I am at the point when recalling events from my childhood feels like digging up another historical epoch. Nonetheless, if I do not attempt the memory excavation now, when will I get around to it? So here I ponder a question that has poked at me for many years: what was that strange music that I heard on some radio station out of Manhattan some sixty years ago?
My family lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey in 1959, a little bedroom suburb just off the George Washington Bridge. Fort Lee was supposed to become Hollywood around the turn of the twentieth century, but for various reasons did not. Its next, more dubious claim to fame would arrive in 2013 when some of then Governor Chris Christie’s apparatchiks punished the city’s mayor for his lack of Christie support by blocking Fort Lee’s entrances to the bridge. By the time of this scandal I was long gone, comfortably ensconced in my present digs in San Francisco.
Returning to the last year of the 1950s, we resided in a nice little apartment complex on Edwin Avenue. It was walking distance, even for five year old me, to the local shopping/parking area, which included a Food Fair supermarket and a theater at which I saw my first movie (The Road to Bali, with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour). At night I could see the complex from the window to my room, and over that the upper Manhattan skyline. Very late when I could not sleep I would watch that vista while listening to a small portable radio. Tuning up and down the various bands, it felt as if I might find a channel through which the sights before me might speak.
I am pretty sure that I listened to some historically famous broadcasting back in those years. This included “Milkman’s Matinee,” the late night record show that made WNEW the world’s first 24 hour radio station. Although I enjoyed the tunes, I was already very focused on classical music. My mother had also purchased a small portable turntable for me with some records, which included Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony. Obsessively listening to these tonal masterpieces, I was unprepared for what I heard one night as I held the radio close to my body under my bed covers.
Here is the problem. I remember that moment now with too much hindsight. The challenge for me here is to describe what I heard as I experienced it then. There was some kind of music for sure, but it was being played, I felt, by an orchestra in which most of the instruments had gone away. For reasons unknown the horns and the drums and the windy sounding music gadgets were not there – just a very small group of the stringed devices. I remember trying to count them, maybe there were three? five? I could not be certain. But they were definitely working with each other to play something that I could not readily understand.
It, the music, just did not make sense. The titles that I played on my records sounded like songs, except longer and with more instruments. Also, those pieces had beginning and end parts that clearly told you your point in the music. You just knew that from the way that the music worked. It somehow told you when these things were happening.
But this music kept starting and stopping very quickly. And there were no songs or beginning or end parts. Instead, the instruments kept making what seemed like statements to each other. That’s the way it felt. Statements. Sometimes the statements played high into the air; sometimes they plucked; sometimes they growled in low places. I distinctly remember laying there in the New Jersey night and thinking, “What is this? What am I listening to? It doesn’t make sense.”
Then the music stopped and a group of men came on, and they began talking about what I had just heard. I don’t remember what they said. But I remember being struck and impressed by the tone of their voices. “This,” I finally concluded, “must be very serious music.”
And with that, I fell fast asleep.
What was the composition that I heard that night? Over the years I have convinced myself that it was Anton Webern’s 1938 String Quartet, Opus 38.
If it was not Webern, it was something else from the Vienna School; maybe Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4. Then there is the problem of what radio station I heard it on. It might have been WBAI in New York, just before the station’s owner Louis Schweitzer gave it to the Pacifica Foundation. Then again, it could have been WQXR, then owned by The New York Times. Or, perhaps it was WKCR, run by Columbia University.
I will never really know. Such are the mysteries of me listening to me listening to something broadcast well over half a century ago. At least we are both still here, listening; that is, listening still.
