THERE'S ALWAYS BEEN MUSIC IN MY LIFE
Not that I make any myself, in fact I have absolutely no musical talent whatsoever. But I love listening to it. This started in early childhood, in the 1930s, as my mother was an aspiring opera singer. She even on occasion sang in the chorus of the Philadelphia Opera, but mostly it was with the far less renowned Allentown Opera. Her starring role was as Elsa in Wagner's 1850 opera, Lohengrin. When I was about 5 years old she would take me along to rehearsals, where I was free to explore the theater while she sang. My favorite spot was in the prompter's box. Afterwards, we would have lunch at a Chinese restaurant, then take the trolley car home.
After two more kids, she gave up performing opera and became the organist and choir director for St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Allentown, PA. So Wagner got replaced with Bach. I still like Wagner better; maybe it's all that drama.
At about the age of 12 or 13 I began buying records. You know, the kind that revolved at 78 rpm and broke easily. It was around 1948 or 49 that RCA introduced 45 rpm records, the ones with the big center hole that were practically unbreakable. I saved my pennies and bought a 45 changer, which I wired into a radio by the simple expedient of soldering into the wires leading to the volume control. It worked, and soon I did the same for some of my friends. The photo, right, shows one of my old 45s. It still plays.
At first we listened to popular music, the kind played on radio's Your Hit Parade. But by High School our tastes had evolved to jazz. I still have my prized possession of that time, a 12-disc boxed set of Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. 
Although the box is in wretched condition today, the 45s still play. That's what's left of the box (on the left). I also now have it on CD. Another favorite of ours was the rather pretentious modern jazz of Stan Kenton; in fact we even went over to New York to see him in Carnegie Hall. I think that was in 1951.
I tried classical music on 45s, but that never worked out well, what with the discs changing every three minutes or so. So by my senior year in High School I had a Columbia 33-1/3 rpm LP player, and plunged into serious music.
Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, all those Russians (did this make me pinko?); Debussy, Ravel, and some other French guys; Strauss, Schoenberg, and the rest of the modern Germans/Austrians. Add to these the contemporary Americans, especially Philip Glass. And yes, I even listened to Beethoven.
By the mid-fifties I got diverted into Dixieland Jazz and even some folk music. This infatuation did not last long. It got worse. While in the army, I began buying records that could only be described as fake Hawaiian bird call music by such bands as Martin Denny. Fortunately I soon came to my senses and embraced the cool jazz of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, while continuing with the classics.
From the mid-sixties until 1970, I sometimes did photo assignments for Opera News Magazine. 
This was more to let me justify trips to Europe than for the fees. It was great fun, and I traveled all over Germany, Italy, and Austria for them, sometimes alone and sometimes with my business partner. The photo above shows part of a spread from a photo essay I did in Vienna. The one on the right is from another, this one on Mozart, shot in Salzburg. I spent the better part of a week there in the fall of 1969 photographing everything remotely connected with Wolfgang Amadeus, and others that were not. A very strange thing happened — the 28mm lens on my Nikon was not "closing down," which I failed to notice. As a result, the many rolls of Tri-X film were grossly overexposed and thus extremely grainy. This I turned to advantage by printing them as "arty" photos, full of mood. The editor loved the effect and devoted five full pages to them!
The sixties changed everything. I detested rock until I heard the Beatles. This was a complete revolution, and in a very small way I was part of it. While still working for Avedon, I flew over to London to assist him in photographing two of the Fab Four early in 1965. CLICK HERE to read all about it.
We opened our own studio late in 1965, and it was soon filled with loud rock music. This loosened up the models and made our clients think we were "hip." Anyway, it certainly helped make better pictures. Besides the Beatles, we played the Stones, Led Zep, Doors, Pink Floyd, The Who, Velvet Underground, The Clash, Ramones and more. I still enjoy all of these. By the late sixties we were taking album cover photos for both CBS-Columbia (now Sony) and Atlantic records, photographing such stars as Chicago, Billy Joel, AC/DC, ELP, and Ted Nugent. Many of these were done on location at such locales as a ranch in Colorado, an island in the Bahamas, and even Staten Island. More on this later.
At home I played mostly classical music, eventually amassing a collection of nearly a thousand LPs and cassettes. And I got into opera, surviving dozens of performances at the Met and City Opera as well as in Germany, Austria and Italy. My favorite opera composers are Puccini and Wagner.
So it goes on. I now have hundreds of CDs and DVDs, and seldom play the old 45s and LPs. My tastes still include classical, opera, jazz and rock.
CLICK HERE TO SEE MY NEW RECORD PLAYER.
RETURN to Music Index.
RETURN to Current Main Page.
SO, just what Little Adventure am I up to now in 2012? Why, just the most challenging one of them all! CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT.
Recent Comments