My Musical Career – Part Two

My Musical Career – Part Two

In Part One of this blog, I told you about the very beginnings of my musical career – from my youth and upbringing in the Bronx and more specifically, how my upbringing influenced my choice of career. To recap it briefly, my role as a choirboy in the church choir, the fact that my mother was a church musician and my dad loved to listen to music, and listening to classical music and watching the New York Philharmonic Young Person’s Concerts were the three greatest influences.
The video clip of the Young Person’s Concert of February 1960 which I inserted in Part One goes a long way to explaining what was it about those concerts that so fascinated me. To be more concise, I was fascinated by the workings of an orchestra and more specifically, by the role of the timpani in the orchestra. I was most fortunate to observe the work of Saul Goodman (1906-1996), who was the orchestra’s timpanist at the time and served in that capacity for forty-six years – from 1925 until the end of the 1972 season.
The years in the Bronx were the starting point for me, but there had to be more. The parochial school I attended, St. Joseph’s – was a good school, but there was no band or instrumental program at the time, and while singing in the choir was an excellent start, if I was to become an instrumental musician – more specifically, if I was to become a timpanist, I’d need to be exposed to the percussion instruments. It required a move from the city to the suburbs to accomplish this, and that move wasn’t too long in coming.

It happened just after I completed the sixth grade. My parents had long contemplated moving to the suburbs, and in 1958 (the year I started school), they purchased an acre of property in the then sleepy village of Yorktown Heights, New York. Yorktown Heights was located about thirty-five miles or so north of New York City. When they bought the property, it was all overgrown with high grass and it required a lot of scything and mowing to get that grass down to manageable proportions. It took six years of weekends, vacations and extra visits from our home in the Bronx, plus a lot of planning, ordering and building, but by July 1, 1964 we had a completed house on the property, and we moved in, lock stock and piano. Needless to say, it was a huge adjustment.
To go from the city to a semi-rural suburb was a big adjustment in itself, but it was an even bigger adjustment to go from parochial school to public school. St. Joseph’s School did not at the time have a band or even physical education programs. Art and music were taught, but in the classroom, and there was no hands-on at all in music, just a dry recital of the facts and some listening to records. True, there was a church boychoir, but that was for about eighteen selected youths.
It was very different in public school. My first exposure to public school took place in September of 1964. I was a seventh grader and was now enrolled in Yorktown Junior High School. It was an entirely new world for me. Having been used to one teacher for the whole day’s curriculum from the first to through the sixth grades, the fact now that the curriculum was departmental (meaning a different teacher for each subject) was a revelation, and to this city slicker, not a little intimidating.
Needless to say that music fascinated me, especially after I found out about the school’s band program. The school had a band, chorus, and small string orchestra. I pestered my mother into checking out the requirements for the band program. They were fairly straightforward and since I had some musical background, I had an interview with the band director. I was all fired up to play kettledrums in the school band. The director kindly informed me that the school did not then possess kettledrums, but that he would look into the matter and try to get a pair of drums and would let me know when they arrived. He would then start teaching me the basics. It felt like an eternity, but it was only about two weeks before I was summoned to the band director’s office outside of the auditorium, and there, just outside the door stood a pair of Ludwig & Ludwig pedal timpani – sizes 25 inch and 28 inch. They were old – about thirty years old and had their share of dents, but to me they looked like gold!

A pair of Ludwig & Ludwig balanced action timpani – ca. 1935

Of course, from the vantage point of an eleven-year old who up to this point had never seen a pair of kettledrums up close, this was pretty close to heaven! This despite the fact that they were already thirty years old and had seen quite a bit of use. I remember that the kettles had relatively few dents, but were much marked with scuff marks and other signs of wear. I still wonder where the school managed to get a hold of them. Chances are that they were locked in a surplus storage locker – having seen many years of service with the old Yorktown Central School until 1961, when the high school was finished and the old Central School became the Junior High School. However the provenance and condition, they did the job, and were the first instruments that I played on. For such old instruments, they had a good tone. Whoever mounted the heads did a good job – there was actually good pitch, and I had no trouble learning to tune them and actually tuning them during compositions. To get back to the story – not having had the opportunity for drum lessons of any kind, the band director did not let me into the band until I had several weeks of lessons. These were very basic, but he was patient with me, and also firm, as a good teacher ought to be. My first assignment was to procure a pair of timpani mallets, as the school did not have a pair. As a matter of fact, I was the first student at the school in a long while to learn the timpani, and would be the first to eventually join the school band.

As I stated above, my first assignment from the band director was to get a hold of a pair of timpani mallets, as the school did not have a decent pair – they were using what they had for tenor drum performance in the marching band. He did provide me with my first timpani method – the Rubank series – which was very basic. He also provided me with the Rubank snare drum method and a pair of snare drum sticks to work on while I awaited delivery of my sticks.
I procured these with the aid of a cousin of mine, who worked for Sam Ash Music on Long Island at the time. This would have been October of 1964. He recommended a pair of Ludwig timpani mallets with medium hard – hard heads. These were the old style mallets with rock maple handles and felt heads that were kept in place on the shaft with a metal washer screwed on top. These were not the best mallets in the world, but for a beginner like me, they were more than suitable and I was so proud of them, that I had my Mom make a special mallet bag just for them. I remember she had put a red satin lining in the bag, and it had two metal snaps at the top as well as a handle to carry it.
I carried it everywhere I went in school and I admit know I was distracted by the bag and the mallets to the point that my art teacher had to confiscate them during my art class so that I could concentrate on art and not on the mallets.
I did eventually get them back and used them for the rest of my time in junior high school, and well into high school.

My first concert at Yorktown Junior High School took place in the spring of 1965. The first piece was called “The Dance of The Pixies’ – a simple band composition – it actually used timpani tuned to F and B flat. Another piece on the program was a simplified arrangement of music from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” ballet. I fell in love with the music instantly and always looked forward to rehearsing it with the band. I had by this time learned how to tune the drums with the pedal and also to adjust tension with the T-handles around the kettle. In order to check the pitch, I had to lean over and tap the head quietly with a finger and listen with my ear to the head in order to be certain that it was correct.
My father and mother attended the concert of course, and I distinctly remember my father getting up and going to the back of the auditorium where he could see the complete band much easier. I asked him about this afterwards, and he said, “I saw you bending over the drums, and was worried that you had dropped your sticks at first. By getting up and going to the back of the auditorium, I could see that you were checking your tuning!” Typical fatherly concern! Not that I was not grateful for his support. It was also a natural reaction, as the timpanist’s art can same arcane to most people.
The rest of my junior high school musical career was pretty uneventful, and I progressed well enough so that when I entered high school in 1966, I was good enough to become a member of not only the school band, but the orchestra as well. Stay tuned for Part Three!