Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

And the Music Goes Round and Round

One of the blessings of living a long life is that you collect a lot of wonderful musical experiences. The ones I selected mostly have nothing to do with my own work or my teaching, but I thought it might be fun to put together a top five list of the most memorable �sightings " of classy composers, conductors, and performers that I've been lucky enough to see since the 1930s.

1.Seeing/hearing Rachmaninoff. He was appearing in recital in a small recital hall in San Antonio, Texas. I had gotten a free ticket from my piano teacher. He was about 20 feet from me--tall, gaunt, almost ghost-like, Slavic-looking, and, to a youngster my age, a bit scary. He played Chopin, and, of course, himself. I remember him having large hands and long fingers, and never smiling. Of course, he played beautifully and gave several encores--a very gracious gentleman. At that point in my life, I didn't realize that this was how he earned his living.

2. A few years later, around 1936, I saw Igor Stravinsky conduct the San Antonio Symphony in a program of his early music. He was such a little guy.

3. In the mid- 1940s, when I was in the Navy, I heard numerous big bands--Harry James (with Betty Grable sitting at a side table ) in San Diego, Benny Goodman in San Jose, Stan Kenton at Balboa Beach, Count Basie in Oakland at a black movie theatre ( I was the only " honky" there ), and Woody Herman in an almost deserted hotel ballroom in San Francisco shortly before my discharge in 1946. What great bands! There were other headliners, of course--a young Frank Sinatra trying to sing over the teenage screams in a San Francisco theatre in 1945, and others.

4. Around 1960, my family and I were in Rochester, N.Y. while I was working on a Ph.D. at Eastman. A colleague of my wife's treated us to a concert by Judy Garland in one of her several comebacks. She was beginning to go downhill, but still had some of the magic left. Of course, she had to sing all of her old hits like "Over the Rainbow " and " Chicago," among others. Judy was a gracious lady, and the fans loved her as much as she loved them. Her appearance was in a small hall and the fans were actually only a few feet away. Between songs they would approach her, and she made it a point to thank each one.

5. In the summer of 1978 I attended an N.E.H.Summer Seminar on electronic music at Dartmouth College, was hosted by Jon Appleton, composer and co-inventor of the Synclavier. It was an exciting time for me. There were guest lectures by people like Roger Reynolds and Laurie Anderson, who had just gotten back from a tour of Japan with her band. I listened to lots of electronic music, and marveled at the wealth of Dartmouth. The small town where Dartmouth is located is like a step back in time--no billboards are permitted by the city fathers. Oh, a couple more things, I did a paper on text-sound music, went to a church supper across the state line where some gravestones in its cemetary dated before 1700, and learned that you can eat flowers (peppery), and I did. Who says an old dog can�t learn new tricks? I�d be curious to hear some of your favorite musical memories.

posted by Robert Jordahl 2/28/2005