Bear in mind that I was growing up in a household where Percy Faith, Boots Randolph and Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass were the music of choice, so this stuff was like water in the desert to me. I had only just gotten a cassette player for my birthday, and I had played the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey just about to death. That was pretty much all I knew about classical and non-pop, non-pap music.
And then one day, Mr. Paterno played the "Mars" episode from The Planets. A few weeks later, I recognized the big gray cover while I was poking through the cassette section at Sam Goody, part of my regular circuit at the Garden State Plaza, and brought it home. It was the version conducted by Bernard Herrmann, then as now best known as the composer on The Twilight Zone, most of Alfred Hitchcock's best movies and a range of other films, most of them with a strain of fantasy running through their celluloid veins. (Though Herrmann was slagged for slowing down Holst's tempos, his version of The Planets remains my favorite, and it's a minor pity that his recording isn't available on CD.)
Since at the time I was addicted to fantasy and science fiction, I came to realize that Herrmann was the composer on some of my favorite movies (the dreamlike menace of his Fahrenheit 451 score, for example, ought to get him co-billing with the director, Francois Truffaut). I also got to hear where Herrmann copped some of his best tricks. So that album was a real watershed for me.
Teachers spend most of their time throwing things at kids in the hope that something will stick. Not exactly an easy job, I realize, and one made worse by the fact that even if something does stick, the teacher will probably never know it. I have no idea if Mr. Paterno is still around, or if he left teaching, or if he would even remember those music classes. But I can testify that at least once in his career, he made such a big impression on me that I credit him with helping me develop my own taste in music, and I can find myself remembering him even as I chase my little daughter down the halls of a movie theater, many miles and many years from that seventh-grade classroom where he once worked.
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Originally posted at StevenHartSite.
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Article comments
1 - Temple Stark
This is an Blogcritics editors' pick of the week. Click HERE to find out why.
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2 - GoHah
Great article, and very evocative--as you described each of your experiences, you jogged my memories of the wide variety of music I was exposed to growing up.