Music, Part 1 - Star Wars and Beethoven

The greatest irony in my relationship with my father was that he discouraged me from a career as a musician when he worked in the music industry himself.

In order to illustrate what music meant to my father, I feel the need to illustrate in detail what it meant to me. Music began for me with theme songs of Japanese animation on vinyl records. In hindsight, it's weird that we had so many records when we couldn't watch most of the shows on TV in the US. These were times when TV was barely in color, still years before even VHS came into existence. Looking at it another way, the records might have been one of the few ways in which we stayed in touch with contemporary Japanese culture.

Honestly, back then, it was the graphics of the robots, and even their names in flashy katakana fonts, that captured my attention and imagination more than the music. I would spend hours drawing these robots - I remember Grendizer being one of my favorites. I was a pretty good artist, and people at school told me so. As I got older, that turned into a desire to draw my own manga. But Dad told me to give that up - for one, he rarely appreciated my talents as an artist, and two, he told me that being a manga artist was not what it was glammed up to be, that I was romanticizing what is actually a hard and highly unstable life. I didn't really understand the second half of that reasoning at 10 years old; I only knew that he didn't approve of what I wanted for my own life. This, of course, would become a recurring theme.

I must have been about 8 years old, in my dad's car with the family, in Japan, when I heard the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah playing on the car stereo. I became aware that Dad was once in a chorus himself. The music was certainly gorgeous and memorable, and has stuck with me to this day.

But that didn't have as big an impact as seeing a full orchestra on a field trip. We were back in the States, and I was in 5th grade. They loaded us up on a bus and took us to a venue that no longer exists near Disneyland. I wish I remembered the name of the orchestra. They played a few classical pieces that I might recognize now but didn't know then.

Then they played the main theme of Star Wars. This changed everything.

Of course, it went over fantastically with the kids - so much so that the orchestra came out and played it again as an encore. But I don't know if anybody else was moved by it as much as I was.

That night, when I talked about the field trip, my parents asked me which instrument I found most interesting. I replied, "Instrument? I want to be the one who WRITES that music!" I meant it then, and I still mean it now. Too bad Dad didn't take me seriously.

It must have been close to my birthday, because I remember going to the record store the next day and getting my mom to buy me the two-record set of the original soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back (which I had seen. In fact, Empire was the first Star Wars movie I saw. And it was a rare occasion when my dad took me and my younger brother to a movie theater in Japan). I now realize how complex and sophisticated the music was (even the catchy hits like the main title and Darth Vader march), but I gobbled it up. I soon became a John Williams fanatic, with the E.T. and Superman soundtracks also affecting me deeply.

I was 11 years old when my dad, probably bemused by my sudden and intense interest in orchestral music, introduced me to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5. That record of the Emperor concerto was performed by Rudolf Serkin on piano and Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Hearing this was just as shocking as hearing the Star Wars theme was. The overwhelming emotion I felt was: "Why am I just now discovering this music that was written almost 200 years ago?" Soon I was getting into my dad's collection of classical music records. He had quite the collection, mostly of popular conductors leading orchestral works by major composers. Dad often liked only certain parts of a work - like the opening of the first movement of Tchaikovski's Piano Concerto, or mid-way through the fourth movement of Brahms's 1st Symphony. A favorite of both my dad's and mine was Beethoven's 9th Symphony with Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In fact, I became obsessed with Beethoven's 9th, listening to it practically everyday after school. Who woulda thunk we would actually sing it almost 30 years later? But that's another story.

All this happened before I embraced rock music. And started playing guitar. Not that those two were necessarily related in the beginning. And of course, Dad didn't care much for either.

To be continued.