Songs and Memories

Some music provokes a deep reaction from me. The strongest reactions are the oldest, from songs I must have heard on the radio in the kitchen in California. I hear one passage from one of Tchaikovsky’s works and I’m back sitting at the table while Dad listened to the radio. Serenata by Leroy Anderson sings of lost opportunities and a different, warmer path than the one I chose: a melancholy reaction to such a cheerful piece. The Route 66 theme evokes exactly what it is meant to: the rhythm of the wheels on the road and the turning off to the goal (not home). Long before I learned to drive it defined the experience for me. I only saw part of the show when the family visited friends once, but somewhere I heard the tune.

Sometimes just a fragment of a song is all that it takes: "Once there were valleys where rivers used to run" from Greenfields by the Brothers Four—not so much the rest of the song, but that line resonated with the "cat who walks by himself." Or "I hear the music from across the way, across the bridges of my mind" (not so much the rest of "Music from Across the Way") calls up the ghost of a dream of walking down 2am streets with the streetlights that shine like grubby winter, past the mansion of music to an alley of pointless errand.

The wedding march 30 years ago was the carillon from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne, but although the memory is fond the music isn’t visceral in the same way; perhaps because that day was supplemented by 30 years worth of other days with other incidental songs.