The Bass Desires, Pt. 1

Dear jo,

Sometime in elementary school, I suppose it was the fourth grade, I decided to join the school orchestra. Like just about everyone, I wanted to play the violin, or at least the cello. How I knew those were the instruments for me, I’m uncertain. But disappointingly my preferred instruments were already taken and my musical fate that day led me to the double bass, that mammoth of stringed instruments, and for the next some 11 years, our relationship endured. I would participate in classroom rehearsals and practice at home where the deep sonority of the instrument felt outsized for both our modest family house and my preferred dynamics in the family system to be more invisible and low-key. The bass felt not only larger than me but larger than my life.

When I started playing the bass, it was a good deal taller and wider than my own body. Wielding it was clumsy, not least of which during the periodic struggle to get it to fit into the back seat of the family sedan. But I think that its size gave it a personage for me; I could wrap my arms around its shoulders; lean on it slightly for a little support; it was woody and warm, not dissimilar from a tree; we could sing together. The double bass became a friend to young Tony, and the music our relationship exposed me to became an enduring refuge. I was often a quiet kid, shy, clumsy, nervous. But the bass gave me stature—physically so, but it also amplified my voice, loud and deep, anchoring the collective voice of the orchestra. In the orchestras I played, I was often the only bass player. The conductor wanted to hear me and gave me a way of communicating that gradually felt validating and empowering. My voice was needed and it mattered. I was essential.

For young Tony, family life and school life weren’t often what I wanted them to be. It was hard to fit in at school, I was bullied for my clothes and somehow being dirtier and different, making friends was challenging. I was smart enough, but the friends I made were often smarter, making it into advanced placement classes that I could never quite perform well enough to get into. At home, I have fond memories of playing outside with my brothers, or playing Atari and Nintendo. But being the eldest I had my own bedroom, and I spent a great deal of time there alone with my books and my music, the most reliable of companions.

Over those school age years, the emotional life of music melded with my own. In particular, the rich complexity of orchestral works—their many different voices, all communicating harmoniously, evoking such passion and tenderness—this became a kind of secondary home in which I could retreat, close my eyes, and feel myself floating in that emotional universe that mirrored my own. After my parents divorced and our family separated at the beginning of high school, I had even much more time alone, and even much more emotion to be explored. Many times I’d cue up a favorite CD of classical music after school, alone in my dad’s one-bedroom apartment (gone were the days of having my own room), and for an hour or more would imagine myself on the conductor’s podium, dancing and swinging my arms as I indicated the violins to pianissimo, or the basses to forte, or the horn section to staccato bursts, or the clarinets to gently legato. For hours at a time, I would be transported to another world of incredible beauty, freedom, and unity. Favorites were Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Tchaikovsy’s 1812 Overture, and Prokofiev's Firebird Suite.

Thusly, music has long been one of my closest friends. It was there for me during the alienation of primary school years. During college, after I switched to electric bass, it was a hip companion to finding my voice as a young adult. And throughout the joys and sorrows of adulthood, music has been among the most reliable relationships, you could say like family. Yet my relationship to it went through major changes after my stage 4 cancer diagnosis some two-and-a-half years ago. I had mostly stopped listening to orchestral music for the past couple of decades, overtaken by a jazz obsession. But orchestral music and I recently have gotten reacquainted, renewed our vows, and I've been besotted of our reunion. Both the joy and excitement of it, but also noticing how orchestral music lives inside my body in a singular way. When listening to it, I sense a physiological aliveness, a dancing kineticism, a kaleidoscope of emotional colors I sense swimming through my heart and my arms and my hips—listening to and embodying orchestral music feels like a reawakening of a deeply connected radiance and vibrance that lives in my cells, which feels like it offers much needed healing to the beleaguered cellular life this cancer patient now suffers. And I'm singing Handel's Hallelujah! to that!

(Pictured: Dear friend J. and I, high school, pre-concert)