How Music Spins Up My Soul

It took quite awhile to realize that people who also love music don't also love music for the same reasons I do. This is probably because music's effect on me is so immediate and so fundamentally related to what is going on in side me that it feels as if it couldn't be any other way for anyone else. Maybe it is genetic. Maybe it is programming, but it is "musical direction" that my dad always pointed out to me -- the way the harmonies and the melodies walk through the span of a piece and carry the listener's heart along. For me, the presence of that direction has always been a necessary ingredient in truly good music.

To put it another way, to guys like us, it is the horizontal progress of a piece that makes the magic, not the a rows of verticals stacked up next to one another like books on a shelf, that makes the magic happen. Rock music (and pop) are often based on verticals: one chord follows another and the melody note is just something laid over the top. To my dad (and to me) that was generally ineffective. But when harmonies melodies and chord move gracefully in a profound arabesque on their horizontal journey; when they "go where they need to go" it affects me (and it affected him) in the most profound way.

When music does this to me, I feel an actual physical "high." If there is a door that holds back the endorphin flood, for me, particular harmonic clusters and progressions are the key to the lock. Emily Dickinson said she "knew" poetry this way:

Grandpop's Snowstorm

This will be the last of the sad-sack posts. I promise.

We grope for meaning, don't we? Maybe that's okay. Maybe that is necessary. And maybe it is better than logic.

Sometimes we consciously delude ourselves. Sometimes we truly believe in things that have no explanation. Sometimes we lie to our children, because they need it. Sometimes, these things intersect and science and fact and circumstance give us help in turning delusion into belief.

As of some time on Friday, the local scuttlebutt was that, on Sunday, there was going to be snow coming. Nothing significant. In fact, it was most likely going to miss us altogether.

We said our last goodbyes to my father on Saturday.

On Sunday morning, the snow began to fall -- small flakes that reminded me instantly of my dad having told me, as a child, that if the flakes were small, the snow was going to fall for a long time; when the flakes get big, he always asserted, it was about to stop.

Joe Matt

The boy emerged from an Italian neighborhood in a Philadelphia world that still smelled like burning coal, burning wood and big pots of gravy (that's right: "gravy") bubbling on the stoves. From a world in which the milkman made his slow zig-zag way through the city's streets, an old horse pulling, then waiting; pulling, then waiting, old head dropped low, as his master set the bottles on one side, then another. And when the last clip-clop faded into the distance, the boy would sneak through the grey light of dawn, from stoop to stoop, drinking the cream off of the tops of people's bottles.

Wide-eyed, he'd watched as Dorothy's world went from sepia tones to glorious color, on the screen, for the first time, along with the other children of his generation, as her door opened onto Oz. He ran home on summer nights, dashing especially quickly past dark alleyways, after having spent all afternoon ("for ten cents," he would tell me) with a bag of his grandmother's sandwiches while watching Frankenstein and Dracula creep and stomp through the flickering, silver screen shadows.

He sat on the floor in his father's business, "Joe's Market", on 19th and McKean, playing Mario Lanza on a record player, annoying everyone by lifting and dropping the needle in the same place, over and over and over, just to hear one of Puccini's musical swells...just to nourish his little heart that needed harmonic direction the way a plant needs light.

He heard what Hitler was up to; saw newsreels before movies; laughed at the silly little moustache, but was too young to really understand, so he sat on a stone lion and posed with a comb over his upper lip: the Great Little Dictator.

He perspired in the congestion-free, South Philly avenues of the forties and early fifties playing summer halfball and football until the street lights came on...

He saw Kirk Douglas in Young Man With a Horn, and knew what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be, so his grandmother bought him a silver trumpet and he played, first, like Harry James, but, soon, like Joe Matt. But that wasn't enough, so he walked (as he told it to his less than musically studious son) uphill, both ways, barefoot over broken glass to sit sat at the piano at his aunt's house and to discover chords and the soul-spinning effects of harmony, and he wrote and orchestrated, and approximated the power of God's voice for years to come.