266. vilipend

Story time.

My sophomore year in college, the choir went on one of its many tours around the Midwest, including Vermillion, South Dakota, which (among other things) is home to the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota.

No, that’s not true. The National Music Museum and the University of South Dakota are really the only things Vermillion has going for it, and I say that as one who spent a good chunk of his childhood in a small, Central Plains town that was also home to an institution of higher learning.

Sorry, people of Vermillion.

Anyway, at one point during the tour of the various collections we entered the keyboard room, and this is where our story begins.

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First, some background.

As some readers may know, I play the piano. At one point I could’ve been called a pianist. I started lessons at age eight, and by age eleven was studying pretty seriously.

Like, hours of practice a day seriously.

Now, I just play the piano.

Unlike most kids who take piano lessons, I decided to specialize in what’s known as period (or historically informed) performance. I read books on 16th and 17th century keyboard and embellishment technique, checked out journals from the library, studied recordings to absorb stylistic mannerisms, mastered skills like finger pedaling and use of ornaments like mordants, appoggiaturas, and doppelt-cadences.

For birthdays, I asked for recordings of pieces by Mozart, Bach, Purcell, Tallis, Josquin, and Monteverdi.

(I did discover 20th century music around age sixteen, but that’s another story.)

Basically, if it was written before 1800, I wasn’t interested.

One of the instruments I always wanted to play was one with a Janissary pedal, a reference to Turkish military bands that Europeans went mad for in the mid 18th century. This is referenced in the film version of Amadeus when Katherina Cavalieri tells Salieri her hairdresser says that “everything this year is going to be Turkish!”

These bands featured lots of percussion–including bells and drums. Piano builders catered to this craze with a pedal that activated a drum, bells, cymbal, and/or triangle built directly into the piano itself.

One of the pieces written for this device is the third movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11, better known as the Rondo alla Turca.

Fast-forward to 2003 during my sophomore year, on a tour of the National Music Museum. As we entered the keyboard room, our tour guide began to talk about some of the pianos featured there… including the one in the picture at the top of the page.

Which happens to include a Janissary pedal.

The tour guide played a few of the pianos to demonstrate the differences in sound quality and timbre between them. Then she got to our piano. Now, I’d only ever heard a recording of the Janissary pedal on the radio, but never in person.

So when our tour guide played through that movement of the Mozart rondo, when she got to the A major section and activated the pedal, I inadvertently let out a sound that was a combination of a shriek of elation and squeak of surprise. It wasn’t an effeminate sound, per se. It was too feral and wild for that. But it did catch everyone off guard. Every head in the room whipped around and I must’ve turned numerous shades of red.

I’ve often reflected on this moment, especially in the years since coming out. Much is made of the differences in mannerism and expression between gay and heterosexual men. One moment when I became acutely aware of such differences was when listening to an episode of This American Life when I was almost fourteen years old titled Sissies. In one segment, an excerpt from an advice book for young men written in 1942 was read aloud:

Here’s a list of gestures commonly associated with women and another list commonly associated with men… Feminine gesture: hand on hip. Masculine gesture: hands folded over chest or clasped in back… Feminine gesture: looking at people from the corner of eyes. Masculine gesture: direct look; entire head turned toward person… How do you laugh? Are your laughs pitched high like a woman’s? Lower the pitch. Develop a masculine laugh… Roar. Bellow. Do anything but giggle.

This was one of those landmark moments when I realized that to be effeminate (i.e., faggot) was something negative and shameful. It was when I began to scrutinize my own behavior, looking at myself how I imagined the world might be seeing me.

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To this day, there is little about gay culture and lifestyle today that I identify with–and by “culture” and “lifestyle,” I mean perceived culture and lifestyle as defined and reinforced through shows like Will & Grace, Modern Family, Glee, and in places like gayborhoods and gay urban meccas like Los Angeles and New York City where trends develop and are exported from. Things like speech and vocal patterns, clothing, mannerisms, preferences, and the like become community tokens of belonging, powerful totems of identity in a world that is often unkind to those who do not conform to heteronormative values.

But I’ve realized that for me, this goes much deeper. It’s not that I wasn’t socialized as a gay man.

It’s that I wasn’t really socialized, period.

That moment wasn’t an expression of my “queer” self. It was the unfiltered delight of someone who never learned what is a socially appropriate expression of delight.

Homeschooled until my junior year in high school, I grew up in an insular world within an insular world. In those years when most people learn what’s cool/uncool, how to read social signals and express yourself in acceptable ways, I was learning what it meant to be an outsider in a world dominated by Satan. While other kids were running to get to class before the bell, I was doing my own thing.

Sure, I missed out on the various traumas of middle and junior high school. I also missed out on the growth opportunities that time affords.

 

190. enormity

Ohmygoodness, has it really been fifty-one days since I last updated this blog? That’s terribly delinquent.

My world as of late has been consumed with stress, worry, anxiety, and the like. A few weeks ago my therapist asked me what’s been keeping me going. I replied that the thought of graduate school, studying music again, and having a real career in music (as supposed to the state of meager subsistence I’ve been in since graduating from college in 2004) has prevented me from being totally consumed by depression.

At the end of last month I submitted my first grad school application, this one to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. At the end of this month, I’ll be submitting two more applications, these to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Southern California. Of these three, my top picks are Eastman and the University of Michigan. USC would be a great opportunity as well, but I’m more an East Coast kinda guy than West.

The process of writing statements of purpose got me thinking a lot about my past, and since I don’t have much else to write about, I thought I’d discuss some of the music that has been most influential to me. I don’t talk about music that much here, probably because LGBT issues and atheism have been such dominating forces the last few years.

One of the first pieces of music I can remember is Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. My parents had a recording with Mia Farrow narrating that we’d listen to in the car or around the house. My early tendencies toward neoclassicism probably started here.

My early ventures into composition were largely shaped by exposure to Classical music. The first piece I ever wrote was a minuet that I composed shortly after learning to read music. One of the pieces in my lesson book was an arrangement of the menuet from Act 1, Scene 2 of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I’d seen a production on television and skipped ahead in the book to learn it and probably drove my family crazy by playing it over and over.

After my family moved to Minnesota in 1993, we found both a church and a library to call home. In my piano lessons, I was studying a lot of Baroque music, and I probably checked out the library’s entire collection by the time I finished high school. By then, I’d listened to everything Bach ever wrote, plus a good deal of Handel, Corelli, Purcell, Domenico Scarlatti, and Purcell.

My love of Bach and the Baroque though was firmly established around age 10 when I went with my dad to an orchestra concert where they played the first of the Brandenburg concertos.

When we left the concert, I asked my dad for a recording of the complete Brandenburgs, which I still own. I was obsessed from that point on. Throughout high school I studied everything of Bach’s I could find, which were my first lessons in orchestration and counterpoint.

I also adored Mozart. My first opera was Le nozze di Figaro, and it remains my favorite to this day. A seminal moment in my composition career is at the end of Le nozze, when the Countess sings: “Più dolcile io sono, e dico di sì.” It’s ridiculously simple: a G major chord in first inversion, to C major, to d minor, to e minor. It took my breath away the first time, and still does.

Everything changed when I heard Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. Considering the majority of my listening up until that point, it almost felt like checking out pornography. I knew that it was supposed to be dissonant and that it had caused a riot in Paris in 1913, and that I should be familiar with it as a musician, but I didn’t know what to expect.

Rite of Spring literally turned my entire world upside down. It was violent, dissonant, chaotic, and unfamiliar—and I loved it. I listened to it straight through two of three times that first day. Then I discovered Prokofiev’s adult music through his seventh piano sonata; Béla Bartók; Alban Berg; Paul Hindemith; Steve Reich; Francis Poulenc; Maurice Ravel; Samuel Barber; Benjamin Britten; John Adams; and probably most importantly, György Ligeti, whose music I heard in the film 2001: a space odyssey. And I almost abandoned writing tonal music completely.

About midway through college, after hearing repeatedly from colleagues and teachers that they preferred to hear my “nicer,” tonal work, I reversed course and delved into what my friends affectionately refer to as my “Tallis and Tavener” phase.

I got back into Henry Purcell after hearing a piece from King Arthur used at the end of Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s The Miser. I also heard an incredible “completion” of his anthem, Hear my prayer, O lord, by Swedish composer Sven-David Sandström in 2002. I actually include a chord from the penultimate bar of the anthem—a G major chord with an added fourth—in all of my own music.

I’m also still obsessed with the funeral sentences from Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

My voice teacher in college specialized in Baroque music, and I discovered Monterverdi’s L’Orfeo. My piece for double brass choir, Elisabethan Musicke, is an homage to the opening.

I also got very interested in Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill, and in writing music for theater… especially music incorporated into productions. I don’t remember at what point, but I realized that why I liked Mozart so much was that all of his music seemed to have dramatic links, and the music I enjoyed writing the most also had extra-musical links and was spatially oriented.

Moral of story? At age 30, I’m finally figuring out who I am, personally and artistically. I’ve tried on different styles and have found what works for now. I also know there’s more to work on, and that’s what I intend to pursue in graduate school.