I was born into a very musical family. My father wooed my mother by playing the violin beneath her window. He played well enough that she married him, and happily they didn’t end up like Romeo and Juliet.
My mother had a beautiful singing voice (better than the one she used when she chased me around the dining room table, with her slipper, shouting, “Act like a lady!”) And, her father (my grandfather) was a concert-trained pianist, whose father had told him that he would disown him if he sought a musical career.
My little brother didn’t inherit much of the musical gene, but he enjoyed sliding down the banister, and jumping on the piano keys on his way to the floor. However, in middle school, he did play the bag bass drum in the marching band, which was bigger than he was. The school couldn’t afford summer uniforms, so he marched in the summer parade in his winter uniform. All we could see was a big loud drum coming down the street behind two flatulent horses.
Unfortunately, a talent for music was not to be one of my gifts. My parents paid dearly for my piano lessons, but I wore out three teachers before they admitted that their daughter was a total failure as a pianist. I had a problem coordinating the keys with the foot pedals. It didn’t help much when after a ten-minute practice, my musical mother would yell from the kitchen, “That’s enough! Go out and play.”
So, to help me develop an appreciation for classical music, my parents took me to symphonic concerts when I was a very little girl. I liked the “pretty music” but usually fell asleep before the concert was over. As a child, I felt like Woody Allen who said, “I just can’t listen to anymore Wagner, you know…I’m starting to get the urge to conquer Poland.”
When I was a pre-teen, I heard that there was going to be a local scheduled singing contest for children on the radio. I wanted to enter singing a simple popular song, “In My Little Alice Blue Gown.” Instead, my stern grandfather insisted that I sing “Habanera”, the most popular aria from Bizet’s opera, CARMEN.
No practice had been scheduled at the radio station. When I handed the pianist music from the aria, he just looked at me and dropped ashes from his cigarette onto the piano keys. When it was my turn, the piano player and I started the musical experience together, and we mercifully ended the song together---but we hadn’t done too well in-between. When I got home, it was the first time I ever saw my strict grandfather smile---or maybe it was a grimace. To this day, I will never know.
I have always enjoyed music---all kinds of music. I enjoy Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, and I love jazz even though Frank Zappa said, “Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.” I like country music, because I can make up some funny lyrics along the way, and I love going to the simulcasts of the Metropolitan operas, even though my tuchas (look it up) still can’t manage 8 hours of Wagner.
I occasionally sing songs in Hebrew to herds of deer in the mountains. I’m not sure they feel soothed, but they do pause, raise their heads, and give me soulful looks that seem to say, “You can keep it up, Lady, just don’t eat our food.”
Esther Blumenfeld (“For those of you in the cheap seats, I’d like ya to clap your hands to this one; the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry.”) John Lennon