ABSTRACT
When we were living at my grandmother’s house in 1936 I remember a sound that used to float upstairs while I was supposed to be asleep. It was like boxcars bumping together as a great steam locomotive pulled them slowly from the rail yard. This clanking and banging was my father, playing in the quiet of the night when all of us were supposed to be asleep. There was a wonderful old rosewood Steinway in my grandmother’s living room, and as he would practice I would listen, fascinated as he attempted to play through the first movement of a Mozart sonata or Brahms symphony arranged for four hands. He couldn’t play more than one chord without getting stuck. Sometimes after finishing a measure, he would go back again and start over. But somehow that sound of going back and forth and gradually getting to the end like a mountain climber who keeps slipping and sliding but still makes it eventually to the top—that was to me the first sound of music.
