small when you are a euphonium player. And while I loved ensemble work, nerves were always a problem as a soloist. The most terrified I have ever been was before taking the stage four times to prove proficiency as a soloist in different periods of music. My last performance was in concert as a soloist with a full wind ensemble, playing the first movement of a concerto I had transcribed. After a 16-bar intro by the ensemble, I made my entrance . . . about 20 clicks faster than the ensemble was playing. Nerves throw my sense of time right out the window, along with my endurance. By the cadenza, my strength was gone, and after just a few improvised notes, I ended while I still could. I didn’t bother getting a tape of the performance. Upper range playing was always a problem while my low- and mid-range was rich and robust. One of my instructors commented that I may never have found the right instrument, and that tuba might have been better. My axe really deserves a better home than it has. I got my degree playing instruments owned by the university, and when that was done, had none to play. When the farm machines were sold a few years later, I bought the Hirsbrunner. I have never really played it. It’s probably time I do, in a capacity other than originally intended.
I also never taught music. I did very well in theory, ear-training, history, analysis, orchestration, and anything else that required thinking about music, but when it came to doing, I didn’t meet my own standard. I wanted to be a good teacher, and thought I wouldn’t be. I didn’t want to prove the adage that “those who can’t, teach.” I may have been wrong, but done is done. And so, having my BM, I now do board-level repair of electronics for a living, a vocation which suits me well.
Well, at least I don’t have to mow the grass at work.
