THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Union-Tribune, Veterans Day, November 11, 2010)

The degree to which we mourn our war dead as a nation is matched by the music for mourning our composers have given us. In America’s case, it’s virtually none. The reason our composers have been so stingy with writing elegies—contrast this with the Irish ballad or the fiddle dirge, keening traditions that go back 1,000 years—is that our culture has not demanded they write sad music.

We attend to public loss with private grief. We have a funeral, a memorial, a wake; we pay tribute, shed tears, tell stories and play a brief, favorite tune to remember the departed and to evoke a modicum of sorrow. We grieve not for the dead. We lament the individual who lost his or her life. If the remembrance has a religious bent, someone sings “Amazing Grace.” If it’s military, the tune is “Taps.” We watch the casket lower or the ashes scatter, and return to our separate lives, changed only in personal ways.

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Adagio for Strings: Leonard Slatkin, BBC orchestra, September 15, 2001, perhaps its longest and most emotional performance ever.

The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," Pegasus Books. Hardcover, September 2010, paperback, March 2012.

A YouTube video of my one-hour "Saddest Music" multimedia presentation at Warwick's Bookstore, La Jolla, CA, Tuesday, November 30, 2010.

(Written February 2010)

What is it that’s so annoying about VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab”? It’s the reality show that features the good-souled Dr. Drew who ministers—and really listens—to those fallen stars, mostly talent-less one-hit wonders, throwaway children like Mackenzie Phillips or love-starved sex toys like Heidi Fleiss.

What’s so annoying is their helplessness. Being on drugs or being off drugs doesn’t matter. They can’t function; they’ve got addictive personalities; nothing works. The two stock dramatic bits are will he/she pass the drug test or will he/she bolt before the “treatment” is over. They’re forever unstable because life on drugs or in treatment is a hell of denying the self what it wants. Watching adolescents in adult bodies is the saddest thing of all.

It’s also irksome that the cameras roll on and on, “catching” the celebs off-guard, when, in fact, this clan (Dennis Rodman, Tom Sizemore, et alia) is so media savvy and comeback-minded that it’s obvious they crack up or cry on cue, which is hardly caught-in-the-act. Maybe we should have a show called “Film Rehab” for those who emote only when a camera’s present.

(San Diego Reader February 24, 2000; Revised 2006-2009)

I was trembling, tearing open the biscuit-colored envelope, its official return address, University of California, San Diego, Department of Music, Graduate Division. "I am happy to inform you," it began—but didn’t I know the rest, hadn’t I known it in my gut for months, ever since I kissed and mailed the application, that my (our) westering dream would come true?—"The Department of Music is recommending that you be admitted," and then I couldn’t see the words since I was crying and running to tell my wife Annie and four-year-old twin sons: we’d be leaving Santa Fe, our home since 1975, and moving to southern California.

I didn’t say that last bit right off. I read out the very sweet "offer": full tuition scholarship, a teaching assistantship at $5,000 a year, and the Ph.D. track in composition. In five short years, I’d be a bona fide Doctor of Music!

New English Review July 2009)

1.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story is the claim every storyteller is admonished to believe. What our ten-thousand-year-old tale-telling tradition (most of it oral) instructs us to do is to be good dramatists and let the story have its sway. This law of the tale, and our drama-loving DNA, is why the Bible has survived so long: its well-told stories were the means by which its morally sound messages were delivered and, tellers and scribes hoped, stuck. When disputes about a story’s authenticity arose, the Bible authors were less keen to preserve history or embrace veracity. Instead they made the drama central, via legend, fantasy, parable, and the fictionalized life, based on Egyptian mythology, of Jesus Christ. The Bible is a work of narrative literature and a work of fiction. But, the problem is, its fiction has almost always been thought of as fact.

(Book Review, Special Issue on "Memoir Now," March/April 2009, Volume 30, No. 3)

Lately, I’ve been brooding on the word remember whose mystery for the memoirist is all-important. From the late Latin, the word originally meant "to call to mind" or "to be mindful," implying a mind full of what it’s been called to. Breaking it down further, we trace the re in remember to the Latin ablative of res, which means from a thing, object, or circumstance, the re also referring to repetition. Then there’s member, which comes from the Latin membrum, as in "part." Remember may mean one’s mindfulness of the past and one’s putting the parts of a past circumstance together through repetitious recall—that ever-occurring now in which we brood over past events again and again.

When I re-member an incident, I re-assemble its parts—the elements of what happened and the times I’ve recalled it. That which I recall one hundred times is much different than that which I recollect once. For deep memories, the parts I re-assemble are themselves re-assemblages of parts already assembled. It would seem then that the nature of memory is equally creative, constructive, and confusing. How is a memory composed of a single past experience as well as the piled-up/piled-on memories of that experience?

The rest of this essay is available as an eBook: What Exactly Happened: Four Essays on the Craft of Memoir, $2.99.

(Written 2005 - 2009)

How perfectly alone I felt that Labor Day weekend, 1972, staying at the YMCA in Madison, Wisconsin, getting ready, after a two-year hiatus, to reenter college. I had a tiny room, maybe ten by ten, a bed, a desk. I’d paid extra for the privacy. I loved the solitude: no parents, no job, no girlfriend. Never before was I so alone—and never since. I’d rise at dawn, sit in the straight-back chair at the desk with two drawers; it reminded me of the varnished desk and the blotter pad on top where I did my homework as a kid in Ohio. At the Y, I’d work through the morning. The heat slowly built until the brown-brick tiles radiated steam like a sauna. By noon, I was cooked and I’d go for a swim in Lake Mendota. Back at my desk, my guitar would be on my lap, my writing journal open before me. My attentions would alternate. Either I noted down the rough cut of a song, chords and lyrics, or I sketched in prose my latest anxiety, trying to say exactly what it was I was after by re-enrolling, this time at the University of Wisconsin. A home? A direction? A career? Those queries voiced in words alone only intensified what I couldn’t answer. Eventually my fingers dropped the pen and I picked up the guitar. As I played, my worry lessened, then dissolved.