Total Turn-offs: Vulgarity in Music, Stink in Sex

Music for me began officially when I was eight years old, picking out tunes ('The Tennessee Waltz' was the first) on the piano. Before that, even as a toddler, according to my mother, I had always tried to play the piano--never just banged at it like other kids did. And, of course, as far back as I can remember, I could carry a tune, and loved to sing along with my father, as well as with Dinah Shore and 'smiling' Jack Smith on the radio. So, from the beginning, for me, music was tunes; some of which I liked ('Zippity Doo Dah,' 'When the M-Moon Shines over the Mountain') and was allowed to like, more than others; and some of which I didn't like, and was allowed to punch my father in the shoulder if he persisted in singing them--one about 'rats and cheese' I found particularly creepy, and would beg my father not to sing it; which, of course, he would insist on doing, despite my frantic abuse of his shoulder, I think trying to discover what it was about 'rats and cheese' that I found so offensive. I was never able quite to explain it.

When I was nine, the folks bought a big, sweet, clear-sounding upright piano, and my mother began, in her very own Suzuki Method, to teach me to play it by playing pieces to me out of an anthology of waltzes, printed in diamond-shaped notes with the ink fading to brown, that her mother's mother, my great-grandmother Ellen Moore, had brought West with her in 1859 from Virginia in a covered wagon, and had me play them back by ear--which, astoundingly, I was easily able to do; so learning by heart 'The Mosquito Waltz.' It being thus determined that I had talent, I started taking piano lessons from the widow of the recently deceased Methodist minister, Olive Osbourne, a graduate of Mills College and a former pupil of Darius Milhaud. At my first recital that year, in addition to one of the Bach menuets (which I loved) from Anna Magdalena's Book, I played a piece of my own composition entitled 'To a Waterfall,' because I could think of nothing more beautiful.

It didn't occur to me that I had been and was acquiring taste--my own taste--or that in so doing I was taking giant steps away from the vulgar and tasteless norm. I wasn't trying to prove anything or to be anything other than myself. I loved the music I loved, and hated the music I hated without analyzing it overmuch. When I discovered Mozart, Rameau, Daquin, C.P.E. Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, it was always, as Emily Dickinson said of real poetry, like the top of my head was coming off--ecstasy. When I first heard the Magic Flute on television when I was eleven years old, I was in a state of delirium that lasted nearly twenty-four hours: I couldn't, didn't want to, sleep, playing it over and over in my mind, weeping and trembling in the dark while the music flowed through me. Something similar, though rather more cheerful, came over me when I first heard a Haydn symphony on the radio, dragging me out of my chair and sending me dancing around the room. Conversely, the popular music of the Fifties (Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, musical comedies, Ethel Merman, Gail Storm) made me nearly physically sick with distaste, as did most of the music of the 19th century (Paganini, von Weber, von Suppe', Lizst, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Johann Strauss)--and it still does.

When I would try to explain to myself what it was that I found so offensive in the vast majority of the music of the 19th and 20th centuries, I would find myself repeating again and again, "stupid stupid tunes!" I began to see that what I meant by "stupid" was "vulgar," and it was only much later that I began to understand that there was a real, if metaphoric, connection between the vulgarity which ruined music for me, and certain kinds of stench which, for me, utterly squelched sexual pleasure: shit, smegma, women's perfume. I began to "see" how like cheesey fecal matter are polkas, Pagliacci, "La donna e' mobile," "Dancin' in the Rain"; how like 'Chanel No. 5' and 'Shalimar' are Die Fledermaus and The Sound of Music. Of course, to a Dog on Heat, the smell of shit is half the attraction (if there's enough, he'll eat it); while to a Heterosexual the "smell of a woman" is downright intoxicating; but a Homo Superior finds this gag-reflex insuperable.