A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness, Part 7: Must Explore Further!

On Getting Lost. And Celebrating the Young. And the Right Gray.

Below is the seventh installment in my ongoing series of posts about my relationship with my late father, Jerry Hirshberg, and our shared and separate relationships to art we loved and/or made. Each essay responds to a selection from my dad’s homemade card catalog, which documents his lifelong music collecting habit. I want each of these pieces to stand on its own, but suspect their effect will be cumulative. If you’re new to the series, you might want to start with Pt. 1.

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On to Part 7…

Must Explore Further

My father did not love travel. Which seems odd, given how hungry he remained, all his life, for new experiences, fresh input, different light.

It was traveling itself that bothered him. If he could have teleported—and, more importantly, brought the Misters (Martin and Logan, his electrostatic stereo speakers; see Pt. 6) with him, and his dog, and those appalling, open-backed, floppy slippers he flapped around his house in, and the coffee shop with the patio down on 11^th Street—then, fine. Otherwise...

He loved being elsewhere, though. Especially places he’d dreamed as a Cleveland kick-the-can kid. Cobblestoned lands steeped in myths of creative upheaval, artistic eruptions, garret studios, centuries-old concert halls. Amsterdam. Vienna. Berlin. Paris, obviously.

There’s a 90-minute cassette—or there was—of my father walking around Paris in the late ‘70s. He showed it to me once, told me what was on it. Played me maybe three minutes of it. I don’t remember any narration; this wasn’t an aural version of his notecards. More a field recording, in the original sense. Stock footage. A record, as in a transcript, not a composition.

My dad’s footsteps, elsewhere.

I keep hoping that tape will turn up in one of his drawers or sketch boxes. It hasn’t. I’m not sure what I’d do with it if it did. As with the notecards, its very existence sets me missing all the things my father was all over again. And also raises the same questions: What did he even he think he was doing? Who, exactly, was that tape for?

Not his family; like I said, he only showed it to me once.

Not friends or visitors. He had more important, revelatory things to play friends and visitors. Preferably with said visitors positioned in the sweet spot between the Misters (again, see Pt. 6).

Did he go to sleep to it?

Did he know where that tape was when he died? I’m thinking not. As we all do—even people like my father, who left behind so many paintings, sketches, writings, collections, notecards—he took almost all his elsewheres with him.

All I know is that he got to Paris, and most of his other dream places, too. I know he loved being in those places. I suspect he hated the going, even then.

As for work trips:

Japan gave him nightmares. Literally. Not the country or the people. More the sheer distance, and the sensory overload. My mom would get calls from him at absurd hours. He’d had a nightmare. He was pretty sure there were creatures scrabbling in the walls. Also, he felt a cold coming on. “Am I getting a cold?”

That’s an actual quote, from one of the times he either couldn’t get my mom (or thought it might be wise not to call her again quite yet, or she’d unplugged her phone so she could sleep) or just wanted to talk to me. It was his second question of the call. The first was, “What are you doing?”

It was 3:42 in the morning, where I was. I know this because I remember having to rub my eyes open to look, and also my wife flinging her pillow over her face and yanking down, as though trying to suffocate herself. God knows what time it was in Tokyo. He certainly didn’t.

Being my dad, he only suffered sleepless jet-lag nights when he had meetings to conduct the next day, or a speech to give, or a presentation to make.

When he had a free day—and he always, always, always built in free days—we never got phone calls. Presumably, those nights, he slept like a baby, and his immune system ate cold virus like candy. Then he’d get up, conjure freshly ground coffee from somewhere, and go get lost.

By which I mean, lost. Giving my dad directions across a city he didn’t know—or, for that matter, to the supermarket—was like teaching a cat to knit. He wasn’t totally disinterested (Hey, that string is moving, I could jump on that), appreciated that you were trying to help (Wow, these people-creatures can be so nice, how long are they going to need to be talking to me?). But in the end, there were just so many more interesting things to listen to. Think about.

He really could get lost going to the post office. Sometimes intentionally. Built-in free time, remember?

In Japan, though. With all those lights and sounds and people to marvel at? And no street signs? Honestly, I have no idea how he found his way across Tokyo.

Actually, I do. He pinpointed where the Tower Records was, and charted everything in relation to that. The only real mystery is how he got back.

Even on business trips, though, the issue was the travel, not the business. Mostly, my father liked his business. He liked fighting for his team’s designs. Liked being needed Elsewhere.

He loved giving speeches, and especially the approbation he got for giving them. Which he almost always did get, because (again, of course, as usual) he was great at it.

As a result, during the last few years before his retirement and more than a few after, he agreed to surprisingly frequent business excursions. He talked to or advised university graduating classes, advertising agencies, technology and creativity think tanks, business conferences, presidential political committees, public arts boards. He did those things in Cambridge, Mass., and Cambridge, UK, and Eindhoven, and Berlin, and Chicago, and Cleveland.

For all I know, he has cassette recordings of his footsteps in all those places. Certainly, he had record stores in all of them.

But the only business trip I ever heard him say he looked forward to was the one he took every spring during the two decades he directed Nissan Design International: to Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena.

Partly, he loved that trip because it lasted one day, and he could drive it. And if he got stuck in traffic—pretty much a given—well, that just meant extra hours alone with the stack of CDs he’d spent the entire week beforehand curating for himself. And if he didn’t finish at Art Center before, say, 4:00 p.m.—which I’m pretty positive he made sure not to do—then clearly, there was no point sitting in the (c)rush hour traffic on the 5 or the 405. Far better to find somewhere to wait out a few hours. Like, say, the giant Amoeba Music record store over on Sunset. I mean, he practically had to pass right by it...

But mostly, on that trip—I was about to type “even more than Amoeba”, but I’m trying so hard to get you right, Dad, and I knew you—my father loved being around young talent. He’d tour the student galleries and studios. Pop in on classes (that was another thing he loved all his life: college campuses, of almost any kind). Talk to twenty-somethings about design, and art, for hours.

Those were the trips from which he came home vibrating. Gushing about particular drawings or sculptures he’d seen, a specific lit-up kid he’d lit up some more. A fresh voice he’d found. Fascinatingly, and tellingly, he talked about those kids’ hobbies at least as much as any of their accomplishments or skills. He loved when they surfed. Hang glided. Built robot drones—that flew—from scratch, from specifications that existed only in their heads. Played jazz tuba. Once, he came home and expounded for weeks about a woman with what he described as a pure, completely-her-own genius for color.

Just color. For saying, “No, not that gray. This one.”

That same reverence for discovery, and for the young, is all over his notecards.

You can see it in the sprouting exclamation points after Steven Stucky’s dates (“1949-2016)!”), in the gleeful inversions of syntax (“What a great ear has Christopher!”), in his impatience for the rest of the world, or at least what was left of the classical music loving world, to recognize what he already knew (“Why Stucky not celebrated?”). Most of all, you can feel—in fact, have to withstand— the tsunami of adjectives: “spectral/romantic” (that’s all one adjective), “transparent”, “pointillist yet not Boulezian” (again, one adjective), “lush”, “evocative”, “big-hearted”, “glorious”. That last being the key. Glorious as in pouring through him. Filling him the way nothing else could. Lighting him up.

Sometimes, through his cards, you can track the development of his relationship to his discoveries. Occasionally, as with the American composer Tobias Picker, they disappointed him with later work, but only because the first piece of theirs that he’d heard—in Picker’s case, his magical “Old and Lost Rivers”—got enshrined so fast and permanently in my father’s canon.

He talked to me about every one of his new finds—Corigliano, Vasks, Coates, Tuur, Scelsi, Silvestrov, Ruders, Lauridsen, Kernis, Panufnik—more than he ever did Beethoven. Or even Mahler, whom my father probably revered most of all.

Partly, that’s down to the thrill of discovery. But mostly, I think he loved these composers because they were young. Or because he imagined them young. Wide open. Full of possibilities he hadn’t dreamed, and couldn’t wait to.

Oh, how my father loved dreaming possibilities.

I’ve written multiple times in my music round-ups (here’s one; scroll down) about the music of Chattanooga songwriter Nathan Bell. Recently, on his Substack, he’s been running a series of essays about the first professional workings of Peers Under Pressure, a band formed by one of his guitar students. Nathan presents as hard bitten, and he’s not one to unleash the adjectives, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen him deploy an exclamation point. But this band is breaking his heart. Meaning, giving him hope: “Their newness to everything should be a weakness, but it’s proving to be a strength.”

It’s an exceptional set of essays. You should read them.

My father would have loved them. Especially the bit about Peers Under Pressure’s rehearsals often getting “sidetracked by a riff, a joke, a possible new lyric”. He would have read every word.

And then gone and listened to Peers Under Pressure.

More than once—whenever he found one who made him laugh, lit him up—my father hired a kid right out of art school. Or no school. And then turned them loose. When one of their designs got selected as the direction for a specific project, my dad really did get more proud than if the design had been his own.

Because he was generous, yes. But more, because he gloried in human creativity. And even more than that, because those were the times when I think he was surest that he really might have company on this planet.

As noted all through these essays, there are mysteries buried in his notecard collection, the most nagging of which is to whom they’re addressed.

But writing this, today, I suddenly wonder if his collection wasn’t a record at all, of any kind, but another sketch. A design for a new Elsewhere. Someplace populated exclusively by hang gliders with paintbrushes clutched in their teeth. Avid footstep-recorders. People who know which gray, and why that matters, and how much.

Because how many people are there in the world to enthuse with, in the end, about anything?

And that is why my dad loved going to Art Center more than Tokyo.