August 2nd, 2006

Today's rant is a combination audio/literary one. Please click here to listen to some music while you read the words below.

My mother trained for and sang opera when she was a younger woman. Her sister sang opera and "classical" up until last year, when she finally retired (and now just teaches it at Queens University). One of their brothers trained and sang opera and, in fact, still sings at the drop of a hat. That, of course, means I grew up in a household where the only musical commonality was Puccini or maybe Bach, perhaps Mozart (whom I just can't learn to like) and various other "lesser" lights such as Vivaldi, Bartok, Stravinsky, the various Palestrinas, and other assorted debris (Schubert, Handel, Albinoni, and Beethoven all spring to mind).

But talk about Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchel, Queen, James Taylor, or Led Zeppelin and the stares from my mother were as blank as the cover of the Beatles' White Album. We all played piano, I played trumpet and guitar, my sisters learned flute and guitar, we all took voice lessons, we all joined professional "classical music" choirs and we all toured Europe and North America as musicians before we had even finished puberty (this is all very true) ... but, back at home in the real world, secretly and guiltily retired to our bedrooms to listen (with headphones) to BTO, The Doors, The Who, etc.

Then I rebelled in my early teens and quit the discipline of voice, piano, and trumpet lessons to become a 3rd-rate hockey player. I question the value of that move now, of course, but I sure loved the freedom back then.

I had figured that my cousins grew up with same sort of quiet furtive guilt towards popular modern music until one day when my cousin Ed and I were hanging out in the basement of his house and we put on the album LA Woman by The Doors and my aunt came into the doorway for a moment, listened to part of the first song ("The Changeling") and said, "This was always a very danceable album," and left. Well, I was more than a little impressed! A few years later, she commented on the song, "Bloody Well Right" by Supertramp as being a pointless bit of improvisation followed by a "horrible" song. Maybe she didn't like it, but she knew the song well enough to (accurately) make an observation about it!

So I think that my cousins—at least that brood of cousins—grew up in a more ... um ... musically permissive home than my sisters and I did. For example, when my sister was lulled to the Dark Side of Music (Jazz) it was a bigger and more traumatic experience in our household than it would have been in my cousins'. And when, at 18, I bought an electric guitar (for $25.00 out of the back of someone's Chevy on a street corner) the ripples of shock and horror ... well, I think they are probably still bouncing off the walls of my parent's house.

So [come to point, Porter -Ed.], one of the pseudo-classical things I did as a teenager that enabled the transition from pure "classical" musician to something less respectable was to write music on the Commodore 64 computer. It amounted to creating large quantities of DATA statements containing the note duration (in milliseconds) and then three two-number sequences corresponding to each of the three voices that the C64 could make. Data usually looked something like this:

1000 DATA 200,16,195,21,234,33,180
1010 DATA 400,64,243,12,92,18,246
1020 DATA 400,16,104,22,45,29,195
.
.
.
etc.

In the above sample, that's three chords, or one second's worth of data. You can imagine how long the strings of numbers get when writing three, four, or five minute-long pieces. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed the results.

Then, the 80s ended, my C64 got sent off to a nephew, the disks got scattered or rendered useless by the ravages of time, and soon all the songs were lost. I didn't really care much until recently, when it occurred to me that it was an important slice of my life lost and gone forever. All my old C64 songs were irretrievably lost!

And then a CD arrived in my mailbox the other day. It was from my cousin. He had found an old cassette tape of nearly all of them (certainly, the ones I wanted back) and he had digitized the tape and even done some clean up and sound recovery. The result was impressive! It sounded like I had an original C64 plugged into an original 1701 monitor and the music was playing over its speaker! Fantastic! Wonderful! I had a significant chunk of my teenaged life returned to me! Yay!

Hmm ... except, the pieces aren't really the masterpieces I remember them being. I mean, they are okay ... and some of them are quite pretty in their own way, but none of them scream out, "The Work of Genius!!!!"

Oh well.

I didn't want them back to exploit them for their huge commercial potential, after all; I wanted them for posterity. And for the way they bridged that gap between the "classical" side of me growing up and the ever-increasing "pop" side of me that emerged throughout my teen years. It's as much a part of me as anything else.

If you are interested, you can listen to them here.

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