What I was trying to get around to in the entry about my extremely abbreviated brush with music theory in college was that my relative ignorance about music in the formal sense remains something of a thorn in my side, intellectually. There are lots more topics like this in my repertoire: though I performed well in academia and am generally recognized to be a smartypants, I am at heart an unfocused, eclectic taster of information and my internal encyclopedia is full of holes, most of which I am finally having to acknowledge that I will never fill or even hopelessly poke at much.
Another arena of my relative ignorance with respect to music is in the area of the more revered (at least by aesthetes, academics and other assorted longhairs) genres of music - mainly classical and jazz, I suppose. It’s not purely an influence to get with the orthodox culture that I find disappointing in this deficiency: I’ve genuinely liked the few pieces of these genres I’ve come upon, even own a paltry few representatives. As topics, though, they seem so big - especially classical - I wouldn’t know where to start.
This would hit me from time to time whenever I read Bill Holm’s books because his stuff is full of references to the classical music that he played and loved, and he could surely make you feel that the deficiency in your knowledge of these works was a critical, possibly fatal one. Recently, when I signed up for a subscription to eMusic - the independent-label-only version of iTunes that was making a credible go of selling digital music downloads many years in advance of the rest of the pack - I thought that I might take advantage of their not inconsiderable classical catalog to rectify, at least a little, this deficiency. But still, the problem: where to start? The two ideas bumped into each other and I had a thought - I could reread my Bill Holm collection, which I’d been meaning to do anyway, and whenever he referenced a particular piece, I would see if it was available on eMusic and if so I would download it.
A neat idea I didn’t do anything with for a couple of years, that came back to me with Bill’s unexpected death.
I went to the bookshelf with a mind to work through them chronologically and was faced with a decision: The Music of Failure and Boxelder Bug Variations both list a publication date of 1985. I’m drawn to the former, though, it’s something of an enigma in my collection: I can’t figure out where I bought it. It looks to be of the original Plains Press printing, but the sticker I peeled off it after all these years suggests it was stocked in 1996, and the condition of the binding does allow for the possibility of it suffering 11 years of benign neglect. I know I read the book in college, perhaps even high school - that must have been my father’s copy. What bookshop did I spot this time traveler in? Most of my collection were gifted to me by Holm himself, noted by his cheerful inscriptions but this one I know I bought for myself, apparently at the original cover price of $6.95.
The picture on the back is a younger man than I ever knew - probably the year it was published, he would have been around 42, just a few years older than I am now. I get a shiver - it seems forever ago, I was not yet in high school, my brother just graduating, my sister in her first year of college. And this young fellow on the back cover, short hair and beard still mostly free from gray and doubtless so red you can almost see color in the black and white photo, has lived almost two thirds of the life he’ll get, and he has just published his first book, with some podunk university press. He’ll publish seven more, mostly with the more classy but still very Midwestern Milkweed Editions, and a handful of odd chapbooks. He will teach in China twice, travel the world; play the piano, sing and recite poetry to millions of listeners on the radio, and half expatriate to Iceland. Without cracking the book there was a lesson in it for me already, at a time when I had begun to feel that perhaps I had missed the window to yet embark on the road less traveled. With which thought I turned the cover probably for the first time in a decade, and began to read.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Apr 14, 2009 at 1:55 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment