Fantasia, Toscanini, and Music in the Air

As I watch our grandson, Bilalay, grow up, I have been thinking about how different my own early childhood was, and wondering about how my various experiences as a youngster may have influenced my later life. I have already commented on how the simple act of traveling to and from my dad’s fishing places on Lake Erie may have influenced my interest in science and, in particular, chemistry. [See blog: Fishing, Epilogue Part 2, May 11, 2009] Here I speculate about some possible sources of my pleasure in classical music. It remains to be seen how Bilalay is being influenced by growing up in the digital age
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Although opera music wafted through our home every Saturday afternoon emanating from a radio mounted atop the refrigerator in the kitchen, I believe my first formal exposure to classical music probably was seeing Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia.
I clearly remember being taken to see Fantasia by my sister Natalie in one of the fancy theaters in downtown Buffalo,. I was ten years old and Natalie joined the Women’s Army Corps later in the year (1942). I can still see Leopold Stokowski stride to the podium, not knowing what to expect, but quickly being transported into the world of cartoon animation a few moments after the music began. Even to this day, I have strong visual images of the Mickey Mouse character donning the wizard’s hat and cape, and commanding the broom to carry water, resulting in a flood because he did not know the magic words that would stop the broom; all of this was to the music of Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I can still picture grazing deer being frightened by an approaching storm as suggested by a thunderous passage in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (#6). I have a clear image of the fearsome birds flying about in the Night on Bald Mountain (Modest Mussorgsky).

While Fantasia was widely applauded as a landmark in animation in which the craft of animation was applied to the interpretation of music, there were some who called it kitsch. These critics felt that music is an abstract art form and that any intrepreation was simply one person’s vision of the meaning of the music, if music has any visual meaning at all. In any event, as a youngster, it seemed that the visual scenes were entirely appropriate to the accompanying music. As it turned out, as an adult, I have the ability to enjoy music on its own without the necessity of creating a mental image to accomany it.
(How has the brain stored these memories for 67 years?)

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After WW II in 1948, there were less than a half million black and white television sets in the US, and half of those were in the New York City area. Despite such a meager audience, NBC was courageous enough to broadcast a classical music program featuring the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini who at the time was 81 years old. Or, perhaps, it was merely to give an innovative forum to the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

My friend’s parents had a washing machine repair business a few blocks from our home in Buffalo. With the coming of the “television age,” they decided to carry television sets as part of their retail business. When a Toscanini program was scheduled, my friend Paul would invite me to come to the store after hours. The one television in the window was turned around so that it could be viewed in the darkened store.

In those early days, TV was literally a vast waste land meaning that the few programs that were broadcast were in prime time only. For much of the day only a test pattern was broadcast so that TV owners could adjust their sets and television stores could display the reception quality on their various TV brands. Nothing was automatic as it is now: There were several controls at the front of the TV to adjust focus, brightness, and contrast; to adjust the height and width to make a more perfectly round test pattern; and to adjust for vertical and horizontal hold to prevent “rolling” or “tearing” of the picture. Unfortunately, these controls were not independent in the sense that making an adjustment of one parameter would often result in the required readjustment of another parameter.

After much set adjustment and with great anticipation, the Toscanini program came on and what Paul and I saw was almost a silhouette of a white haired figure, who with obvious stern intensity, brought forth music of great beauty. Perhaps it was not the music itself but the mesmerization of the new experience of seeing and hearing musicians in real time playing from a distant location – tele-vision, that made it so memorable.

The National Broadcasting Company eventually broadcast ten Toscanini concerts from 1948 to 1954 at which point the network disbanded the NBC Symphony Orchestra. I don’t recall how many of these I saw at my friend’s store or on my parent’s TV that they purchased sometime in the early 1950s.

In graduate school, I started a collection of thirty-three and a third rpm long-play records. I was constantly reminded of my Toscanini experience a few years earlier when I saw his black and white image appearing on the dust jackets of recordings of those historic broadcasts.

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There were perhaps other influences, equally subtle: While doing my homework on the kitchen table, I would hear my mother listening to the Voice of Firestone and the Bell Telephone Hour, both featuring light classical music once a week on the radio. She was particularly fond of Eleanor Steber, an American operatic soprano who often sang on these programs. She also enjoyed it when the Ed Sullivan Show on television featured a singer like Kate Smith.

I recall that my sister Arline bought a 78 rpm vinyl record of Chopin’s Polonaise. I was often called upon to quickly run to the phonograph to turn the record over to play the other side. Because of the short recording capacity of 78s, only about roughly half of the 7 minute Polonaise could be recorded on one side. Since the Polonaise has a certain momentum to it, no doubt something was lost in the transition. Nevertheless, given the state of the art at the time, this record was played over and over again with no concern about the loss of musical continuity.

By any measure, our family would not be considered classical music devotees. Nevertheless, as I look back on those years, there apparently was enough of this type of music in the air that I gravitated toward it as an adult.