Recurring Tunes
Dennis Bartel
The older I get the curiouser I find how certain tunes follow me as I hurry down life’s rabbit holes. These tunes may be of my choosing, or not. They may reappear to me in meaningful ways at any time under any circumstances, and often in different forms. I may feel I can’t shake them. They may catch me by shocking surprise, or, they may delivery me from conditions-in-need: discontent, discomfort, doubt & grief, to name just four.
One of the tunes which has chased me, it seems like forever, is a strange animal I watched over as it grew within me. Being an obedient boomer kid, starting about age ten, one of my primary chores was to mow the front lawn. Sounds easy, except our front lawn was large enough for me and my friendly neighborhood goons to play touch football, almost thirty yards long, if not to regulation width. Call it a narrow gridiron. Plays that called for much lateral movement didn’t get far. The front yard even had the perfect out of bounds marker, a knee-high hedge of twisted myrtle running the length the field, bordering the sidewalk.
So went my Saturday mornings, behind a loud, smoky machine, powerful, too. Once I opened the throttle, I had to hold the angry dog on a stiff leash as it belched fumes. Brute that it was, the mower nonetheless had a surgeon’s precision, as within the helix of its spinning blades each strip of grass was cut scissors fine. The beast maintained a vicious panting idle, as I emptied its canvas catcher into a metal barrel, one of three designated for yard waste. Not far behind me with his electric edger was Dad, completing our cutting-edge team (ha ha).
Once the weather got warm, the mowing doubled. Wednesday afternoons were added. I did that work solo. No mid-week edging required. You may think twice a week is excessive, but our lawn needed it. Whatever Dad did to the turf made it grow like a breathing creature. In summertime I could sit on the lawn with my neighborhood buds in the shade of our magnolia tree and after an hour the grass felt perceptibly higher and lusher, I swear it, on my precious memories of boyhood, I swear.
All of which is to say, I was out there on the front lawn a lot, restraining the mad dog mower, shrouded in an aural cloister. I could hear nothing on my periphery in our near-noiseless neighborhood. When Dad added the high whine of his edger, no one in the neighborhood could hear me. I was shielded from sound, coming in or going out. No one could penetrate our lawn yard cacophony, so long as we kept up the peace-disturbing din.
I found this situation well-suited for humming to myself. At first, I mostly hummed the usual pop stuff of the day, spiced with Sinatra, a favorite of Dad’s, and the new and faintly naughty sounds of bossa nova. Eventually I began to concoct my own tune to hum. It was slow going at first, just a phrase or two, but I would remember it, and with the next mow build upon it.
Striding across the lawn, tightly gripping the handle, arms vibrating, I hummed my tune over and over up to the point where it gave out, then I would test another phrase to hear how well it followed, and after much trial and error (mostly error) I found what I wanted and moved ahead. At the edge of the lawn I pivoted, swung the huff-puffing monster around and headed back across the lawn, overlapping the last cut, all the while humming my tune, my very own tune.
I pressed on, mowing on Saturday mornings, and Wednesdays in Summertime. My tune continued to evolve. Longer, more intricate. I added some clever ornamental twists. (If I say so myself.) While running, I began pacing myself by softly chanting my tune with each breath. While swimming, my muscles seemed to sync with my song, my tune.
At times, I involuntarily blurted a phrase from my tune, most of the time only to myself, but other times, with others. How strange I must have seemed, erupting with random sounds.
My tune often came to me like a friend as I porch sat with Mom, her on a pillowed porch chair, me in an old wooden rocker, and as the tune appeared in my ears, I’d hum along and rock.
I stopped mowing the lawn when I left for college, and without its twice-weekly reconstruction, over time, my tune slowly became submerged in my thoughts, not entirely, I could still summon it up at will, but I lacked the will to summon it up. I had other tunes in my thoughts.
In the first weeks of my new job as a classical DJ at the campus radio station – a job I landed entirely because of my good voice & calm manner, for I was without a shred of experience with classical music beyond falling into The Grand Canyon Suite, at age eleven – I played a LP during my off-hours weekend shift of a piece I chose because I could pronounce the title and composer, Pavan for a Dead Princess by Maurice Ravel (though at meetings some members of the announcing staff stiffly expressed their stern insistence that the work must be introduced by its French title, Pavane pour une Infante défunte, so as to give the proper nuance of meaning). Imagine my shock and confusion, there in the tiny, cramped studio, when suddenly coming out of the speakers at me was my lawn mower tune!
I listened, thinking surely the similarity would stop after a few seconds, but the Pavan, that is, My Tune, continued phrase by phrase by phrase. I sat dumbfounded. The short Pavan ended, and I was supposed to back-announce it. Instead, I watched the needle on the LP move to the next track, which was Bolero, thereby giving me a quarter-hour to collect myself.
How did this happen? I’m quite certain I never heard Ravel’s music prior to composing My Tune, not in our home, for sure. Or, if by rare chance I had heard Ravel before age twelve, his music left no imprint on me, didn’t register. My Tune was composed gradually, painstakingly, over months. It grew inside my memory. Once I finished it, it matured within me nearly a decade, never leaving my consciousness, submerged of late, I guess, but never lost.
Could my recall of My Tune have been faulty, while listening to Ravel’s similar sounding masterpiece, allowing it to prompt me? No chance. My Tune was as embedded in me as my lungs. I had created it and stored it on my brain’s hard drive. The tune was mine. Much as I love Ravel’s music, I will not relinquish My Tune to him, even though he wrote it first. That’s only because he was born first!
Enough, back off, Delmore! Some things are best said slowly. Now take a deep breath and try again.
It’s as if Marconi’s theory is provable. The great radio inventor suggested that all sound waves continue to exist just as matter exists, and if we could only devise instruments sensitive enough to retrieve sounds, which are submerged under years and centuries of other sounds, like an art restorer removes a layer of paint from a canvas and discovers an entirely different painting, we could listen to any sound ever made, anywhere.
What I’m saying is the tune, which Ravel and I each created on our own, may be part of a cosmos of sounds which move together in random, unpredictable ways, slender ribbons of sound amidst the slack-jawed chaos which fall swirling by sheer accident to the feet of some unsuspecting person who looks down and says, “Hey, that’s my tune.” It’s too much for me to compute. Further research required.
Until proven otherwise, I’m maintaining my share of ownership of My Tune, because when I hear it on the radio introduced as Pavan for a Dead Princess, or, Pavan for a Dead Infant, or, Ravel’s Pavane, or, Dead Pavan for a Princess, or, Pavane pour une Infante défunte, I know who really wrote it, and can prove it by the way the delicate & stately sounds speak to the summer in me as loudly as the roar of a lawn mower.
Speaking of Bolero and recurring tunes, research at the University of Cincinnati, home to a renowned music school, found that nearly all of us, 98%, get earworms, tunes that stick in our heads, specifically in our ears, inexplicably, incongruously, and eventually disagreeably. Females get earworms more often, as do the worry-prone, and musicians, among whom I do not count myself – musician, worried, or woman.
Still, I’m hardly immune. For many years, I suffered grievously from a disagreeable earworm by the name Fifty Nifty United States. I was in high school, as it happened the class president, and my friend and vice-president Stan compelled me to use what few funds I had at my disposal, intended for the enrichment of my fellow classmates’ senior year, to hire a vocal ensemble sponsored by Stan’s newly found Mormon Church, The Grand Land Singers. I cannot recall the first time I heard Fifty Nifty United States. It was probably on a cassette tape Stan pushed on me as part of his strong-armed sell. However, I recall the second time, as I sat in a near-empty auditorium alongside my parents and girlfriend, having been ridiculed and shunned by nearly the entire senior class, in ways only ruthless teenagers can ridicule and shun, save for a handful of curious concertgoers and future community orchestra supporters who were scattered about the auditorium. It’s a harmless enough tune, a chance to hear the name of each individual state, but this performance was galling to me. Besides, I instinctively recoiled at the scent of jingoism, as the red-white-&-blue-clad Grand Land Singers swayed with conventioneer grace on stage, all white teeth and jauntiness. Nixon was president. The massacre at Kent State was three weeks away.
Fifty Nifty United States stuck in my head the rest of the school year, as I endured the shame of squandering the senior class budget. At graduation, as I stood at the podium to say my perfunctory words, I was heckled by classmates.
It can be hard to escape a tune like Fifty Nifty United States. It’s part of the American Experience. Sooner or later, if you travel far and wide across our grand land, you will hear it, and each time over the years I heard it my hatred for the tune wormed its way deeper inside my ears.
That changed in a downbeat, when I watched Fifty Nifty United States sung by a third-grade class choir, including our oldest daughter, Colette. Suddenly Fifty Nifty United States sounded like a perfect test of memory and articulation. Try it yourself and see how difficult it can be: “Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii” all the way to “Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming,” which is a whole wave of wiggling W’s to say or sing. In an instant I became grateful for Fifty Nifty United States, and in the following weeks I asked Colette to sing it again numerous times. Hate expunged by Love.
Even tunes that once meant very little to me can suddenly step from the shadows, grab me by the shoulders, and shake me. A few years ago, I was washing dishes and listening to a home-made CD my wife had compiled. On came (They Long to Be) Close To You. You remember that sticky sweet Carpenters’ pop tune, ubiquitous around 1970? Burt Bacharach was all over the radio. However charming Karen Carpenter’s throaty vocal, the song just blew past me like the summer wind, here today, forgotten tomorrow. I’m not knocking the song. I no longer knock anyone’s song. It just wasn’t for me. At the time I was carrying on an infatuation with Alice Cooper.
Now, here I was in my kitchen with my soapy hands, and here comes (They Long to Be) Close To You, this time performed, in a club setting, by Bare Naked Ladies, a band I’d dismissed for their self-conscious, sophomoric irony. Instead, they gave a sincere rendering of the old tune, respectful and heartfelt. They were not making fun, they were making music. I turned off the faucet and turned to listen, to face the music, and was overcome with emotion. I began to cry uncontrollably.
Erin happened into the kitchen and hurried over to console me. “What is it?” she asked.
I could say only, “The song,” before succumbing to sobs.
Why was I weeping? Was it nostalgia over a tune that was once popular but of no consequence to me? I did feel like I was choked up over the loss of my youth, so long ago. In the time it takes to hear a sound, my youth unexpectedly came flooding back upon me (inexplicably and incongruously), and I was revisited by frustrations and insecurities I lived with in my late teens, and all of it for what? For nothing. However changed, it was the same tune, only different.
In ways mysterious to me, music can inflame passions to the brink of tears, as surely as it can unravel questions and set off sparks of enlightenment. One of those sparks occurred for me the first time I heard – or the first time I truly heard – The Firebird. I had never known such sounds in my life; was amazed that music like this existed. It was as disturbingly wacky as Alice in Wonderland. If this incredible music was possible, I thought, what else lay before me as I travel through a life of sound? I’ve come to call my Firebird episode a moment of musical ecstasy. I have never forgotten it. I hope I never do, and I am sharply reminded of it with each new hearing of Stravinsky’s first great ballet.
Recently, I was streaming The Firebird, which has by now followed me for decades, from city to city, love to heartache, anger to depression, recovery to contentment. This recording was made by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in concert at Disney Hall. The crackle of excited yet preternaturally restrained spectators hangs in the background. It is not the suite but the entire ballet, a snorting, loud, smoky performance conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. I tried to tell our second child, eight-year-old Celia, about my long-ago ecstatic experience with The Firebird, how it seized my mind and took it to where it had never been. This I said to her, but I stopped short of telling her all. I wanted her to know that musical ecstasy exists, and that it is every bit as ecstatic as sex or winning or eating food more delicious than the mind alone can fathom. I couldn’t say that to Celia and expect her to be anything but confused. Instead, we listened to the music together, and after a few minutes I went into the kitchen, where more speakers were vibrating with “Infernal” sounds. I began to wash the dinner dishes and soon peeked in on Celia. She was up on the marble hearth before the fireplace, dancing, seemingly lost in the music, pivoting on her bare toes. I left her to her discovery, but later that evening I could not resist asking as she cruised spritely through the kitchen, “Did you like The Firebird?”
“Yes, Daddy, but when was the ecstasy part? I didn’t hear it.”
I laughed. “You will. If not there, somewhere else.”
She looked at me like I was an odd bird.