I was about nine or ten when my older sister, Margie, played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for me on her old-fashioned string victrola. It was her favorite symphony, her favorite single piece of music, and she never got tired of it. After she played it for me that time, she became my favorite too. I had discovered music, the deepest, most sensual and visceral art form, and I can only wish I had the creative inclination for it.

Another points to things I’ve never done: I never learned to play an instrument or create music. Unfortunately, and to my regret.

In those days of my youth, music for most people was the pop stuff that came on the radio, songs like Istanbul by The Four Lads, gold sh-boom by The Crew Cuts. But those and other hits of the day were nothing more than fun, something to sing along to and tap on. Classical music, when I met it, was a revelation, something I could lose myself in.

Beethoven’s Fifth is still one of my favorites, and it’s a treat to find it off guard, so to speak. Once, while I was driving somewhere I can’t remember now, Ludwig’s Fifth came on the car radio. I parked, turned off the engine, and left the radio on. And there I sat for the entire forty minutes, listening, humming, sometimes waving my arms like a conductor, especially during the magnificent fourth movement. Also, when no one was around to see me.

Other moments of musical surprise come to mind. Lounging around with my stereo tuned to a classical station one day, I sat up suddenly, struck by the opening verse of a violin piece I had never heard before. It was instantly beautiful to my ears, serious at some points and whimsical at others, sensual in the way only a violin can be. I just waited for the announcer to tell me, after he finished, what was the name of this piece that had moved me so unexpectedly. He finally did, saying that he had just heard Max Bruch’s The Scottish Fantasy. Not only had I never heard this wonderful ode to Scotland before, but the composer was also unknown to me. To top it off, the violinist who had played it was Itzhak Perlman, possibly the greatest since Jascha Heifitz. So, in those few moments, The Scottish Fantasy had become one of my favorites, and Bruch, after I had become acquainted with his other wonderful concertos and compositions for violin and cello, was now on my short list of favorite composers.

Another musical memory stands out for me, even after so many years since I was a twenty-four year old soldier serving in Vietnam. While there, I didn’t get a chance to listen to the music that I loved. All we had was Armed Forces Radio, with its “Good Morning Vietnam” greeting every day, featuring the day’s offerings of the top forty American radio hits. So, on my R&R to Taipei, after checking into my hotel that first night, I turned on the little AM ​​radio on the nightstand and was surprised to hear the opening chords of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, another one on my list of favorites. Fourty main. It had been so long since I had heard music like this, and it was a revelation to hear it coming from this little radio in a tiny hotel room in a place as foreign to me as Taipei, that I sat up in bed with tears in my eyes. across my face, listening to Dvorak’s sultry paean to America.

My love of great music never got me anywhere except as a grateful listener and fan. Maybe I had no talent for it, maybe I came to my love too late, whatever. My own artistic inclinations, discovered around the age of sixteen, led me to become a writer. And sometimes I feel lost because of that, for following the muse of the written word instead of singing. When I watch performances by Itzhak Perlman or cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and see the joy on their faces as they play, I can only marvel at what it must feel like to make that music. But I never had the discipline that their parents should have instilled in them, coupled with a young child’s love of music from a very early age. And most likely not the genius that these two virtuosos so obviously possess.

I remember the 1946 movie humorous, starring John Garfield, playing, with his quintessential tough-guy vulnerability, a concert violinist. It begins when a poor boy from the East Side of New York is taken to a store to choose a present for his upcoming birthday. His father offers him a baseball glove, but the boy doesn’t want that. Instead, he covers up a violin that he sees in the store window. Discouraged by his father, who thinks it’s a waste of money, but encouraged by a mother who wants better for her son, the boy gets a violin, grows up with a great love of music, and becomes a renowned violinist. That’s what dreams are made of.

Paraphrasing Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy character, in his famous taxi scene on the sea trip“You don’t get it. I could have had class. I could have been a songwriter. I could have been someone, instead of an idiot, which is what I am. Let’s face it. It was you, Melpomene.”