One Year in the Studio, part 2

In my last post in this series I talked about moving from northern British Columbia to Vancouver Island which happened when I was fourteen. Were it not for this move the available options in my life would have been far narrower. I first started getting interested in music a year or so after the move and it was rock and pop music, the most ubiquitous, that caught my attention. I took up the electric bass guitar and joined a band. Actually, I wanted to take up the drums, God knows why, but they cost $12 a month to rent while a bass guitar was only $9. Yes, we were on a tight budget! Six months after my first lesson on bass guitar (I think I only had a couple) my band played its first "gig" in a little hall in a tiny town whose name I forget. There were less than ten people in attendance and I think that we made six dollars each. Now that's professionalism! After a while I took up the acoustic six string and became interested in both the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In a brief folk music interlude I recall performing, in a state of high anxiety, Dylan's "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands," an eleven-minute dirge (though a nice one) at a local talent festival. This demonstrates two things, I think, my wide-ranging aesthetic curiosity and taste and my inability to either notice or care what the tastes of the audience might be!

From time to time I would notice the existence of classical music. As I recall my mother had an LP of Ferrante and Teicher, an American piano duo specializing in light classics and I quite enjoyed their arrangement of Malagueña. But the real revelation came when a friend played me a recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and I realized that there was a whole musical universe of intricate harmonies and orchestrations and extreme virtuosity that I knew little of. At first I started borrowing classical LPs from another friend's father. I recall listening to the "New World Symphony" by Antonín Dvořák, the "Unfinished Symphony" by Franz Schubert, the Symphony No. 5 by Beethoven and "La Mer" by Claude Debussy. A transcendental wow. All these gems were listened to on an old monophonic cabinet stereo and the discs themselves were a mass of tics and surface noise through which the music appeared as a spectral ghost. I still almost expect the sound to skip a groove at a certain place in the Unfinished Symphony from listening to that old record so many times.

One summer I worked for a stuccoer (very demanding physical labor) and before going to work in the morning I would listen to an LP of violin music by Pinchas Zukerman that had Romantic showpieces by Henryk Wieniawski, Camille Saint-Saëns and others. Here is the Violin Concerto No. 2 by Wieniawski:

Noble and lovely music. After a hard days work I would often drop by the local record store and pick up a new LP. I recall that re-issues of older recordings were often available for $2.99 from the well-known companies (or $1.99 from the lesser-known). Mind you, I was only getting paid something like two or three dollars an hour!

At some point around then (1970) I discovered J. S. Bach. I used to have a photo, taken by a friend, of me leaning out a window holding an Archiv box set of the Bach Mass in B minor, looking very much like the tablets of Moses. This same recording is still available:

At the time this was a new 1969 recording. The whole performance is on YouTube with a short introduction in German:

Music does not get much better than this. Not too long after I discovered two things: that there was such a thing as a classical guitar and that one could play actual music by Bach on this instrument. That pretty much set the course of my life for the next few decades. The great Chaconne by Bach, the last movement of the Partita No. 2 for solo violin, transcribed for guitar by Andrés Segovia, was my inspiration for years:

Ironically, this was the only goal that I did not ultimately achieve. I never did play that piece in public.