Love/Hate

Music really does stir the emotions. It takes Sirius/XM and a long road trip to find that out. Picture me behind the wheel for nine to fifteen hours at various times this past week. Picture me basking in my entertainment options:

’80s pop: reminds me of school days. I hear tunes that bring the memories flooding back in. No good pop music has been written since about 1987, so I enjoy hearing real pop tunes once again, with creative band work and real melodies. But then the memories start to include loves lost, mild bullying, and family matters, and I start getting irritated, many times without knowing it. Oh, but the music is so good. No, change the station.

’70s pop: is much the same for me as ’80s, but it reminds me of even earlier days in the car, going to church and to school. But then I begin to remember some of the emotional and racial straitjackets that can be the product of growing up in North Carolina. Change the station.

Only recently, I have begun to enjoy the hidden treasures (hidden from me, that is) of Broadway. Of course, I am familiar with the traditional book musicals, but the new stuff actually has something to say, much to my pleasant surprise. It’s an easy entertainment, doesn’t require much thought, and melodies are still being churned out today. But then I begin to listen too much to the screaming and larynx-crushing belting, and my scruples as a musician begin to take over. Enter the irritation again, and change the station.

Comedy is nice to have on satellite radio; it’s uncensored. But it can’t be taken in doses longer than about thirty minutes, and when the sound quality goes down like on an old Redd Foxx recording, it’s no fun anymore. And there are too many ads. Change the station.

A full opera on the radio is one of mankind’s better ideas. I can listen to that for hours, with no apparent lapse into irritation. At last! A station I can listen to! But opera is no fun if you can’t see it, and I’m not familiar with enough operas to know what’s going on. But the music is sublime, and so I listen.

Then there’s classical pops. Bite-sized pieces or only single movements. That begins to irritate me; I want to hear the whole symphony, the whole suite, the whole sonata. And so oddly enough, I begin to get irritated by classical music. And I am also reminded by some pieces of the repetition of popular pieces over and over and over on the stations I used to listen to in Houston. And then I’m reminded of the endless prattling of some of the announcers in Houston, sometimes to the point that they’d forget to actually say the name of the piece or its composer. I called in time after time to ask them not to skip over the important information while they were chasing logorrheic butterflies. Change the station.

Then there are classic radio shows such as Gunsmoke and Sherlock Holmes. I love those shows very much, but the ads in between are of shady products no one has ever heard of. Irritation. Change the station.

The full-length classical station called Symphony Hall is perfect. It is the one station I can listen to for hours in the car, not needing to plug in my own music. They play good stuff from all centuries, a lot of which I haven’t heard of, and they don’t repeat stuff. Did you know that Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed a Piano Concerto number TWO? I didn’t knew he had composed a number ONE! But lo and behold, number two was playing. About the only time I have ever shut off Symphony Hall was when they started a complete Nutcracker – in July. I’m not sure what that was about.

I suppose those flawless recordings of emotional and cerebral classical music feed my soul more than the direct love songs that leave nothing to the imagination. Memories sparked by music are nice, but the classical stuff moves past memories and reminds me of a future.