But please, I didn't intend ever in my life to do anything other than simply avoid and, to the best of my ability, ignore the intentional ugliness of modern music--getting on to the century mark now with Le Sacre du Printemps. As a youth, naturally, I sometimes dabbled in atonality, listened over and over to le Chant du Rossignol, practically memorized la Mer; even, on one memorable summer's day of my thirteenth year, sketched out a polytonal canon at the Major 7th for string quartet, which I discovered years later while going through my juvenilia and found still to have a very interesting, very real charm. The story of how I came to write it will explain much about me and music and many other things. My mother's mother died at the end of June that year. Not knowing anything really about her father's domestic arrangements--or if she knew, ignoring the fact that he had acquired a housekeeper with whom he had apparently been living on terms of connubial intimacy throughout his wife's final illness--my mother, bringing me and my younger brother along with her, simply moved in with my grandfather in his big old(five bedroom) farmhouse, an oasis of willows and cottonwoods and green pastures along Willow Creek among the dry rolling hills of the Palouse (in Eastern Washington State) called Pampa, for several weeks on either side of the funeral, "doing for" him; my father meanwhile, stayed home in Oregon City with the cats. There was little for my brother and me to do except to go out severally (we didn't like one another and tried to spend as little time as possible in one another's company) walking among the gardens and pastures, or staying inside or in the yard reading. In the front parlour there was a piano that my grandmother hadn't played or had tuned for decades that I sometimes amused myself by trying to get music out of, despite its sour discordancies. Then one day it occurred to me: Why not write sour music for it? So was born a short, lively polytonal fugue which I scored for Cello in A Minor, Viola in B Flat Minor, 2nd Violin in B Minor, and First Violin in C Minor. Amazingly and amusingly it worked. My grandfather came in while I was absorbed in writing it--I had started it at the piano, and moved to the floor with the parts scattered around me, and didn't notice his approach; and was startled when he spoke to me. In a hesitant, husky voice, with what I realized with astonishment was deep feeling, he said, "Go on doing what you're doing. I just want to say--you don't have to, but if you want to, I think you should become a composer. You probably won't make any money at it, but don't let that stop you. Just do what you want to do. Writing music is not something that everybody can do, but if you can and want to, you should." He stopped and looked at me with deep tenderness (I get my good looks and blue eyes from him), and we both realized that he was close to tears. Then, as quickly as he had come upon me, he turned and walked out of the room.