Once I played a small plastic flute – it was called a “Tonette”—and it was similar, I think to another toy-like, recorder-like plastic flute called a “Song Flute.” Maybe our music director—Mr. Girol then—didn’t want the words to be confused. I was in 4th grade. I could have started in 3rd grade, but I chose art class instead.
The first culmination of the tonettes in our district – with its 5 grade schools then—was to gather us tonette-players together on one crowded stage and have us play, in unison, “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.” I still remember the fingering. The next year I switched to clarinet, which Mr. Girol taught (all year, including summers) in the school basement. What I was doing would hardly be called musical.
Mr. Girol was a true Music Man. He taught us to play the clarinet or trumpet or violin. He assembled us grade school kids—had us bussed together on Friday afternoons to play together, bought us matching capes, and performing a concert. The township was new. When the new Junior High School opened, we entered 7th grade and Mr. Girol continued with us for the next few years. The township extended the school from 9th grade to 10th grade for an emergency year or something, and by then we had branched into other instruments, and Mr. Girol had an award-winning concert band.
I switched wind instruments several times. He offered me an alto-clarinet in 7th grade. I said Okay. He offered a bass clarinet, as he rounded out his orchestra, in 8th grade and I said yes. It was when I went to a District Band Festival with that bass clarinet that I saw a lovely girl with a strange instrument—large, rather unwieldy, but with the most marvelous, deep reedy sound. “What is that?” I asked her.
“A bassoon,” she said. I returned to ask Mr. Girol if he’d “heard of a bassoon,” and he laughed and said yes, he could order me one, but he couldn’t teach me. That was the end of 8th grade, that summer, that I began lessons. The instrument was in the bass clef, unlike the clarinets, but I had piano lessons, too, and could read the bass clef.
Long story short (as they say): I played the bassoon—or someone’s bassoon—the junior high one that Mr.Girol had ordered for me, the high school bassoon when I switched to a great high school, then the one at college, when I showed up in the music department and asked the conductor if the college had a bassoon I could play.
I was almost serious about the instrument. I played in quintets, which were demanding, and some of my friends went on to study music. But I wavered and ultimately graduated and taught English and so on. I never had a bassoon again. They are expensive.
However, I follow the bassoonists—in the San Francisco Symphony , in the Opera and Ballet Orchestras. I love the double reeds in general. Once, during a performance of “The New World Symphony,” when the English-horn player delivered that longing, piercing solo, I felt transported. Such an odd word—but the feeling was there—of being taken out of that space and lifted elsewhere by that double-reed longing.
When I was in 10th grade, still at the junior high, Mr. Girol featured me with bassoon and orchestra, as a soloist. I played “Lucy Long.” I remember that silly name and once looked it up and there are a number of you-tubes with accomplished bassoonists playing “Lucy Long.” Funny. I went on—to contests—playing Mozart’s Concerto for bassoon and orchestra—first the second movement, which is slower, and In senior year the first movement. Our woodwind quintet received high honors, too.
Music is feeling? Music to me is doing, and it’s all so long ago I feel I am writing about someone else. I am.
I missed out on pop music mostly. I don’t wax nostalgic over songs of the past because they were all peripheral to me. Am I sorry? Do I miss that intensity? I ultimately didn’t have talent—nor do I in anything really—just a perseverance that isn’t perhaps driven enough. But music to me is an active verb, not a passive feeling. It’s “felt” in the fingers, in the mouthpiece, in the sound one makes. That’s music.