In my mind he’s sitting at the kitchen table writing so diligently the table shakes and the white swivel chair he’s sitting on squeaks. Outside it’s night, and the autumn chill is trying to get in. The television is on; we’re watching some inane ’80s sitcom, and my father is someplace else. As he writes in the kitchen, he’s hearing music, scribbling notes on scrap pieces of paper.

My father, Budd, is a great arranger of band music. He can take a song and compose parts for various wind instruments simply by sitting at the piano, pulling notes from the air and writing them in pencil on the back of discarded paper from the school, drawing the music clefts by hand. A staggering number of students have played his arrangements, though he never got paid for this extra work as the high school band director. When he retired, for the second time, earlier this year, he was still writing out arrangements for the musicians in his bands to perform. Why did he do it? I’m not sure, but I think some of it had to do with that bird called creativity chirping in his ear. Watching him work so hard all of the years of my childhood influenced me profoundly, teaching me to keep at something until you get it right, even if it means going back and revising again and again.

When I sat down to write this column, Joe Jackson’s “The Trial” seemed to leap out at me. I had been thinking of my father and our relationship. So much of what we have bonded over has been music. While he is definitely a student of classical music, I am a disciple of rock. Where we often met halfway was the populist movie themes of some of our favorite composers, like John Williams and James Horner. That this track, a classical piece of film music written by a pop artist like Joe Jackson would come to mind when I haven’t listened to it in years, well, to me that’s serendipity. (more…)