Tag: Music

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Mickey Mouse Music

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.

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False Nostalgia Syndrome

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Just as there are false memories, there is false nostalgia, the pain — algos — of yearning for a time and place you never were, nor could even have been.

A personal case in point nagging at me lately was the 60s and 70s when “an unprecedented wave of committed and adventurous musicians traveled far from their homes and cultures to experience flamenco first-hand in the pueblos of Andalusia” (The Flamenco Project).

I am an unrelenting fan of flamenco, especially of the traditional styles which flourished in those years in those villages and in Jerez, Seville and elsewhere in Spain. Yet the gap between my relatively late-blooming afición and what I would know and perhaps even myself could play had I actually been there then can never be breached. I have only my imagination, the images like those captured in The Flamenco Project and, to be sure, the recordings, which leave much to be desired technically. I have only my false nostalgia.

There is nothing inherently wrong with such misplaced desire. To some extent, in fact, all desire is misplaced. Without it there is no imagination, no sense of what could be rather than what just is, no learning, no change.

So, instead of what could have been, what was?

First of all, by late adolesence my inner twig was bent not in the direction of Spain, but France. I admit that the resulting Francophilia which I am only now finally shedding was its own variant on false nostalgia, a second skin I had sprouted and which became almost impossible to slough off until now.

As important, the political choices of my early adulthood were incompatible with being in Spain. By the end of the sixties, when the aforementioned pilgrims — late Beats rather than early Hippies — were experiencing the flamenco life first-hand, I was in what I thought would be permanent exile in Canada, a draft resister considered a felon by the US government, a state of affairs which lasted until the Carter amnesty in 1977.

Let no one forget that Spain at the time was a fascist dictatorship under the heel of Francisco Franco. While in France in the early 70s I was tempted on several occasions to travel to Spain. But it was well known that persons in my situation were vulnerable to arrest and extradition by Franco’s border guards. This possibility was also depicted pointedly, first in Henry Montherlant’s 1963 novel, Le chaos et la nuit / Chaos and Night, and then in Alain Resnais’s 1966 film La guerre est finie / The War is Over. Both novel and film had left indeliable impressions, reinforcing my fantasy of existentialist engagement and political heroism, as well as my fear of the Spanish border. It was not until 1976 that I risked crossing it, even then with considerable trepidation.

Knowing who you weren’t doesn’t guarantee knowing any better who you were. But it can help. False nostalgia offers a way to see what was — just as long as we recognize it as false.