1 of 12

Write now Article Tools

I don't think music defines who we are, because who we are changes from decade to decade, year to year, sometimes minute to minute. But I do think music reflects who we have been over the course of our past. This is a natural view for me to take, perhaps, since I'm looking my seventh decade in the eye come October, so there's a good deal of past behind me by now.

There are folk songs and pop songs and ad jingles and even tv show themes from the forties and fifties that remind me of childhood: not anybody's childhood, but *my* childhood, with its moods and confusions and excitements. I was a "Red diaper" baby, meaning that my parents were very far on the Left of the political spectrum, and as part of that stance they tried to make sure I got exposure to the music of other cultures and classes than ours (we were West Side New Yorkers of a Bohemian type and European background). So as a kid I had a little phonograph of my own on which I played, among other things, a Burl Ives record of folk songs from the Old South ("The devil take the blue-tail fly!"), calypso songs ("Sly mongoose, only dooog know your naaame!"), and songs of South Africa by a pair called Mirais and Miranda ("And all the people called Fereira Johnny with the bandy legs"). I recently ran into a young writer whose new book, "Sly Mongoose" is about to come out. It's a fantasy set in the Islands, of course. I sang him a line or two, of a song I hadn't heard literally in fifty-five years, and boy, did that feel good!

When I went to my grandmother's apartment to sneak some money into her purse or go down to Columbus and buy her groceries, she would sing me songs she remembered from Vienna in the nineties. Years later, at a piano bar in the Carlton Hotel where a Hungarian pianist named George Feier was playing one night, I startled him by requesting a song called "Fiacrelied" (a fiacre was a horse-drawn carriage), and he played and sang it for me. Nana (who had a good voice even in her seventies) also sang old New York songs too, a lot of them sentimental Irish ditties like "The Baggage Coach Ahead".

Aas we were a family of artists with connections to European refugees who had escaped Hitler and settled in New York, there was the classical influence: fiddlers came to play chamber music in my aunt's big dining room, and a concert pianist friend played the Hell out of the keys of our old upright piano at my parents' parties (the upright was never the same again). When no live music was available, my parents

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about How music defines who we are?
We want to hear your view. Write now!