Clarinets and Punk-Rock

Hildegard and Riley got into the car the other day, and I had left the radio on so it came on playing something of dubious quality and high volume. I don’t know what it was, but certainly when I HAD been in the car, the radio was playing something more genteel. Certainly. Anyway, this led to a discussion of what music the Maestro gets exposed to.

I listen to a lot of different things, and the Maestro occasionally gets to listen to them with me. Early in the summer I bought Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” CD, and the Maestro spent several weeks requesting to listen to it. Typically he catches hold of one song and wants to listen to it on repeat for hours. With Tom Petty, it was “Honeybee.” He also really likes No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” played on infinite repeat the same way. He likes the Cowboy Junkies alright, and Great Big Sea, a Newfoundland Celtic Pop group. He does not like REM and he really doesn’t like The Killers. He can take Blue Rodeo or he can leave them.

When he was small, he would occasionally get an earache and wake up screaming in the night. Natalie Cole and Norah Jones were usually the best for calming him down. He likes Ella and Louie, but because Riley likes them, he has listened to them enough that he is tired of them. He prefers his Jazz New Orleans style anyway, with lots of polyphonic lines that he can use to pick out the instruments. He likes the Swing Kids soundtrack a lot.

Last Christmas, I was installing a CD player in our car and we had to go to Best Buy to get some wiring. The automotive audio section of course had the big display of car speakers. Pushing different buttons activated different sets of speakers so you can visualize (audiatize?) how they will sound in your car. There were a few songs that this display would cycle through, including Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”. It was so loud, and the bass was so strong that I could put my hand on the Maestro’s chest and feel his rib-cage resonate. He stood there transfixed, lost in the sound and the feeling of it. “Hey Maestro, can you feel that in your chest?” “… … Uh-huh.” He didn’t want to leave, and I had to carry him out, crying to go back.

In the car with Riley, he gets a lot of classical NPR. This has led to a number of trips to the library to find something similar to what he heard recently. This summer I found myself in line at the library waiting to check out CDs. In one hand I had a stack of clarinet concertos, because my three-year-old had been pestering me to get him some. In the other hand I had a stack of Blink-182 CDs, to see if I liked them. It turns out that I don’t really like Blink-182, and that the Maestro liked the Bassoon concerto on the CD I got better than the Clarinet concerto he had asked for. That didn’t take away from the irony of the situation though.

Sometimes when I turn on the car, the radio is tuned to something I don’t really care for, like Boston. When I try to change the station, he yells out “I want to hear that!” So we have to listen to that station until the song is over.

He has never been passive in the music selection process. Ever since he could talk, I could ask him what we should listen to, and if he didn’t have any ideas, he still had opinions. The only common feature I can pick out of the music he likes is that he likes to be able to identify instruments. He can point out all the melodies in a Benny Goodman song, and his favorite No Doubt song is “The one with the guitar”, not that they all don’t have guitar, but it is the guitar in “Just a Girl” that he likes. He’s asked about the feminist metaphors, but I haven’t been able to explain them satisfactorily yet. His favorite part of Ella and Louie is the trumpet. He prefers concertos to symphonies, generally. Rock music often has snare drums and cymbols that he likes. I think that “Honeybee” is the only non-kids song I can think of in which lyrics contribute to his interest and it has a strong guitar part anyway.

For kids music, he likes Jim Gill a lot, and he has fun lyrics as well as an adult satisfying musical complexity. He has a Wiggles CD that he listens to occasionally, but not too often, thankfully. I just can’t handle Captain Feathersword.

He asked me once why Captain Feathersword was a pirate. I said that his parents were pirates, and they taught him to be a pirate, just like I could teach him to be a chemist if he wanted, someday. He said “Oh, OK…. But dad…” Lip begins quivering, just a little. “I don’t WANT to be a chemist!” I know, buddy, I know.