Sunday, April 17, 2005

The Decomposing Composers

Mellie Hellen over on Golly Blog Howdy has a post today about children, classical music, and WalMart. It is, as her posts always are, great. Click on over there and experience her wit, humor, and intelligent parenting and personality. She's a lovely person.

Her post, naturally, reminded me of some things that happened years ago, when Belle and Zappa were learning about classical music.

They loved it. Cannons, and drums, and loud horns, and people playing pianos and violins really well instead of like Momy played. . . .

Soft, soothing orchestral arrangements. . . .

Sigh. I loved those years. In retrospect, of course, as are most of my musings here. It makes a big difference, you know, retrospect really does.

Retrospect is like a big sieve; all the bad things drain out the little holes but the good stuff stays in the bowl so you can savor it.

I used to make up songs for them, using classical melodies.

And lest you think me uninformed, I used baroque, romantic, and 20th-century melodies as well.

I made up lyrics to all the Mario Brothers melodies, too, but that's hardly classical. Or is it. . . .

Zappa was about three years old, and was napping on the sofa one afternoon; I put the 'William Tell Overture' on the stereo. It must have blended with his dreams, because he sat bolt upright, shouted "Hi Ho Silver, awayyyyyyyy," and crashed back into the pillows again.

My question was, where in the world did he hear about the Lone Ranger? The only tv we had then was a twelve-inch black-and-white jobber, hooked up to a tower antenna that was mecca to red-headed woodpeckers who couldn't tell the difference between metal and wood, but which was stuck pointing north because it was so old the clicker didn't work. We used it mostly for bird-watching. The kids used to love it when the 'retarded woodpeckers' came in flocks and droves and pecked uselessly away on the metal rods.

They brought that expression home from pre-school; don't start in on me. ThankYouVeryMuch.
But their all-time favorite piece of classical music was the Taco Bell Canon.

I'm sure Pachelbel would have peed his pants laughing.

Now, where did the title of this post come from?