The Flames of Passion and the Fires of Temptation

In one of his Old Kingdom books, Garth Nix writes: “Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?” [i]  It’s a thought-provoking line, one that encourages reflection on choices and consequences throughout his Abhorsen trilogy.  I decided to explore his questioning reflection, although in a modified form: ‘Does the music choose the person, or the person the music?’  My incentive was I’d been thinking about musical preferences while working on the first chapter of my never-to-be-released autobiography.  Mulling over the less than thrilling moments of my life, I had been examining the music I was drawn to at different stages, noticing how my tastes had changed, or at least shifted.  I could see links between the two, but it wasn’t clear if my choices followed events, or if music was like a catalyst, a key element in precipitating new directions.  If I set out some examples, the question might be clearer.  Here’s a summary, preferences by age.

As a child, I would often lose myself in music, listening to my slowly growing collection of LPs:  classical music, symphonies and concertos; organ music, Bach especially; and choral music.  As a family, we all agreed the best of all was listening to The Messiah at Christmas.  As in so many things in my childhood, I was gently guided.  Early on, my parents would play music from the classical era, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak and Sibelius.  Then dad would put on Bach’s organ music as I got older.  At this stage, most of the time I was listening to big, heavy romantic pieces.  Was that what my mother liked, was that the kind of person she was?  I have no idea: it wasn’t obvious, and I still don’t know.  As for me, I think was entranced by intense passions!  Bach?  That was Dad: mathematical, he loved fugues and variations, and I realised I did too.

Around the age of twelve, I decided I wanted to learn the cello.  I don’t know why I ignored the clarinet, the very instrument my dad played, as well as the organ.  Certainly, dad didn’t talk much about his ability as a clarinetist; what’s more, he was never one to push me into anything.  I was in luck, and managed to borrow of the school’s cellos.  For six months I would take it home on the train, and bring it back again the next day.  No fancy back-pack cello cases in those days:  it was big, and it was a nuisance.  Ah, but the sound it could make; well, to be honest it was the sounds the teacher could make.  I tried hard, and I have no idea what it was like for mum and dad to hear the groans and shrieks that resulted.  Even worse, I could hear I kept on missing the notes, but couldn’t seem to find the way to get there.  My performing career ended quickly, when I managed to chop off the end of a finger with a circular saw (please don’t ask me how).  I think my parents were relieved – about me not playing, of course!  I was back to listening.

In the late 1950s school friends told me about rock and roll, and Elvis Presley.  I went to see some Elvis films in the local cinema.  I bought, or was loaned, some recordings.  Two stick in my mind.  First was Blue Suede Shoes:

Well, it’s one for the money
Two for the show
Three to get ready
Now go, cat, go …

Well, you can knock me down
Step in my face
Slander my name
All over the place …

You can burn my house
Steal my car
Drink my liquor
From an old fruit jar …

[and that wonderful refrain}

Do anything that you want to do
But uh-uh, honey
Lay off of my shoes
Don’t you step on my blue suede shoes [ii]

Jailhouse Rock, Treat me Nice, but, wait, what was this?  Elvis singing Treat Me Nice and he missed the beat, and that was – that was sexy!  Syncopation thrilled me.  It was new; it was daring.  This was the same decade I was attending classical concerts, quite often at the Royal Festival Hall, on the Thames south bank.  You could buy cheap orchestra or balcony seats.  The list of great musicians I heard would seem amazing now:  I heard outstanding concerts with Rostropovich, Rubenstein, Klemperer, and so many others.  Looking back, it must have been slightly dislocating:  on the one hand, I was in step with the great romantics, and on the other hand, with rock’n’roll.  Classical was to be the winner, but that Elvis, he was thrilling, too.

At some stage, just a teenager, my mother took me to a light opera, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and a little later The Yeoman of the Guard.  That was it:  not so much the humour, but the pathos took me down a path that would lead me to a lifelong love of opera.  A little later I was off to Covent Garden and the Savoy Theatre, and for very little money heard everything from The Flying Dutchman to Peter Grimes.  The staging and the music of operas fascinated me.   Unworried by the rather pathetic stories that sustained them, this was romantic life on the grand scale.  Was I a romantic now, or still becoming one?

A little older, the time of the Beatles and Rolling Stones!  Both played to my clearly romantic nature.  Initially the Beatles were love all the way, with a slight tinge of regret.  Please Please Me, I Saw Her Standing There, Twist and Shout, Till There Was You, Please Mr Postman, and Money, all in 1963.  The Rolling Stones were rather grittier, but in the same vein.  Then, just as I was coping with marriage, one child and then another, the music went a little darker.  From the Beatles is was Can’t Buy Me Love, Paul McCartney the romantic balladeer was now sadder, with Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby, while John Lennon was off in space with Nowhere Man, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.  These were the years of the Rolling Stones throbbing, driving, unrelenting songs, (I can’t get no) Satisfaction, Heart of Stone, Moving On, songs of bittersweet longing and regretful failure. And then there was Tommy, The Who’s stunning rock opera.

Longing.  Down in the disco, The Doors hit town.  Moving on from the Stones and Beatles, I listened to the strange, pulsing narratives of Light my Fire, The End, and L A Woman.  Angst, revolution and radicalism was in the air, only to be saved by Carole King a little later with wistful songs:  So Far Away, It’s Too Late, Will you Love me Tomorrow, and Tapestry:

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view
A wondrous, woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Once amid the soft silver sadness in the sky
There came a man of fortune, a drifter passing by
He wore a torn and tattered cloth around his leathered hide
And a coat of many colors, yellow-green on either side  …

Soon within my tapestry along the rutted road
He sat down on a river rock and turned into a toad
It seemed that he had fallen into someone’s wicked spell
And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn’t know him well

As I watched in sorrow, there suddenly appeared
A figure gray and ghostly beneath a flowing beard
In times of deepest darkness, I’ve seen him dressed in black
Now my tapestry’s unraveling – he’s come to take me back
He’s come to take me back

Longing, journeys, wanting something out of reach.  I was ripe for all that.  I moved and my new workplace was a hothouse, throbbing with UST (yes, unresolved sexual tension!).   I had several staff.  One was an attractive young woman, interested in me.  My boss invited us over, and started playing some records.  All I needed was a gentle push, and it came from Roberta Flack!  I can still remember her introducing Revered Lee with a spoken verse: “This is a song about a very big, black, strong sexy southern Baptist minister who thinks that he’s got his program all together until he runs up against a lady who shows him that he ain’t got it all together.  His name is Rev. Doctor Lee”.  Then the music started:

Rev. Lee, he went to the water
And he prayed to the lord about ol’ Satan’s daughter
It seems in a dream, child
While he lay sleeping
She climbed in his bed
Starts rubbing and weeping
Oh she was twisting and turning
She was beggin’ and pleading
Loving, burning
Panting and breathing

Rev. Lee she said
“Oh, Lord knows I love you child
I will not even place God above you.”
Rev. Lee, he lifted his arms high
Said “heavenly father, take me home to the sky.”
He said “Lord, please don’t test me
Not down where she touched me, oh
My mind is so hazy, Lord, my body is hungry …

God rolled a thunder then a bolt of lighting
He seemed to be angry
Oh sure was frightening
The thunder grew louder louder
Dark and conditions just then a voice said  “God can not petitioned”…

Just then the devil emerged from the water
And he said in a dry voice
“Your God will not barter.”
Reverend Lee ran screaming from the water
He was hotly persued by old Satan’s daughter
“Reverend Lee” she said, “Reverend Lee, Reverend Lee
Oh do it to me, Reverend Lee
Do it to me, Reverend Lee, do it to me…”

Oh, yes.  Did the music choose me?  I suspect I might have already made the choice!

Moving to a different country, busy working, music disappeared from my life for the rest of the 70’s and 80s.  In the 1990s, with a new partner, a new life, it was a time for a renewed love of baroque music, chamber music, and Mozart operas.  Melbourne was, and I am sure will always be, a great city for music.  Chamber music series, orchestra series, opera series early music series, and many individual occasional concerts.  Music by trios and quartets, by chamber orchestras and major orchestras, by soloists, duos, and even crazy ensembles!  And I found jazz!

This was also a time for the invasion of the blockbuster musicals.  Some were excellent entertainment.  I liked Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, romantic tales of love and death, which might be described as modern ‘light operas’, but where the music was clearly secondary to the story.  Light, simple, and sappy, yet some songs were designed to catch you unawares, hang on in your mind, and annoyingly, fail to go away!  For me, one of those tunes ‘stuck in my head’ was Music of the Night, from Phantom of the Opera:

Softly, deftly, music shall caress you
Hear it, feel it secretly possess you
Open up your mind, let your fantasies unwind
In this darkness which you know you cannot fight
The darkness of the music of the night

Was I making any choices?  The only thing I seemed to avoid was popular music.  It was a time when almost anything else was acceptable.  Music all the time, until my partner died, and the music stopped in the late 2000s.

One more cycle, as music has become central once again, and the pattern has shifted.  I seem to be back to some of the music from my childhood, and some I had never really given myself time to enjoy.  I am listening to Bach’s organ music again, some modern jazz, but I keep listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets, Shostakovich’s quartets, leavened with occasional bursts of opera, from Akhenaten to Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.  Older, it seems I want music that is more reflective, more cerebral.  Or perhaps the music is pushing me that way.

Is the music choosing me, or am I choosing the music?  Perhaps it is neither, but rather there’s a constant interplay between the two.  I think that was Garth Nix’s point, too.   Opportunities reach out to us, and we seek choices:  the two-way process helps define and redefine who we are, and what we’re seeking.  The process is continual; as we change, so do our choices.  Perhaps in the past I responded to the flames of passion, the fires of temptation, the peaks and valleys of the romantic world, the ingenuity of baroque counterpoint, but now?  Now I seek those deep, quiet, complex compositions that reach deep into my soul.  That’s the music that is finding me today, shaping and satisfying a more reflective, thoughtful person.

Ah, but I did enjoy listening to Roberta Flack as I worked on this blog, for research of course!

[i] Sabriel, Harper, 1997.  The quote repeated in the other two books in the Abhorsen Trilogy

[ii] I haven’t sought permission to quote these and other lyrics:  I think it is OK

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