Eclectic Company: My Life In Music Lessons, and Why You Should Too

I loved music before I was born. My dad played trumpet, had played guitar and piano, and had a collection of 78s that ranged from jazz to classical to religious to soundtracks, dance band numbers and pop tunes, novelty songs and opera, all of which he played to me in my mom’s belly. Not surprisingly, I showed an early interest in music, which led to thousands of hours of formal and informal vocal and instrumental lessons, which in turn made me into a lifelong card-carrying, flag-waving music fan.

I think that’s why I’m such a supporter of music education for everybody. There’s some old joke that says to provoke lifelong joy, every child should be issued a banjo at birth. I can’t think of the set up or the punchline, maybe “banjo” is the punchline, but I actually applaud the sentiment. Give a child a musical instrument, early, and get back a smarter, more creative, more passionate adult as a result. As school music programs suffer, and kids replace learning an actual instrument with faking it on a variety of toys, I worry that real audiences for real music will diminish, and if they do, real musicians will eventually disappear as well. So teach your children well. And it’s never too late to learn to play an instrument yourself. All the health studies show that your brain needs new stimulation all the time to keep it from atrophying. Think of music lessons as brain therapy, and see what your medical insurer says…..

My own music education has had its highs and lows. In grade school in the 1950s, each child was given a “Tonette” – a dolphin-shaped black plastic recorder – and we were taught to sing and play the American folksongs in Carl Sandburg’s treasury at frequent school assemblies. Singing cool, playing the Tonette, not so much. At home there was always a piano in our “music room.” I practiced the same folksongs I learned for the plastic recorder as well as popular classical pieces for my half-hour weekly lessons, but didn’t like scales or the finger exercises; I couldn’t stretch an octave with my small hands. Am I exaggerating when I say that that sturdy Mason & Hamlin upright sounded great played by anyone but me?

It took a while to get it, but eventually I realized that the voice is an instrument too. At summer camp we sang from morning to night, like troops chanting “left, left” marching on parade grounds. Folksongs made another appearance there as counselors led us in singalongs. Cooler. Mrs. Oringer, my Hebrew school music teacher, taught us religious holiday songs, and selected me to sing “Torat Emet,” the “Gaudeamus Igitur” of the Jewish world, as a solo while my graduating class marched into the sanctuary to collect our diplomas. I sang musical comedy at P.S. 104 (“Oklahoma”), J.H.S. 180 (“Bye Bye Birdie”), and at the Hartman YM-YWHA (“Once Upon A Mattress”). I joined my Junior High School chorus and then the borough-wide All-Queens Chorus, where we sang spirituals and chorale music and Motown hits at lunch breaks at the pizza parlor. But at home, with my best friend Barbara Toennies, whose lofty soprano harmonized well with my alto, I only sang and played folksongs. Well, there were a few showtunes thrown in for good measure. I mean, who could resist the score to “Gypsy”? But by and large, my friends in those days sang Bob Dylan’s esoteric poetic lyrics. We thought we were uber-cool, because we knew all the words to “Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again.”

By the time I was 12, I’d switched from piano and theory lessons to acoustic guitar, taught by Sonny Ochs, sister of the famous topical folksinger Phil, and soon I wanted to be a famous topical folksinger too. At 16 I was hired to teach beginning guitar at the Y, and I made a few forays into the folk clubs in Greenwich Village. Oh man, that was the coolest.

At 20 I dragged my guitar to Israel where we played in my Kibbutz’s 50th Anniversary orchestra. Learning to play barred chords well enough to be the orchestra’s rhythm guitarist? Absolute torture. My friends there were Israeli and foreign non-violence-niks who sat around campfires singing folksongs about the 1967 Six Day War. Cool again.

But when I got back to the U.S., it turned out that everyone and her brother was a folksinger, so I signed up for a degree in Jazz Composition and Arrangement at Manhattan Community College just to be perverse. Trouble was, I had to learn to play a wind instrument. Remember the Tonette? This time around I wanted something more robust, and chose French Horn because I loved its smoky sound. But I couldn’t blow a note. Somehow I managed to hide this from my Horn tutor for a few months! My Atonal Composition teacher was flutist extraordinaire Yusef Lateef, and his bandmate pianist Kenny Barron was one of my classmates. Needless to say, I was totally out of my league. Luckily I contracted a bad case of mononucleosis, and had to drop out mid-semester before I made a complete horse’s ass of myself. So back to folksinging in my next college’s coffeehouse and at parties in anyone’s dorm room.

In Syracuse, NY in my mid-20s I taught guitar and music theory to toddlers and studied Suzuki method violin myself. Picture this: me and a dozen cherubic three-year-olds, all with our tongues hanging out of our mouths, sawing away at “Twinkle, Twinkle.” They at least, learned to hold their instruments correctly. I came back to New York and went to work as a waitress and strolling musician in a sandwich shop on Long Island, and to taking fancy fingerpicking lessons in the Village from awesome Erik Frandsen (who occasionally sat in with acoustic Hot Tuna, two-fifths of the Jefferson Airplane), who taught me complicated 10-finger versions of “Blackbird” and “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime.”

At that point, concentrating on the finer points of guitar-playing, I dropped the violin. For nearly thirty years. Until recently when my Lake Charles old-timey fiddle-playing friend Jill King gave me a sweet spare instrument to practice on, and I began carrying the fiddle with me wherever I go. I still can’t hold it in perfect tabletop position (oh to be as flexible as a three-year-old), but I can find the notes on the fingerboard, and my bowing arm is getting more fluid. Who knows, in a few years I might be brave enough to join in an old-timey jam session with an instrument other than my voice! So long as I keep listening and practicing.