The Vineyards

Because Asgaard is kept on most nights, I like to use it to wake me up, instead of the radio or the alarm. The alarm is horrid, loud beeping is not a way to start a day; the radio is too random in what it plays, and too easily turned off. I use a very good free program called jetAudio, then, that plays Mp3 and nearly everything else (I could only see the Utena movie because of it), and has a feature I missed so much I sometimes tried to create a program with it myself (and always failed): an alarm.

So I choose some Mp3, and at the given time jetAudio will start playing that list. My current list is adorable: Beethoven's "Ave Maria" and "Ode to Joy", Orff's "O Fortuna", Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and "The Blue Danube", and of course, Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" - all of them complete, a total of over an hour of music.

Yesterday I needed to leave home later than other weekdays, so the house was already empty when I woke up to the first notes of Ave Maria. I let it play to the end, and got up when Ride of the Valkyries started - the speakers were just too loud to be next to for that one. I decided to leave it playing, and went to have a shower.

As I was leaving the bathroom afterwards, I heard The Blue Danube coming from my room. It brightened up my day. And it would have remained that way if yesterday was not the day the gas truck comes by - and my beautiful Danube was overlapped with the distorted screeching coming from it, the sound one level above the ringing of my cellphone and the things I produced with the PC Speaker using QBasic.

I was very glad when the truck left and my music could be heard again, but by now Zarathustra was playing. I had breakfast listening to that part no one knows because it does not play in "2001, a Space Odissey". And I concluded that a day that began with such musical events would be a good day to post about music, as I said I would. But yesterday went by and I did not, so I am doing it today.

Some may ask why I would make a selection of classical music to wake me up. There are a few reasons, the first one being I like these songs. Also because the song that wakes me up often stays in my head for the rest of the day, and I am extremely tired of having songs with lyrics in my head - I so much prefer instrumental ones (okay, O Fortuna and Ave Maria have lyrics, but I cannot quite understand Latin and... is that German?). And finally because these songs are neutral. Liking them is always alright.

What am I talking about? My childhood.

My mother never cared much about music. She likes some things from the 60's and 70's, sings some catchy ones from this day, but she has no big taste for it, no favorite genre or band, nothing. She is not someone who will go out and buy herself a CD then have it play once a week or more. Most of the albums she bought or we gave her are untouched, or are listened only by myself.

My father, on the other hand, always liked music. And although nowadays he rarely touches a CD, let alone his vast collection of vynil records, music was always a part of his life a few years ago - collecting said vynils, writing lyrics, trying to learn how to play a guitar.

And when I say guitar on this post, I mean this kind, the acoustic guitar. Not the electric guitar used by Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix; this kind.

It so happened that, during most of the years of my childhood, my father was in a phase where he would listen nearly exclusively to Brazilian country music. Before it was horrendously corrupted, it talked a lot about the countryside, the cattle, the old ranches, the woods, the river (in Portuguese, that would be "sertanejo de raíz" - "root country" in a literal translation). Later it became the equivalent of American pop music, just performed by two guys instead of one girl or five boys. And more recently I do not even know the words in English to describe. Of course, there were very bad songs back then as well, about things other than ranches and cattle, but they were not as numerous; my father liked some of them, though.

I was a very insecure child. I could not possibly imagine daring to like anything my parents did not find good. I had no indication from my mother, and my father would only listen to "root country" - so that is what was good, and I should ignore all the rest. In fact, based on that idea, for many years I simply considered anything played with electric guitars very bad by design, and refused to listen to any of it. Music had to be done with acoustic guitars and talk about the countryside and the trees and rivers to be any good and to earn my ears.

The only exception I would ever accept was music used in soap operas. I was a perfect victim of mass media, and had this idea that anything coming from the TV was good - the movies they showed were the best, the soap operas were great, the news were the most important and always right. So if they chose those songs to be played in their soap operas, it was obvious that those were good songs, and worth listening to - even if they had electric guitars in them.

When I was about 10, my father's country musical phase seemed to have ended. He compiled a cassette tape with things like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and John Lennon (plus "Tears in Heaven", which I considered the only song by Eric Clapton that was any good, for reasons mentioned above). Okay, he liked those songs, I could like them too. I wanted to make a copy of that tape for myself, but it was not complete. So I had to find more music to fit in there, and I wanted it to be music I would not listen to before - but that my parents would approve, of course. I added more John Lennon, some American country, and a number of songs by Raul Seixas (a Brazilian rock singer that I thought was just "quite funny").

I listened to that tape multiple times every day. My father was no longer so deep into "root country", so I lost interest in that. My new standards were all in that tape, and a CD called "The Very Best of Country Music Vol. I" (American country, that is) - hey, if it is the very best, I can like it without worries.

Then my mother came along to play, at last. And she added many things from the 60's and 70's. Plenty of Italian songs, some French songs - things that were very popular during her own childhood. In my eyes, then, anything in Italian or French made between 1960 and 1979 was good. She also brought Johnny Mathis into my tapes. Johnny Mathis...

Of course, my personal nemesis for all this period was MTV. At the time it showed music videos nearly the whole day, with lots of guitars and drums. That was the devil. I went on a deep guilt trip when I saw a cousin watching something there and I realized I liked it. I wish I could remember what it was. All I recall is a lady crying in the middle of a room, then the room floods. I liked that song, whichever it was, when I heard it there. I felt horrible about it.

When I was 13, something around that, my father brought home a CD that, it could be said, finished screwing things up. A selection of Jimi Hendrix songs. He said the guy was really great. I tried it one day, when no one was around. Electric guitar, nothing else. Lots and lots of electric guitar. My own father... He betrayed the acoustic guitar, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. I lost faith in his musical taste. My two or three tapes, first a standard, became my boundaries - anything not in those tapes, or extremely similar to them, was not worth listening.

Not until I was 16 did I venture outside those boundaries. I completely refused to. But I will save the rest of the story for another post, even knowing it will probably be rather shorter than usual. Not a good choice, because this way I cannot make a clear parallel to the classical music that led me to write this today, but this is just too long now.

I promise to conclude this horrible tale soon.

Posted by Etienne at May 5, 2004 01:37 AM