Classical music came into my life through the serene sounds that orchestras made on a radio station that I discovered in childhood, on a sick day. It was WQXR, which was owned by The New York Times and devoted to classical music. I liked being by myself when I listened to it. This wasn’t a matter of choice, because no one else in the house would listen to it. But that was good. The kind of music that they played on WQXR had a way of drawing out my imagination, but only to keep it still, and for that I needed to be alone.
I mustn’t suggest that I liked everything. I liked very little, really. Most of it was “boring.” It was boring, I now realize, because I didn’t know where it was going, other than “on and on.” And it could be heavy, like massive, old furniture, and dark, like a room shuttered from the light of a beautiful day. And when it was stormy, it could be just as unpleasant as other kinds of music, although it was never as bad as the loud, percussive music that prevailed on other radio stations as well as on television. I would say that I hated noise, were it not for that wise old definition of “weed”: any plant growing in what you consider to be the wrong place. I can say that I like almost all kinds of music, from cha-chas to chants, but I have never cared for rock. It’s not a drum thing — drums can be very musical, especially in classic jazz. It’s the bangs. Most people today seem to like bangs, but they irritate and then unsettle me. Hell for me would be a fifteen year-old boy with a drum kit.
One thing led to another. The first title that I remember was “Funeral March of a Marionette” — improbable but then unforgettable. My parents bought a Capehart hi-fi, and to go with it, a variety of LPs, from Lester Lanin party records to Broadway original cast albums. But it turned out that neither of my parents had much of a taste for recorded music. It was I who made use of the Capehart — so much so, that I was presently given my own turntable, which plugged into the Grundig radio on which I had discovered WQXR. And alongside this, my record collection was born, with hand-me-downs from Mrs O’Neill, whose stockbroker husband had threatened me with an action for alienation of affection after I monopolized her attention during one of my parents’ parties. For a long time — until now, actually — I regarded Mrs O’Neill’s LPs as an embarrassing stepping-stone on my way to the appreciation of truly serious music, and in that way dismissed them as a guilty secret that I would not discuss even with myself.
For it cannot be argued for an instant that the arrangement of popular melodies from all backgrounds made by Ronald Binge for Mantovani, the hugely successful bandleader whose sales would be exceeded only by the Beatles, were kitsch. However you define kitsch, though, you must acknowledge the derogatory and not particularly descriptive nature of the term. It expresses the contempt of educated people for lower-class tastes, quite often those of the social groups out of which the snobs have educated themselves. Kitsch has some slightly more objective characteristics, but it always involves scorn for the artistic judgments of the ignorant, the very people who claim to know what they like even though (as they’re happy to admit, with a sort of retaliatory derision) they don’t know anything about it. Kitsch is, finally, a policing term, a shibboleth. But to the young and insecure it is a battle cry of Euclidean clarity, and there is no appeal from its condemnation. I was vaguely aware of all this during my two or three Mantovani years, so I didn’t flinch too defensively when I was shot down for it in high school. I put the LPs away and labeled the bundle “childish things.” That was the end of that.
But now, in the course of writing this, I resolved to set dismissiveness aside and to give the matter some thought, and, more important, air time. I still have a few LPs, kept for their cheesy jackets, but as I no longer have a phonograph I have had to rely on the seven hours of recordings that at some point I uploaded onto iTunes. It has been something of a revelation. I wasn’t entirely surprised that the music didn’t hit me as “gagacious,” to use one of my late wife’s splendid words, because I had enjoyed the score to Paul Taylor’s Lost, Found and Lost, which is comprised of elevator music. I had no trouble recognizing “Charmaine” as the defining example of “the Mantovani sound.” (It was recorded twice, the second time for stereo in 1958. Mantovani was key to the popularization of stereophonic reproduction.) I’d read a little about Binge and could hear the effect of “cathedral reverberation” that that he tried to capture. I didn’t have to listen to too many cuts to hear these arrangements as a kind of war relief, a refuge, particularly for Britons, who had endured the horrible uncertainties of the war, and, too often, the catastrophes that settled them. This might raise the question, why was a ten year-old living an outwardly quiet, comfortable life seeking refuge. But that’s for another time.
The music of Mantovani is an unusual kind of white noise. As calming as the sound of the surf but comprised of recognizable tunes, it strips music down to a pulseless dream. It softens the edges of melodies as much as it can without diminishing coherence. “Charmaine” shows this effect very clearly in its opening bars, which feature a figure of descending notes played by the violins. With great artistry, and perhaps artificial studio assistance, each note in the figure is slightly slurred, or held, as if sustained by one of the pedals on the piano. There is a discernible but extremely muted waltz rhythm, as if there were something gauche about tempo. And yet there is nothing sloppy or even “impressionist” about these effects. It could be compared with the “timelessness” of Gregorian chant if the arrangement did not preserve the sense of directedness, of proceeding from here to there, that is perhaps the nuclear harmonic quality of modern Western music. For all its sumptuous pallor, “Charmaine” is still what anybody would recognize as a song, made up of verse, chorus, and bridge.
For decades, this kind of thing was ubiquitous in the First World, an unavoidable but therapeutic sound track intended to allay the tedium and anxiety of spaces that nobody particularly wanted to be in — waiting rooms of all kinds, from medical offices to airport gates; elevators, department stores and cafeterias. It might be suggested that these soothing soundtracks made the mass transition to postwar modernity bearable. For them to be effective, however, they had to be unobtrusive, and once people began to notice them, they became irritating, particularly to adolescents, who, newly-minted as teenagers, seemed remarkably dependent on external confirmation of their nervous organization, mostly by means of a transistor radio.
It was when the chorus director in high school asked me what kind of music I liked that I blurted out the truth. His staring pause was a depth charge. I think he was more surprised by my youth than by my bad taste: Mantovani was for older ladies. His distaste gave substance to the misgivings that I already had about listening to things like “My Foolish Heart” and “Unchained Melody.” From then on, I would concentrate on learning the tenor part in Mozart’s “Lachrymosa” and in the opening chorus of the more famous of Vivaldi’s two settings of the Gloria. These excerpts from sacred compositions were perfectly welcome in the repertoire of a public high school chorus at the time; they were even, especially the “Gloria,” a little edgy. I was very taken with them. Little did we know that Columbia Records was about to release not one but two recordings of The Four Seasons, which was all but unknown at the time, hitherto available on LP only as performed by a creaky antiquarian ensemble utterly devoid of the pow that would carry Vivaldi’s tone poem to the point of wearisome inescapability within ten years. I would own one of these new records presently, the one played by the Philadelphia Orchestra’s strings, with the already-iconic trees of the eponymous Park Avenue restaurant gracing the jacket. I had records of the music that we were singing, too. My record collection, and the taste that it nourished, was off to an orthodox start.
I encountered an interesting character on my way. There was an enthusiast for what he himself christened “barococo” music who called himself DeKoven and who broadcast a variety of shows from WFUV at Fordham, in the Bronx. While DeKoven did play music occasionally, he was usually advertising himself. What saved hiss shtick from charlatanism was his crank’s passion for under-appreciated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers, particularly Telemann, who in his opinion was as great as anybody, so much so that it was easy to understand why some of his works were misattributed to Bach. In his choice of example, Bach’s Cantata BWV 160, he was not wrong. Nevertheless, a lifetime of evaluating this claim (not very energetically) has led me to judge Telemann a very agreeable, occasionally brilliant composer of the second rank. If you are not already in buoyant spirits, he can be annoying. Most of the time, DeKoven ranted. He saw ignorant self-styled experts everywhere he looked, and LP jackets that were poxed by misspellings. He was prone to cute but unpersuasive formulations like “deliciously repetitious.” Unforgettably, he denounced “hurdy-gurdy Verdi” and “puny Puccini,” which, however corny, was not out of line for music-lovers among his listeners who looked down on opera as a pastime for Italian immigrants from the boroughs. In any case, I myself shared his disdain for music of the Romantic period, which I found both schmaltzy and overupholstered. I emerged from this prejudice, by inches, in college, and I was about twenty-three when I eventually managed to listen to Ravel.
When the adolescent need to dance hit me, too, it was the studio recordings of Fred Astaire’s movie hits that jazzed me. (They all said he couldn’t sing, but I heard different.)