In Search of the Lost Chord

I got a book/CD the other day: You Can Read Music! Actually, the cover is typeset YOU CAN Read Music! Everyone repeat after me!...

I have a very modest goal: I just want to be able to sound out simple liturgical musical notation. I'm not looking to play Bach or Chopin. So maybe the author is right, and I CAN do this at some point. (Although I'm still figuring out how to work this new objective into my calendar -- somewhere between replacing the atrocious cold air registers around here, organizing what I am discovering are my mother's increasingly confused financial records, blogging and dog maintenance.)

Of all my educational deficits, this is the one I regret the most: never learning how to read musical notation. Oh, back in my college days I did teach myself enough guitar chords to fake my way into an inter-Lutheran folk group -- if anyone out there remembers the old Chicago Folk Service, I used to be able to play a low-down bluesy Agnus Dei. But I joined the group mostly because my friends were in it, and my guitar was more or less a prop; I was like the Stu Sutcliffe of Lutheran campus ministry.

Unlike most of the children I grew up with, music lessons were not a part of my growing-up. My father, who made the rules at our house, came from a family where music, like anything else related to education or the arts, was considered effeminate and a waste of good working time; where the kids had to hide library books from school and read them surreptitiously, like the Bronte sisters hiding their writing under their mending. My mother's family was so poor that the idea of owning a musical instrument like a piano, much less taking lessons in how to play it, was relegated to the world of wish-dream.

One day in fifth grade we all took a musical aptitude test -- a lot of listening to trios of notes and selecting the one that sounded "off." I liked taking tests, and thought this one was easy. Several weeks later, on a Saturday, there was a knock at our door. It was the band director. He told my parents that I had scored the highest of all the kids in our class; that I appeared to have almost perfect pitch; and he was excited at the prospect of my joining band in September.

Now, in most homes I suspect that parents would be very pleased indeed to hear this good news about their kid's newly discovered talent. Here's what happened at my house.

"She's not joining the band," snarled my father to the startled band director. "It's too expensive, and I work all day, and I'm not going to come home from work and cart my kid all over to play in a band." I felt my blood curdle. I looked over at my mother, blushing crimson.

The band director started to protest. My father showed him the door.

Then my parents had a fight -- a huge, screaming fight. I should say, my father did the screaming -- "I earn the money around here, and goddammit I make the rules!" -- and my mother did the crying. I locked myself in my room and wept into my pillow. Eventually my mother came into my room. Her comments to me were, "I suppose you're going to blame me because I'm not like those mothers who can drive," and "Now that teacher is going to tell all the other teachers about your father's bad temper." So the issue of my joining band or taking any other kind of music lessons became one of the many Issues That Dare Not Be Spoken Of Again at my house.*

(For anyone who can relate to this scenario, I'd suggest reading Jean Shinoda Bolen's Ring of Power, where she uses Wagner's Ring cycle as a framework for exploring patriarchal family dynamics -- overbearing fathers, submissive mothers and rebellious daughters. I thought that my experience was somehow unique to my own family until I read this book and realized that a far more universal, culturally conditioned Bullshit Paradigm was at work at my house.)

For some reason, once I got away and got to college (another big, extended fight at my house but one in which I engaged and I won), where I could have studied anything I wanted, I didn't take advantage of the opportunity to take one of the beginners' music classes offered, even though I lived right next door to the music buildings. Looking back, I'm not sure why. I was in a fog during my 20's anyway. But I think maybe I'd figured it was too late; that I'd missed the window of opportunity to do anything with my interest in music other than become an educated listener.

Twenty years later, I've come to the conclusion that I've got to finally do something to make things right. Not just right for me; right for my parents. You see, my father's blowup at the junior high band director was a mirror image of his own experience. He'd gotten the highest score on his 8th grade graduation exam, the big test that kids in one-room schools had to pass in order to go on to high school. He wanted to go to high school. His teacher wanted him to go to high school. Instead, his father unceremoniously yanked him out of school to work on the farm -- no arguments. My mother was valedictorian of her high school class and won a free ride to Wayne State. Her parents said no; she had to go to work and support the family. Her own mother was pulled out of school in the 4th grade by an evil stepmother right out of Grimms' fairy tales, and sent into domestic service.

My family tree is one sad history of persons having their talents smothered and their dreams dashed in service to the preceding generation.

Well...the buck stops here, I've decided. Maybe it takes the last, queer, quirky twig on the family tree to somehow redeem the lost dreams and squandered potential of ancestors who played by the rules they were dealt by their families and cultures, and lost. My musical ability may be limited to picking out Psalm tones, but each note will be a vindication of what I believe is the Spirit's moving in the world to bring the shalom, one way or the other, and will sound all the sweeter because of it.


St. Cecilia 



*I shared this story with some trepidation, because I was concerned that any Christian homophobes and misogynists reading it would point to it and say, "See? That's why she's a lesbian. She comes from an unhappy home. If she'd just grown up in a good Christian family with a father who was a servant leader and a mother who was graciously submissive, she would be normal." Neat trick, that combination of gay-bashing, sexism and faux psychology in one treacly-Kristian-luv swoop; and I've actually heard this argument from socially conservative evangelicals. Of course, taking it to its logical conclusion, most of the world should be as gay as Castro Street, and no one from a Christian household operating under kinder/gentler velvet-gloved patriarchal power dynamics would ever be gay; obviously this is nonsense, but since when has rationality ever gotten in the way of dedicated bigotry? Anyway -- sometimes the necessity of telling the truth trumps concealing it in the interests of "representing." And I felt it was time to tell the truth.