Who or what are our earliest musical influences? I am the oldest of three children. My two younger sisters are 2 1/2 and 6 years younger than me. I feel sorry for them in a way. I’m sure that being older, even though I was still too young to operate the audio equipment, I probably had more influence over what we listened to. I imagine that I pulled them along on this journey. I mean that is the nature of the evolution. You encounter events, people and other forces that nudge into a direction. Sometimes you try harder to like something if somebody you like likes it first. It makes me wonder if my love of dinosaurs, castles, monsters and ghosts affected my sisters and the music they would eventually be drawn towards.

Somewhere around here, a couple classical pieces disguised as more Disney records made there way into our home. Peter And The Wolf / The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was interesting. Sterling Holloway did the narration in his distinctive voice. Of course the “wax on / wax off” aspect of Peter And The Wolf is the introduction of various instruments from the orchestra. I learned what they were called and the kinds of sounds they made. Very basic of course but just about the right speed for the under five. An interesting exercise really to link a flute to an imaginary bird in a story.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was good too. i think at some point we had seen the cartoon on television so when the music played, it was easy to imagine Mickey’s magic causing so much trouble with the broomstick shaped automatons and all that water. It would be another seven years before my next push into classical music. It would be 15 years after that before I’d acquire The Sorcerer’s Apprentice on CD. Not the Mickey Mouse version but the actual grown up version but it was Mickey that told me what to look for.

I had not seen Fantasia yet. Never heard of Tchaikovsky but I did enjoy just about every track on this album. I think on the back were alligators and hippos in tutus. Maybe that was something else. What are those things supposed to be on the cover? Dancing Asian anthropomorphic mushrooms? It didn’t make sense but the music was a good mix some slow and soulful some faster and more rambunctious. Mom saw that we was gettin’ cultured. I didn’t know it at the time but I would eventually see The Nutcracker Suite performed in Boston by the Boston Ballet. Before you scoff at attending the ballet, you should see the balconies in that old building. If you thought Lucas Oil Stadium was steep. The part when the Christmas tree grows was amazing that tree had to be several stories tall on that stage. We’re getting ahead of the story. We’ll talk about The Nutcracker again during my Classical reawakening phase. I will say one more thing about The Nutcracker. I was looking up Tchaikovsky a few years ago. Something I do with the internet is research things from time to time. I found some really interesting things about Tchaikovsky. One that has always stuck with me was that he didn’t like The Nutcracker Suite very much. He knew that it would be popular and it bothered him that when people would remember him it would be because of the Nutcracker. “Whatever happened to that Nutcracker guy?”

So there we are, my first taste of classical music. Nothing too serious. Nothing too hard to digest. Just enough to encourage. I’m sure that it was a nice change of pace for mom.

Next: My Musical Evolution – Part 6 Objects Not A Scary As They Appear