Someone’s calling, maybe me. C. C sharp? D? My scalp tightens, which makes me wonder where I am, and who, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve had this reaction before when I’ve been offered rare sounds from the past, oddly recorded. An incinerated Pompeii on TV in which fictional lava held screams of the dying. The first recorded song, “Au clair de la lune,” using soot, in French. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve written about these in 2008<\/a>. Some would have every reason to think that whatever of my own voice I may have recorded, tremulous and needy, would be a sonic fossil, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But this voice today is a shell’s, of a conch (pronounced “conk,” at least now) from a Pyrenees cave, assigned as Paleolithic, 17,000 years old. It’s one of those enticing discovery stories<\/a>, but not quite as sexy as tales of loving Neanderthals mating with the likes of way-early Ancestry.com humans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Seems the shell, thought ordinary and placed in some little-seen vitrine, had been gouged to be made an instrument. At least, that’s the analysis, and then, I mean then now, a fella with the musical name Jean-Michel Court blew into it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You can hear three hearkening sounds if you click the last link above and find the recording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Small, humanoid cries? A child’s try, maybe, for attention, pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once in my life, someone said I had a voice worth hearing. His name, my high-school music teacher’s, was Mr. Rosa. He married a classmate of mine, clarinetist Marilyn, just after we graduated. Congratulations! He said I was “a soprano,” and I must have blushed; I also lisped and stuttered. Couldn’t read music and still can’t, though I listened to Schubert songs on my RCA Victor phonograph. Countertenor<\/em> was a word I hadn’t heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My only other, earlier music teacher, disheveled from Brooklyn College, told my disinterested father, who paid him with my grandma’s money, that I was the worst student he ever had. I must have overheard that, or maybe the thin, brusque guy also said that offhand to me, as my one-ton pearlescent accordion bent my shoulders and collapsed my chicken chest.
“You’re the least talented student I’ve ever had.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n