The Music Lover

Jerome Kern et al live!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This podcast, The Music Lover, is in two parts. The first part is an excerpt from J.D. Salinger's short story Seymour, an introduction. Second part is The Coda and my response to Part One. Part one. Once there was a great music critic, a distinguished authority on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His daughter went to P Pu Public School Nine, where she was in the Glee Club, and the great music lover was very annoyed when she came home one day with another child to practice singing a medley of songs by Erving Barlin, Harold Arland, Jerome Kern, and people like that. Why shouldn't the children sing simple Schubert Leder instead of that trash? So he went to the principal of the school and made a big stink about it. The principal was much impressed by such a distinguished person's arguments. He agreed to turn a music appreciation teacher, a very old lady, over his knee. The great music lover left his office in very good spirits. On the way home he thought over the brilliant arguments he had advanced in the principal's office, and his elation grew and grew. His chest expanded, his step quickened. He began to whistle a little tune. Kikikati kicked Koda. Later that same week, the great music lover found himself seated in front of a blank laptop screen, trying desperately to meet a deadline for the music critics magazine of choice Carper's Bazaar. The piece he was trying to write had been due the previous day, and the editor, Harvey Schleimel, was not a patient man. Coincidentally, it was his final published piece that he needed also desperately for his upcoming tenure review at Theophilus Conservatory of Music in his bid to become a full professor of music. Sensing the tension one could cut in the atmosphere with a knife, his wife and daughter had strategically removed themselves from the department and were attending public school nine winter musical Scrooge with dignity. All was calm, always quiet, except in the mind of the great music critic. Tries he did, he always ended up where he started, staring at a blank screen. He had the first sentence, that was easy. He knew Mozart's work better than anyone else. And as for the requiem, he'd seen it performed many times. The problem was that he'd seen and written about it a marvelous performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra three years ago to this very day. Everything else since then had paled somewhat. The performance he was trying to critique had been uneven. Parts of it had been quite mediocre, the truth be known. By contrast, the DS E Ray had been simply beautiful, gorgeous to a fault, but that's all he could think about. Somehow in his mind, that part couldn't quite connect the dots of the other parts to an organic prose whole, leaving him unusually wordless. His once great arguments he could conjure at the drop of a hat had abandoned him. A most bizarre state of affairs for the great music lover. He pushed in his chair, reached for his cell phone, he began to dial Carpers, but inexplicably stopped. He ambled over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a large grass whiskey. He walked it over to the window and stood at the window, looking out the street for inspiration. None came, not even a meager, objective correlative. He picked up his cell phone call and made the call to Carpers. It seemed to ring for the longest time. He carefully rehearsed what he was going to say to Harvey. Then the answering service music started prior to leaving a voicemail. It was Geoffrey O'Hara's popular World War I song Kikadi.