Music School, all in one long post

I wrote up a piece for the DJ blog, about a percussionist auditioning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it started me down a road I haven’t traveled in ages. To those in a Proustian mood, every snack is a madeleine, I guess.

I had a job for a while when I was in college working as part of the custodial staff at the school music building. I did this for about six months, taking just a couple of classes, which were paid for as a benefit of the job. So I was still marginally in school, which was important in the age of the draft and the Vietnam War, but I wasn’t all that much in school. It wasn’t exactly a break year, but it was close enough. I needed it at the time, and there it was.

Our building staff comprised three people. The boss was a middle-eastern immigrant named Jamiel, who seemed to have exactly one sentence of English, which sounded like, “Up orla down.” Remarkably, he was able to wring a lot of meaning out of those words. By his throwing in a bit of body language, I would understand him to mean that I should do the third floor, or that he would be in the basement, or it was time for a break, or it was time to stop breaking; the nature of the work being less than rocket science caliber—we swept and/or mopped the rooms—a lot of specific jargon wasn’t required. We’d start at one end of the building, sweeping and mopping, and by the time we got to the other end, it was time to go home. Occasionally we threw in the little law building next door. This was not generally open to the public, even the law student public. It was very pipe smoke and leathery, lined with books no one seemed to read, dotted with comfy chairs, a place where one imagined the law professors gathered with their martinis to sort out the upcoming graduates into the appropriate firms on Wall Street. "Young Jones looks like a Fleecum and Suem man" and all that. I never saw a soul in the place, so anything I knew about it I made up. Joe Biden was a Syracuse law student at the time; maybe he was one of the people who hung out in this special little place. The souls I never saw in it never included him, so I really can’t say one way or the other.

The other member of our little custodial team was a large round woman named Berenice. (I’m guessing at the spellings of both her and Jamiel’s name, since I never had call to see them written down. This was long before the age of wearing visible i.d. tags.) Unlike Jamiel, with whom I never spoke, aside from agreeing up orla down, Berenice and I, when we were together, never stopped talking. Or more specifically, Berenice never stopped talking. She was powerfully cheerful, and incredibly foul-mouthed and, better still, incredibly foul-minded. Berenice and Jamiel were about the same age—he had two daughters attending the college, for free, as a result of his custodial job, while Berenice had a husband at home who she described as everything from a bum to a god, depending on the whims of her conversation at the moment. To Berenice, I was her “little white boy,” which she got a great kick out of repeating at any possible opportunity. And as soon as she discovered that her earthiness often, to put it mildly, caused me to blush at least metaphorically, especially when there were others around, as there often were (the school was far from empty when we cleaned it; it was just that classes were over for the day), she let out all the stops.

Once in a while the supervisor would drop in. I don’t remember much about him, except that he never wore a coat. He would drive or walk around the campus with only a sports jacket to protect him from the elements. And this was Syracuse, where there really were Capital E Elements. Snow would be piled up as high as an elephant’s eye starting around October, and whenever the temperature rose up over ten degrees Fahrenheit people who normally dressed in more layers than your average Aleut in a windstorm would pull down their hoods and shake their heads in the glowing warmth. Yet this supervisor guy lived in a climate all his own, and more to the point, bragged about it. All these years later I still remember this guy talking about how he wasn’t affected by the cold and how tough he was, yadda yadda yadda. If he ever talked about anything else, I don’t remember it. Then again, we didn’t see him that often, not even on a daily basis. When he did show up, he mostly talked to Jamiel, in their roles as supervisor to supervisor. In addition to his weather heartiness, he was also apparently fluent in up orla down.

I was living off-campus at that point, which was not particularly unusual except that it was a section of off-campus that was off the beaten off-campus path. I’d moved there specifically because it was off the beaten path. Nevertheless, it wasn’t any further from campus than the usual haunts, but this being Syracuse and winter, it was a bit of trek at one a.m., walking home after my day at work, which a couple of times a week also included the classes I was taking. When I say it was cold out there, and snowy, I do not exaggerate. You do get used to it, but you never really enjoy it. I have seen the movie Nanook of the North; you can’t tell me that our eponymous hero wouldn’t rather be Nanook of Tahiti, no matter how well he and his family seem to have adapted to their icy world.

Berenice had to pass near my place on her way home, and of course, unlike me, she had a car, and she generously gave me a lift home most nights, along with a couple of her friends. Of course, this gave her yet another opportunity to show off her little white boy, but she also put me to work. Berenice was an inveterate numbers player, and my job was to run into the newspaper office to pick up the early edition of tomorrow’s paper, which was usually printed by the time we arrived at 1:30 or so. I would get back into the car and check the number for her; I don’t remember her ever winning, but then again, in the numbers game, the odds are against anyone ever winning.

Ah, the numbers. Nowadays we have state lotteries, which are the same general idea, but they’ve taken away all the mystique. Keep in mind that I was raised among a lot of Italians, who, along with African-Americans, were among the biggest numbers players. I already knew the numbers well before I met Berenice.

The numbers were, of course, a racket, run by racketeers. Or the mob, if you want to call them that. I learned about the numbers first from an uncle who was a big player. The thing is, being a big player of the numbers did not mean spending a lot of money. The numbers were a nickel-and-dime game. You were a big spender if you bet a quarter, or maybe boxed a number for a dollar. Let me explain this more clearly. Every day there was a winning three-digit number. If you picked that number, not just the digits but in the correct order, you won. Boxing a number meant that the digits could come in any way, in any one of the six possibilities. If you boxed a number for a buck, you were betting twelve and a half cents on each possibility. The numbers games I knew about all paid off 500 to 1. Even as a young lad in knee pants I realized that there were a thousand possible numbers within the span of 000 and 999, and that the payoffs meant that the people operating the numbers game were making out like bandits. Then again, they pretty much were bandits, so there you were. Berenice, by the way, not only played the numbers, but ran them for her friends. That is, she played her own bets and also transmitted theirs for them, thus earning a little extra on the side. It was her way of supporting her playing habit.

Playing the numbers, at least as far as my uncle was concerned, was a complicated business. It wasn’t that you had a favorite number that you always played, or at least that’s not how he did it. He went by coincidences. If he saw a fender-bender, for instance, he’d take it as a sign and copy down the last three digits of the cars in the accident. If someone told him a new phone number, those last three digits were ripe. Any event offering three digits was a sign from God. But the biggest sign from God was dreams. It seems that any dream you could have meant that you should play a specific number that that dream represented. You could actually buy dream books that didn’t interpret what your dreams meant, but instead interpreted what numbers your dreams were telling you to play. I don't know if the bigger racketeers were the people operating the numbers or the people writing these books. Morally, it's a tossup.

Because playing the numbers was so cheap, it was very popular among people without a lot of money, and there were enough of them that the mob made a fortune off the game. The question of what exactly the number was would vary, depending on locale. There was the Brooklyn number, say, or the Bronx number, or something like that. These details are fuzzy in my memory, but I do remember clearly that my uncle had to calculate his daily number, which was derived from the overall take at a certain race track, the last dollar digit of the total proceeds of win, place and show. In other words, if the track took in $4444.22 of win money in a day, $3333.76 of place money and $2321.34 of show money, the number was 431. Some numbers were simply the last three numbers of attendance at a specific track: I’m pretty sure that’s how Berenice’s were calculated. I gather there were also other ways to do these calculations, but I'm pretty hazy on all of this. I do remember that they were what they were because they couldn’t be manipulated. In the New York Lottery these, little balls pop out of a machine on television. Where’s the magic in that? Where’s the mystery? Where’s the mob?

And then there was the job itself. Jamiel and Berenice and I worked the shift after classes had ended, but this didn't mean that the building was empty. Homework, for music students, meant practice. And the music building was filled with practice rooms down in the basement. Each one had a piano, and each billed-as-soundproof little room would have a student in it, banging away, as often as not on Beethoven's Pathetique sonata, the mastery of which was required for first year students. It was quite a draconian proposition: If they didn't master the Pathetique, they would not be majoring in music when they advanced past their sophomore year, which was when majors were declared, so they absolutely had to get it right. They spent all year working on it.

Listen to this for a little while. It’s not so hard at the beginning, if you have any music ability, but listen to what happens at 1:35:



That’s where it starts to get dicey, and where most students went from music-making to hash-chopping. As I moved around, sweeping from room from room, listening to the audible spillage from the little rooms, there was little doubt in my mind that, for most of these students, stumbling their way up the keyboard attempting that majestic run, majoring in music was not in the offing. But they kept at it, especially that one section. It was their dream, if not necessarily their reality. Being a piano player myself, I felt for them.

Needless to say, not everyone in the music school played the piano. Wind and string instrument folk certainly practiced alone, but they also got together in small groups, sometimes in the classrooms upstairs, which was not allowed but nobody really cared, and for that matter, who was going to enforce this at night? The custodian, AKA me? Hardly likely. One of the things the non-pianists complained about was that their instrument, unlike the piano, didn't have the same wealth of solo pieces. In fact, they sort of hated the pianists for this (and maybe also because the pianists all seemed to always be playing that one song). One guy I befriended played the bass trombone, for which of course there are probably zero solo works in the repertoire, but one of the reasons he had picked this instrument was its very unpopularity. When the time came for him to find a job in the outside world, he had reasoned, bass or second trombone players would be a valuable rarity. For him it was not art for art's sake, but a job. I've often wondered if he went on to play bass trombone at a major orchestra somewhere. Or a minor orchestra, for that matter. I’d watch him play every now and then, and let me tell you, there’s not much you can do with a bass trombone. He was good at it though, all things considered. I remember him as a physically prepossessing, hairy-in-all-the-wrong-places kind of guy. At the age of twenty or so he resembled Fred Flintstone heading into his retirement years. I’ve associated the bass trombone with lunking hirsute types ever since.

One great thing about having the keys to the kingdom, or at least the keys to the music school, was that I could boldly go where the music students couldn’t. We had a room-sized organ in an auditorium that, if I had wanted to, I could have sat down at and blasted out noise to my heart’s content. Not my cup of tea, though, to tell you the truth. I was never much of an organ player, not even the organ stops on my electronic keyboards. Just not my thing. More interesting to me was the arrival in the school during my watch of an antique harpsichord. I don’t remember the specific details, but I do remember that it was outrageously expensive and that the strings were made of lamb gut, or lamb chops, or lamb something, unlike the unnatural strings of modern harpsichords. And I do remember that it was absolutely gorgeous, shiny black and elaborately decorated. And it was off-limits to all the music students without special, and apparently impossible to attain, permission from the authorities. Of course, I just went into the room one night, sat down, and started playing.

I would like to report that this was some sort of transcendent musical moment, but I was no more simpatico with harpsichords than I was with organs. The thing about an antique harpsichord is that you just bang on it, and what you get is what you get. That’s why they invented the pianoforte, an instrument with pedals allowing you to modulate the tone and volume. I do admit that the instrument, when I tinkled the little bit of music I could think of that was remotely harpsichordean, sounded brilliant (in all senses of the word), but I was not moved. On the other hand, there were all sorts of interesting pianos in the building, unlike the practice pianos in the basement which were the VW bugs of keyboard playing, and those were absolutely right up my alley. I know I should have been working, up orla down, but I did know a fine way to treat a Steinway…

I was not a musical prodigy, but I was unquestionably a piano player from the earliest possible days. My mother’s friend who lived around the block had a piano in her basement, and when I discovered it, at the age of three, I sat down and started picking out tunes. I had a great ear, and what I guess was an innate sense of music. I do recall having had someone point out the black keys to me, as I was picking out a tune on vacation somewhere, maybe the Poconos, when I was about four or five. Until that time I hadn’t dabbled in them much; realizing that they were the notes I was often looking for but could never find completed my initial education. I was on my way.

My parents signed me up for lessons when I was in fourth grade, lessons given by my third grade teacher, who was also the church organist and grossly obese. She sat like Jabba the Music Master on her chair beside the piano as she introduced me to written music. She was not the world’s greatest teacher, and I was not the world’s greatest student. I loved the piano, and would play it for hours on end, but I did not get the hang of reading music. More importantly, I never learned any serious technique. After a couple of years I stopped taking lessons, but I never stopped playing. By this point we had acquired a piano at home, and I went back to mostly playing by ear.

I got pretty good, I have to admit. In addition to the ear, which may or may not be terribly unusual considering the number of self-taught musicians out there of all stripes, I also developed an amazing touch. I really did have a good musical sense, and could tease some seriously nice music out of the old box. And I could never pass one by. I would have to sit down and try it out. I was especially fond of upright Steinways. They had the sweetest sound and a most compatible action. A Steinway Grand, on the other hand, could pretty much defeat me. They are meant for, oh, Beethoven’s Pathetique, with lots of sturm und drang, and I was more of a Gershwin love tune type. Still am, come to think of it.

I bring all this up not to toot my own horn (or bang my own keyboard), but because it is sort of germane to the discussion of working in the music school. Maybe I was only sweeping the floors, but I felt like a musician. And I knew that I could have been better than almost anyone in the place, at least the keyboardists, if I had had the proper training. Not that I necessarily wanted the proper training. But it was something to feel wistful about. The few students at the school who heard me play were quite pleasantly surprised, and I think a little wistful themselves, that a naïf could pull it off that well.

My career at the music school only lasted a semester, after which I went back to school fulltime. I don’t think I ever went back into that building again. But the experience stuck with me. Mostly I remember all those students who wanted so much to be musicians, most of whom wouldn’t even make it to being music majors, much less professional artists. And then there were those like the bass trombonist, who only held out hope of achieving what he considered the lowliest position available, primarily because it was the lowest and that was the highest that he could imagine achieving. The music school was the place where adolescent dreams bumped headlong into reality, perhaps more than anywhere else on campus. English majors could get Cs on their stories and still dream of getting published someday. And, you were still an English major, even if you sucked at it. But music students who didn’t conquer the Pathetique, or whatever, did not go on to be music majors. It was over before it started.

And maybe that’s why I like working with high school students so much. It’s nowhere near being over for them. Everything is possible. They will be great musicians, great writers, great whatever it is they want to be. High school lets you dream, and lets you try out your dreams. And some of them actually will come true. Even the most over the top. Maybe my buddy the bass trombonist has worked his way up to first trombone somewhere, and is this very minute blowing his way through a Beethoven symphony on a Vienna stage in front of royalty. Maybe he's even moved on to the trumpet!

I certainly hope so.