Music to my Ears

I lost my dad Julius in 1980 when he was sixty-seven. At the time, I thought that was old. Now I’m older than he ever got to be.

My father learned to play the trombone in the high school marching band. From there, he became an audiophile and developed a love for every kind of music. Dad became expert in all of the new renditions of symphonies by famous conductors or re-releases of jazz greats. He had expansive musical tastes, from Muddy Waters to Bach’s Goldberg Variations to Tijuana Brass.

My dad was an introvert but developed a friendship with two younger guys who also loved music. They met every Saturday morning at the diner for the pancake and eggs special, but mostly to talk for hours about music and new developments in hi-fidelity/stereo equipment. Then they came back to the house to listen to new records for the rest of the day.

When I was a child, my dad retired to the living room after dinner to leaf through his albums sectioned on the shelves by musical genre. After selecting his evening’s repertoire, he stacked the LPs on the Fisher turntable, turned off the lamp, and settled into his upholstered easy chair.

Music boomed from the darkened living room through the arched entryway and vibrated into all corners of the house if a Beethoven symphony or a Wagnerian opera. Other times, the lively arpeggios of Art Tatum on the keys bounced lightly off the walls.

I envisioned dancers in voluminous satin ball gowns circling the living room with graceful abandon to the strains of Strauss waltzes.

My dad’s world. He was drawn into it both willingly and helplessly, oblivious to the telephone ringing or my pleas to turn down the volume so I could concentrate on my homework. In the summer with windows open, Handel’s Water Music entertained the neighborhood. In the winter, we were enclosed in a sound studio with Carmen or The Ring Cycle.

When I hear beautiful music—the elongated tones of a chamber music piece or the lively notes of a jazz tune—I think of my dad. And I wish he could be listening along with me. But I listen FOR him instead.

Dad was a musician himself in his teen years, and maybe—I can’t say for sure—aspired to pursue a musical education. His sister Jean played the piano, his sister Elsie took clarinet lessons, and his brother Harry learned the saxophone.

He was also a talented amateur photographer, taking series of photographs of nature, human interest, and public events (parades, park scenes, the 1939 World’s Fair). He spent endless hours in the darkroom to attain perfection in print.

But he set aside his creative endeavors when he apprenticed to the machinist’s trade and started a family after marrying Rose in 1943.

In his fifties, after he was laid off as a machinist at Purolater, he endured a difficult and distressing year of unemployment when he could not properly support his family. He became too depressed even to browse through albums at the record store.

One day, he mustered up the courage to walk into the store he had patronized for years as a loyal customer and ask for a job. Thus began the most fulfilling decade of my dad’s life. He assisted customers expertly with his knowledge of music acquired as an audiophile and collector.

Dad eagerly left for work each morning, his new edition of the Schwann catalogue in hand. He had studied it the night before to keep current with new releases to order for inventory. He eventually rose to position of Assistant Manager. He brought good music into many homes.

He was as passionately interested in the electronic/mechanical equipment as he was in the music itself. If a new kind of needle or speaker came out, he was on it immediately, researching, testing, attempting to reach the same perfection in sound as he sought for the visual images in the darkroom.

His Hero’s Journey led here, when he walked into that store, a shy gentleman, to offer an impassioned plea to the owner to give him a chance. He lived the dream of his lifetime at Harmony House in Union, New Jersey, a stand-alone building on commercial Route 22 that attained the status of paradise on the roadside.

After my father died, I called his two friends and asked them to look through his voluminous collection. At my invitation they selected some favorite LPs. The day we did that, I knew that my dad’s musical spirit would live on.

I’m spending November in New York City to welcome my new granddaughter to the world. On a whim, I stopped in at the Carnegie Hall box office and bought a ticket for the Tuesday night performance.

I was more interested in seeing the amazing venue for the first time, not so much in listening to the musical program.

My mother took me to Broadway plays in my childhood but my father and I never attended concerts. I can’t quite explain it, as we were only a thirty minute Pennsylvania Railroad ride away from New York City.

But I think I figured it out tonight in Carnegie Hall during the performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

As the musicians tuned up, I could not help but devour the sight of the burnished woods of the string instruments from the left side of the fourth row balcony. As they strengthened in tone, I immediately felt how they irresistibly drew my father in, how much he savored each pluck of the harpist’s string. And then the brass, the horns of so many varieties, the French horns distant, the trumpets up close, mounting in volume together, then separating out at the conductor’s behest. The bass drum, commanding, the woodwinds, scurrying.

It was when I closed my own eyes that I understood without any effort at all why my dad, in his easy chair alone in the darkened living room, closed his eyes to everything, to the light, to time, to humanity, to everything but the SOUND.

Watching the musicians draw their bows across the strings, sensing the audience in rapt attention, admiring the ornate plaster moldings and the magnificent arch framing the orchestra, all an experience of visual richness in itself, but it was not the MUSIC.

At family events, I saw my dad try to participate congenially in conversations with the movers and shakers in the family. It was hard for him due to his quiet nature but he pushed himself, wanting to show his interest and loyalty. But I never believed that his commitment to music and photography was understood by the business-oriented menfolk.

My dad’s artistic capital in realms of photography and music did not make him rich, famous, or powerful. But his photographs are my most important material inheritance and the story of his life dedicated to the love of music a most treasured personal legacy.

Before leaving my seat, I am moved beyond words, moved to tears, at the sound of the world-class orchestra performing compositions of the great European composers, at the sight of the magnificent setting with five curved tiers of seating each brimming over with deep red velvet.

I linger for a few moments to sense my father’s musical spirit once more, until the lights dim and the usher signals me to leave.

But not before our creative collaboration—the blending of his music and my writing—comes alive, transforming memory and legacy into a new arrangement.