Orchestra music

I owe my fourth grade music teacher. She played an excerpt from In The Hall of the Mountain King in our class. She let me and my best friend come in at noon to hear the whole thing. It was a revelation to me. I had heard the school band before; I had heard my brothers’ music. They listened to a lot of pop and rock music on the radio; my youngest brother, seven years older than me, played Billy Joel’s music on the piano all the time. My parents listened to talk radio, Paul Harvey, the news; they listened to cassette tapes of scriptures read by a voice that droned. I can feel myself dozing just remembering that voice. We had a few LPs, vinyl records. I had never been allowed to play them; I was 10 years old and the record player was fragile.

But at some point one of my brothers gave my sister and I a collection of LPs of Sesame Street songs and Dr. Seuss stories. We begged to listen to them so much that they taught us how to work the record player. For a while we even had our own portable record player, my sister and I. When it died, my parents bought a second hand player in a handsome wooden cabinet. It had a heavy lid that had to be cleared off before it could be opened, and two large speakers hidden by upholstery cloth in a 1950s style.

There was nothing orchestral in our repertoire. My mother taught piano; we heard lots of Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven — on the piano. I learned Czerny’s exercises. I loved the 1st movement of the Moonlight Sonata and could play it well. I didn’t know it had an awesome third movement until at my senior piano recital another student played the other two movements. But after my fourth grade teacher played Grieg for us, I started exploring the family LPs. My five older siblings had left an eclectic mix, sparse and wildly varied. I adored Scheherazade. I liked “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas mainly because it had an awesome album cover. There was a mixed LP with Rosemary Clooney and a few other 1950s artists. We had Toscanini’s recording of Cesar Franck, mournful and fully half an hour long. In the 1980s my brothers gave us Hooked On Classics. I loved these.

Hooked On Classics listed all the songs it excerpted, so I looked them up at the library. I also started seeking out public radio: the classical music station. So many beautiful songs! So much orchestra!