A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness, Pt.2

Responses, Hosannas

(Note: This is the second in an ongoing series of essays exploring my relationship to my late father, and art we both love(d), and our ways of sharing it. Each essay responds to a selection from my dad’s homemade card catalog, which documents his lifelong music collecting habit. I certainly mean for 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.)

A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness, Pt. 2

Responses, Hosannas

Hey, right, that Rosner piece! Dead center in the deep lake at the heart of the map of our overlapping musical wonderlands. A composer and work neither of us had heard of, tacked to the end of a disc collecting perfectly likable Dello Joio compositions neither of us would have rhapsodized over to the other. No wonder you made a separate notecard for it.

Such a you thing, Dad, to find something like this, somehow, and...

Wait.

I found this?

How did I find this?

I’m sure I’ll explore our separate specialties more in response to some other notecard. For now, let’s just say that in general, my discoveries for you tended to start at minimal/post-classical and extend pop- and world-ward. The more traditionally classical discoveries I mostly left to you.

That’s simplification, for sure. Each of us was capable of unearthing treasures deep in the other’s typical territory. So, so satisfying when that happened, too. Like counting coup.

Or, you know, spreading joy. But also counting coup.

All of which is just to say that if I found this, I should remember finding it. I would. Wouldn’t I?

’94, your card says. Which is after my music critic/box-of-free-discs-a-week days, when I listened to absolutely everything, at first from a sense of duty, and then because I realized I loved so many things. Like you did. Even if they were often different things.

So, from Option, maybe? (God, I miss Option. An insane project then, unimaginable now; a magazine devoted primarily to capsule reviews of any—they would have said all, they really were my kind of lunatics—good independent or alternative or unusual music by anybody, from anywhere. Could someone digitize the whole run? Please? Put it on a USB stick for legal purchase? And then reinvent Option for the current moment?)

I didn’t read it like my father read his Gramophone or Penguin Guide. I didn’t care whether Option’s critics agreed with me or not. It was more horn calling the Hounds of Glenlove to hunt. Wonders, ho! New marvels to chase, play, maybe love.

Share with my dad.

There are adjectives you’ll see a lot on my father’s notecards. Less his favorite words—that’s more my thing—than his closest approximations of his favorite artistic flavors. The ones here— “Rapturous, still, haunting”—are not quite his typical go-tos. But they point in one of his go-to directions.

I haven’t listened to Rosner’s “Responses, Hosannas, and Fugue” in a long time. In fact, that disc disappeared, along with my entire CDs C-E box, in my last move. I’m not sure it does for me now what it did then. I don’t think I’d pick it for my next visit with my father. If I somehow got to have one.

But the elements are there. Things we both treasured. For sure, it’s a clear and rippling lake to float on, dive down into. A reflective surface that keeps shifting, reflecting differently. It borrows from five hundred years of western classical tradition without adhering to any of it, rendering the music at once familiar and elusive. It’s its own world.

Honestly, though, I think this card leapt to my hand today because I spotted my name in your scrawl. Which of course gave me a charge, a sweet and welcome ghost-touch. But actually, I was responding more to the whole scribbled notation: “Find of Glen’s.”

I love so much of the music you gave me, Pop. Even more, I love the love of music you gave me.

But know what else I learned from you? That I’m not sure you meant to teach me?

It’s better to be the finder.

Music you lead me to is scattered through my shelves and digital files and days. But music I lead you to—the moments I shared it with you, saw it go in—flicker through my entire waking and dreaming life.

Partly, I have to say, all of that is your own fault. You were a uniquely aggravating World’s Greatest Finder-Sharer. Did you know this? I think you did. I think you practiced it. Flat out enjoyed making me suffer for your art.

Let’s see, first there was the not-showing-me-the-album-cover-or-revealing-the-composer-until-I’d-responded-properly game. The making me guess. You know the books and magazines I always brought to our listening sessions, and opened on my lap the second you put your selection on the stereo? They were a strategy. Moat. Defense mechanism. Not against the rapture you wanted me to feel—I wanted that, too—but against your cocksure assumption that I would.

Then there were those fucking sidelong glances, whenever we approached the moment. The bit you were so, so sure would get me. Your audible inhales, the not-subtle lifting of your hands from your lap. As though it was all you could do to keep from just reaching into my brain, seizing the controls, and triggering the desired reaction yourself.

And those were during the sessions where you behaved. Didn’t actually tap my arm, grin that grin, and whisper, “Here it comes...”

Of course, I had my own role in our game. Dance. Fencing bout. Whatever it was:

I kept my head down. Resisted giving you what you craved for as long as the music let me. Which just made you whisper louder. Glance longer. Which made me resist more. Read harder. Like a tickling victim.

I wasn’t actually reading, Dad. Most of the time. You knew that, right? Seems ridiculous, now. And worse, ungenerous. Doesn’t mean most of the music didn’t land. Get all the way in. That, I’m pretty sure, you did know.

You were so good at finding. So annoying at giving.

So, so wonderful at receiving.

Playing a discovery to my dad—something I knew was going to get him—was like giving pets to the perfect cat. Watching it arch its back as it unleashes the rumbles, closes its eyes, and curls into the bliss of being alive.

He purred. Literally.

Finding and giving art that gives joy—being the discoverer, the bringer back (let alone the creator, that’s a whole other set of essays)—is an addiction you caused, Pop, and that I have never outgrown. For more than twenty years, now, I’ve had a quarterly music exchange club with some of my friends. I love getting their latest missives, hearing what they’ve hunted up. Not nearly as much as I do finalizing and sending off my own selections, though (all of which you can read about, if interested, elsewhere on this Substack, in my quarterly music round-ups. Like this most recent one .)

I wonder if my friends can sense my sidelong glances through the mail. See me grinning. Hear me rubbing my palms together, Bond-villain style. Murmuring, “Here it comes.”

There’s one other thing about this specific notecard, though. Something else you taught me, for better or worse. Better and worse:

It takes time, the finding. The searching and listening. The getting still long enough to strip away what the world tells us we should like so we can figure out what we actually do, so we can communicate—gift—that to others.

And it has to be done alone. And the opportunities to share, and the people willing to get still enough to offer satisfying responses in return, are precious, and rare.

Which is why it shouldn’t surprise me that there are hardly any people (not including the artists, obviously) scattered through my father’s notecards. So few names.

Not even mine.