by Dorien Grey
Music is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. At its best, it can and should unite, comfort, and empower us by lifting us out of ourselves and remind us of our potential as a species. When it does not, it is simply noise.
* * *
SONGS
I was recently informed by my cable/internet provider that the company was going digital and that I had to have a digital cable box attached to every television set in my home, at a cost (hinted at but I don’t think ever specifically stated, $2.50 per month). I did not see the need for anything other than what I already have, and I certainly did not need to spend another $2.50 a month for something I didn’t want in the first place. Foolish me.
I now have a digital converter box for my TV, and will be spending $2.50 per month for the privilege. However, after all my bitching and moaning, I discovered that with the conversion to digital, I now have available, through my TV, 40 music channels. Everything to Christian Rock (one of my favorites, as you can imagine), through Jazz and Hip-hop (close seconds to Christian Rock)
However, it also contains Big Band, Standards, Light Classical, Classical, and Show Tunes. I guess I can afford the $2.50. So now I get up in the morning, turn on the computer and, passing through the living room to make coffee and let my cat out of the bathroom (a long story), I turn on the TV to one of the music channels...usually Show Tunes.
While I’ve not been really up on musical theater for several years now, and therefore do not recognize many of the songs, they also have all the classics from Oklahoma! on. They’ve just played a couple of my all-time favorites: “What I Did for Love” (A Chorus Line), “‘Til Him” (The Producers), “Somewhere” (West Side Story). Anyone who knows me can clearly spot a pattern here: I’m a sucker for songs which, to me, speak particularly strongly to gays. They haven’t yet played…that I’ve heard, anyway…“I Am what I Am” (La Cage aux Folles), but I’m sure they will at some point. And if by any remote chance they might play “Tell Me, Please” from Boy Meets Boy—a delightful gay musical that originated in New York and which I saw six times in L.A.—I will be a happy man indeed.
While the words “song” and “music” are synonymous, they are two pieces of a whole: “music” implies a broader and somewhat more elevated range. “Music” carries with it the signature of the human race as one of our finer qualities: songs are music on a smaller, more personalized scale.
Songs have significance to different people for different reasons. First, and almost universally, it has to have a pleasant melody, and second, universally, the words have to have some special appeal or meaning to the listener. Where one first hears a song, under what circumstances, with whom it is heard or with whom the listener relates it…influence an individual’s reactions.
There are a few songs that have a power which transcends its words and its music: “God Bless America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” are perhaps the two prime example for Americans. Yet I doubt they have nearly the same impact on non-Americans. Such songs reach deeply into our national psyche and trigger powerful emotions we lump together under another powerful emotion: “patriotism.” Songs are often closely tied to specific times…World War II, the big bands, rock and roll…which become part of their appeal.
Your taste in songs…and in music…may differ vastly from mine. But the thing is that we each recognize its power to move us, and its impact on our lives. Play it again, Sam.
* * *
MARCHES
I’m returning to a favorite theme here—my love of military bands and marches. Since I try to build up a little stockpile of blogs as a hedge against mental blocks, it is Memorial Day as I write this. When I was a child, it was known as “Decoration Day” and was an inclusive time for remembering not only the military but family and friends and everyone who’d gone before. (And here we are only three sentences into it and I’m wandering off the track. That’s one nice thing about marches…they keep you in line.)
Now, it is long and well established that I’m a pushover for anything that brings out strong emotions, and it’s hard to beat martial music in that regard. Can you honestly say you can listen to “The Stars and Stripes Forever” played all-stops-out by 50 or more musicians without getting goosebumps? It is no coincidence whatever that drums were the first musical instrument, and that their beat often echoes that of the human heart.
I started playing the clarinet in Junior High when my folks thought I should learn to play a musical instrument. I took several lessons and no one ever mentioned my playing skills and Benny Goodman in the same breath. I was in my junior and senior high school orchestras where I was okay playing within the cover of the full orchestra, but when it came to ever being called on for a solo, forget it.
I’d not played for about three years when I joined the NavCads, and when they formed a Pre-Flight band and announced an ambitious schedule of trips around the country, I jumped at it.
I find it interesting that many of my memories of playing with the band are accompanied by powerful (though hard to describe) physical sensations. I suppose most of them are related to a sense of loss…of standing, as I’ve described it before, on one side of the window of time and looking clearly through the glass to the times being remembered; seeing and feeling them as I saw them when they were happening, and being achingly aware that I cannot step through the window and be there, be then, be the who I was; that I can’t reach out and grab myself by the shoulders and say “treasure this moment. It will soon be gone.”
And this relates to martial music…how? Because marches are so often the pulley that parts the curtain covering the window to the past, the joy of being part of something so very much larger than myself…of belonging.
The purpose of martial music is to quicken the heart and to create a sense of empowerment, of unity. The drums set the pace of the heart, the trumpets and trombones provide the power, and the winds raise the spirits. Marches are in many ways “the people’s music,” and can instantly elicit patriotism more strongly and consistently, probably, than any other musical form. It is not without reason and logic that “The Stars and Stripes Forever” is considered America’s second National Anthem, and I suspect many people…I among them…would like it to replace the almost-impossible-to-sing “Star Spangled Banner,” to which I think we cling largely as a matter of tradition.
John Philip Sousa, who dreamed the music to “The Stars and Stripes Forever” one night and wrote it down note for note when he awoke, really wanted to be a “serious” composer and felt disappointed that every piece he began somehow turned into a march. We should all be so lucky.
* * *
I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC
Walt Whitman’s classic poem demonstrates how one human has the ability to sound notes within others, and enable them to identify completely with the message. Such words are comforting proof that each of us is part of a whole. We all have favorite books with which we identify, sometimes without recognizing exactly which specific chords in them resonate most strongly. But it is poems and song lyrics which, by the very nature of their compactness, have a uniquely and directly powerful ability to encapsulate our own, deep-down outlooks, attitudes and core beliefs. Given that most of us are far more often exposed to songs than to poetry, I’m quite sure that each of us can point to at the lyrics of at least one song—probably several—and say “this is me.”
This past weekend, I went to see a production of Cabaret, which I had never before seen on stage. It was an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts in that while some of the cast members had good voices, they played the part of their character rather than being the character and therefore the spark of magic which makes some productions magical was missing. But there is no question about the power of songs which comprise the show.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point that I’ve always been able to lay out my entire interior makeup in the words of a few songs. One song in Cabaret—“Maybe This Time”
—has always grabbed me by the heart and described my sense of longing as well as if not better than I could ever do myself. (Turn on your mental stereo and listen to it carefully. You’re hearing me—and perhaps, if you do not have someone to share your life, yourself.)
With all the emotional rigidity of a blade of grass, I am frequently moved by songs, and believe I did a blog on them before at one time. But after “Maybe This Time” reentered my head, where, as is my wont it has stubbornly remained ever since, I decided to select three song lyrics which, even if you knew absolutely nothing about me as a person, would paint a trompe l’oeil self-portrait.
I chose three because while one could be a sketch, a portrait is seldom done in one color. So I selected “Maybe This Time,” to perfectly mirror my life-long search for romantic love, which I still have hopes, however unrealistically, to this day.
While my being gay is not the only thing that defines me as a human being, it has been a preeminent influence, and my entire life has been colored by it. My attitudes toward—and defiance of—bigotry and stupidity and those who would dictate how others should live their lives were formed and have evolved from it. Hence, the second of my three defining songs: “I Am What I Am,” from Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles. To me, it defines the word “pride.”
And the third song...the one which encapsulates my view of everything I aspire to and know I shall never fully realize, is “The Impossible Dream,” from The Man of La Mancha. Can you possibly imagine what the world could be like if everyone “strove, with his last ounce of courage, to reach the unreachable stars”? I can.
I note that the underlying theme of all these songs, and the underlying theme of my existence, is, as noted in my reasons for choosing “Maybe This Time,” hope. With hope, anything is possible, any star eventually reachable. Without it, there is nothing.
So there you have it. I am what I am, and I cling to the impossible dream in hopes that maybe this time....
