Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the ‘Peanuts’ cartoon character Schroeder, but it doesn’t matter. The character Schroeder was a little kid whose main passions in life were Beethoven and the piano. Schroeder could play complex piano works by Beethoven on his toy piano.
In one cartoon, Schroeder was sitting, wrapped up in a blanket, with his ear against the stereo. He explained to the person sitting there that he always wore a blanket when he listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony because it gave him the chills.
Pretty far out. A completely make-believe little kid, right?
Well, when I was in first grade, one day I pulled a record out of my dad’s record collection, completely at random, and put it on the stereo. It happened to be Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, ‘The Pastoral,’ and, yes, I got the chills.
‘The Pastoral Symphony’ is all about the joy of experiencing nature and the outdoors, which I knew before I read the record jacket. (I could read a newspaper in kindergarten.) I apparently also shared this composer’s love of nature and this began a lifelong relationship with Beethoven for me.
Things like this ignited my love of music. There were some other things like going to see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with my friend Ricky and getting into a contest to see who could learn Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d minor first, after hearing it in the movie.
I suppose you could say I was an odd little kid and on my way to being a bit of a musical snob but, then something happened.
My family and I always watched the Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night and, one night, there was this musical band from England.
At the time, they were a complete oddity to me. They had funny haircuts and suits and I couldn’t understand why all the girls were screaming. I looked back at my parents, expecting to see some acknowledgement of the humorous spectacle we were seeing but they had a look of horrified shock, as if a bomb had been dropped in our living room, and indeed one had…
Little did I know, at that time, how my opinion about this band would suddenly change.
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