The first instrument I played was violin, which I took up in the fourth grade at Park Place Elementary School in the industrial East End of Houston. It is hard to believe now, but our working class and lower-middle-class parents demanded and got not only vocational shop training in wood and metals for the boys, so-called home economics for the girls, but schooling in the arts for both. I was encouraged to join the school orchestra, which I did. The pedagogy was of a quality to which only the well-off have access today.
At the end of my second year, I was second violinist and would have normally progressed to first the next, once the acknowledged talent of our orchestra, my senior by a year, moved on to junior high and eventually to a professional career in music. Alas, at the same time our excellent teacher and conductor became pregnant and was replaced by a religious nitwit.
He quickly converted our repertoire from Mozart and Brahms to stylizations of the theme of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song (M-I-C K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E). Its simple modulation through fourth back to tonic in the first phrase and through fifth in the second was quite a come-down. Mickey Mouse, was, in our new instructor’s view we have to presume, more relevant to our limited minds and means.
Damage bad enough, probably distorting my relationship to popular culture for life. But within another week, our new teacher launched his personal crusade to bring us to Jesus. “You cannot play good music,” he opined, “if you do not feel clean inside. It’s like having dirty underwear. Only you will know how dirty you are.”
The very afternoon I returned the violin to my mother’s safekeeping. It remained for years in the back of the hall closet. It was one of the first times in my life when I felt truly clean.
