Symphony No. 1

As I lay in bed in the middle of the night, my thoughts accompanied by Schubert, my mind flashes back to a revelatory moment of my youth. I was playing with my radio, tuning in distant stations as I was fascinated by the idea that I could listen live to voices coming from faraway places like Little Rock, Arkansas or Denver, Colorado, that their voices could be carried through the air in sound waves and somehow be translated back into words that I could hear through a little box with a set of numbers on a round dial.

It was afternoon, as I remember sunlight sifted by window curtains streaming into the basement of our house. Turning the dial, I stumbled across music I had never heard before. Upstairs, my mother regularly tuned into a nearby radio station that played the likes of Dean Martin, Wayne Newton, Frank Sinatra, and popular songs like “Somewhere, My Love” by the Ray Conniff Singers. In the living room she had a small collection of records that included The Singing Nun and several albums by Nat King Cole, her favorite.

What I had found that afternoon was classical music and I had never heard anything like it before. There were more instruments than I ever thought possible and they were mixing together in exciting and beautiful ways–violins carrying the bulk of the work, but also flutes, and instruments I later came to know, such as oboes, French horns, timpani, and more. It wasn’t just sound. It was feeling, emotions.

My child’s mind was transported to faraway places and it was if I were wandering through a forest with birds singing and animals wandering in and around trees and I was living in a landscape in my mind. It was like walking through a portrait of a place I never knew existed until that moment in time. It opened my mind and my heart in ways that nothing else in the small town where I lived had ever done before, with the exception of books that also let me travel to distant places I would otherwise never know. It was like reading a book with my ears.

I must have listened for an hour or more until the program ended and then I made a point of remembering the number on the dial so I could come back to it again and again. I did not want to lose this new joy that I had found, and I have since come back to it throughout my life, still with the same wonder in its ability to transport me to distant realms.