The Isolated Far Western American Transcendentalist: Imbibing Truth and Strength from his Own Inner Source of Wisdom

First and always there was music.  I remember being enthralled with music when I was three and four years old, listening to player pianos and high school band concerts; and my mother recalled to me my pulling myself up, while I was yet a toddler, to the old console radio and dancing, with every evidence of delight, to the music of the Big Bands.  By the time I was five or six, I knew by heart and could sing all the popular songs of the day.  At eight years of age I was picking out tunes (like the "Tennessee Waltz") on the piano; at nine, after my mother had started with her own version of the Suzuki method, playing pieces to me out of a (for real) antebellum album (which had come West from pre-war Virginia, some ninety years before, in Great-Grandfather Moses Moore's Syracusia of a wagon-train) of Waltzes for the Pianoforte, which I would play back to her note-perfect--and after I had begun to make up little pieces of my own--I began formal piano lessons with Mrs. Osborne, the Methodist church organist, widow of a former Methodist Minister recently deceased, a sometime pupil of Darius Milhaud, and a graduate with honors from Mills College, who started me right in on little minuets of Handel, Bach, Mozart and Haydn, which I adored.  At ten, I discovered on the radio Haydn symphonies, Mozart concertos, and the chamber music of C.P.E. Bach which so ravished me that I was sometimes not able to sleep at nights.  By eleven, I saw and listened to Die Zauberflöte on television, which induced a state of raptus that lasted for a couple of days; and, about the same time, I was walked through a performance of Pagliacci on television (by a well-meaning Italian uncle), with a live translation--which nasty little opera lirica totally outraged me, horrified me and sickened me with the mindless squalor of the sordid lives of its dramatis personae, and with its hysterically vulgar, realistically (verismo indeed) and appallingly ugly kind of singing. At twelve, thanks to the good offices of Mrs. Osborne, I saw two live operas on two consecutive nights in the old (then new) Spokane Coliseum, The Barber of Seville and Tosca--the former of which, as sung in 50's barbarous verismo (not bel canto) style (bel canto being a style then still unknown), I had the good taste or sensible acumen to detest; the latter of which being verismo to begin with, I put aside the blinding severity of censure to enjoy on its own sloppy/lush terms, reveling in its voluptuous post-Wagnerian harmonies.   In my early teens I discovered Schubert and Vivaldi and Albinoni and--speaking of beauty which drove me nearly mad for days or weeks on end--Mozart's Divertimento in E Flat for string trio, Köchel #563.  What music (real music) meant to me I could not have said exactly, but I knew that it meant more to me than to anyone else I knew; that I could not live without it, and that worshiping it as I did made my relation to the normal, comfortable world of family and school chums impossible.  It wasn't till I read the novels of Hermann Hesse a decade later that I discovered that there were others who "understood" music as I did, and for whom that "understanding" was, as it was for me, an integral core of their identity.  The sum of all this is to say that I have for most of my conscious life felt detached and isolated from my peers and coevals--and yes, ineffably, though painfully, superior to them.  And, in all honesty, I don't see how I could have done otherwise.